1 Off

Another in the series of recordings made of school bands by Ron Abbott in glorious mono on his reel-to-reel tape recorder has now been published to the web.

This time the band is 1 Off. I don't know much about this band yet, except that Martin Brooks and John Callaghan were members. One announcement on the recording refers to it being about a year since John Lennon was murdered and that was December 1980.

Presumably the recording is made at BGS since Richard Anderson can be heard at various points and at the end instructs the audience to help tidy up the room.

Any more information would be very gratefully received. You can read the scant OBA Wiki article or go straight to YouTube to listen to 1 Off.

The Silicon Process

The next in a series of recordings made of school bands by Ron Abbott in glorious mono on his reel-to-reel tape recorder has now been published to the web.

This time the band in question is The Silicon Process. If you look at the OBA Wiki article, you will see that information is scant so far. I believe the main members we the Ashberry family, but whether all three (Simon, Tim and Jez) were involved or not, I don't know, nor do I know whether any "non-Ashberries" were involved.

I've picked up a couple of track titles from the recording, but any more information would be very welcome.

If you want to read a little more about the band then you can go to the OBA Wiki and follow links through to YouTube, or if you're impatient to see what they sounded like, you can go straight to the recordings on YouTube.

School bands

Evil Scarecrow

I usually start discussions here on the blog and move them later to Facebook. However for various reasons the latest hot topic started over on the Boston Grammar School Alumni Facebook group.

There had been a short conversation about the recent report in the Boston Standard that a study showed Boston to one of the least musical places in the country. It's the usual journalistic simplification so I would suggest at least having a cursory read of the original report before blowing your top.

That discussion prompted me to act on something I had been considering for a long time: to start articles on school bands on the OBA Wiki. You will now already find quite a large and growing selection of bands linked from the Bands Category page of the Wiki, with more being added all the time.

If you have any information about school bands past or present, whether organised by the school (like the BGS Jazz Band), formed by students of the school, or made up mainly of former students of BGS, then please set up an account on the Wiki and start editing. The Wiki uses the Media Wiki framework, just the same as used by Wikipedia, so if you've ever edited Wikipedia you already know pretty much what to do.

If you really can't see yourself editing the Wiki, then please send the information you have to me: webmaster@bostonian.org.uk but it will probably take longer to appear.