Profiles, a little bit to explain ourselves...

Maintaining the assumption that you're here because you're at least vaguely interested in the band for whom this humble website is currently serving as an online expose, it may, perhaps, follow that you're at least slightly curious about the individual members... To which end, Robin has, somewhat bafflingly, requested that I (Mark) put together a series of brief vignettes (he used the word "profiles" but I seem to have mislayed my copies of the other threes' vital statistics and measurements) in order that You, the potential listener / talent scout / chronically bored internet troll, may get to know Us, the people behind the instruments / in front of the bar.

However, before you begin clicking away at Rob's incredibly tasteful and only slightly SouthPark-esque member portraits, a moment more of your time:

Like us, you're probably familiar with a plethora of local and not so local, albeit just as "independent" (read: as yet without recording contract) "artists" "groups" "bands"........ etc. The concept of "x" number of people sitting down together one day and deciding that, seeing as they all like music, hang out together, and seemingly get on pretty well, they should probably from a band, is hardly a new one. From there it's surely just a matter of dividing up the necessary instruments, consoling the bloke who (in spite of the incontestable quality of his " loud bit from bohemian rhapsody bawled into a pint glass three minutes before closing time") didn't land the job of lead singer and telling all your friends. Non?

As potentially self-crucifyingly-arrogant as it may sound, that wasn't quite the way it happened for us. A proper band "history" will hopefully one day explain things far better than this already overlong introduction to a few profiles, but in the meantime permit us to ask for your trust when we say that this band was not formed in order to procure its members the various benefits commonly offered by a recording contract (despite whatever Rob says to the contrary), that neither was it formed purely because we all liked some band and "wanted to play too." It wasn't even formed to cement a friendship: The friendship, the musicianship and a significant amount of experience as an unsigned recording and gigging outfit in previous incarnations were already there, the four people with whom you're about to get somewhat better acquainted are not in this group because they ticked all the instrument boxes (who in their right mind forms a band with two bass players and no singer?!?), they're in the group because when they played those aforementioned instruments in a practice room together this group's music resulted, the four of us liked it, thought something of it and decided it was worth working on. Which is perhaps just a lengthy way of saying (though less tritely) that the four people in the band are the music, in all its effect and in all its imperfection and impracticality, that us and the music we make precede the band.

.........Though we were still technically formed in a pub.

Αινείας

Four and five string electric bass guitars.

To say that Dan's initial position within the nascent How Soon? Sweet Achilles lineup was markedly more challenging than those of his erstwhile bandmates would be something of an understatement: Being the only member not to have cut his teeth in Weave and thus lacking the gigging, song-writing hair-growing and recording experience the other three members had thereby acquired together, indeed, joining a line-up in which the bass guitarist's role was technically already provided for... Hardly an easy or enviable situation to find oneself in. For Dan, plugging his bass in at the band's first impromptu jam session might have been likened to attending a high school reunion party without ever having attended the school in question.... Never one to be easily daunted or put off, Dan responded by providing the group with the opening motif and genesis of its first ever piece of music. You can’t really do much better than that…..

At twenty two and a few-months-more-than-Mark-and-Pete, Dan just happens to be the oldest of the four of us (it's not his fault). First introduced to his future bandmates through a few chance meetings in the pub in late 2001 something definitely clicked and it's now pretty hard to imagine a decent party, festival or night at the local without him. Having picked up the bass guitar in his teens, seen his friends in Weave play local venues and jammed in a few, ultimately non-productive, outfits himself it's hardly surprising that Dan eventually ended up in Sweet Achilles (however illogical it might have seemed instrumentation wise). After the call of University eventually led to Weave’s fragmentation, Dan joined Pete and that band's one-time rhythm guitarist in a band called...... ahem..... "Brutality"..... no, sorry, "Structural Defect" (they were called Brutality for a bit... though so it's still funny). While ST never quite reached fruition in a gigging sense, the brief sojourn nevertheless gave Dan the chance to jam with at least one of his future bandmates, reacquaint himself with an instrument he'd previously lacked the opportunity to regularly play and get some song-writing experience under his belt. The more conventional aggressive direction taken by that project was arguably also responsible for informing some of the "heavier" moments in 'Achilles' music (moments that are, nine times out ten, grounded in Dan's solid "rhythm" playing). When Structural Defect was somewhat callously discarded by it's founder-member, Dan made the jump to Sweet Achilles as easily as one walks into a pub after recieving a text message and finds his former drummer and two of his friends in the process of proposing a jam session to take place in a slot booked by the aforementioned message's sender, for a now defunct band.

Honesty requires we admit here and now that Dan wasn't asked to join because we wanted or needed a bass player. In fact, honestly requires that we also admit the fact that we really didn’t have a clue what we needed, period. Nevertheless, having established that Pete was now free to join Rob and Mark for a, then, casual musical venture, the only potential problem was that the three ex Weave members thus reconvening might have solved all their band problems and provided for all the key elements of a standard rock line-up barring a singer, but it nevertheless left Dan without a band again. It's all very well grabbing the opportunity for a musical reunion but when it potentially relegates a good friend to kicking his heels on the sidelines, spirits are understandably dampened. However, it wasn't long before Rob, in typically straightforward style, put down his pint glass and asked Mark if he'd mind having a second bass player in the lineup. Mark didn’t mind at all.

Since then, Dan has been a reliable fellow occupant of the band's practice room and responsible for a key, if easily overlooked, element of the band's sound: Filling the more conventional bass playing role admirably, Dan combines a genuinely infectious enthusiasm with an inspiring level of commitment as audible in his basslines as it is visible in the sheer physicality of his playing. Whilst Mark faffs around in his instrument's upper register and Rob agonises over which note his bottleneck should stop at next, Dan locks in with the bass drum and stays there, providing depth and colour during the music's lighter passages before throwing the full force of a well played bass behind it as quickly as you can say "heavy."

Quiet in debate perhaps, yet nevertheless musically pivotal, it's arguably Dan's deceptively simple attitude to his instrument that stabilises and enables the band's more immediately striking sonic elements. Not so much the case that we wouldn't be How Soon? Sweet Achilles without the second bass, rather that we couldn't do what How Soon? Sweet Achilles does, without Dan.

Electric and Acoustic Lead and Rhythm Guitars and Guitar orientated noise.

The more astute reader may, by now, have realised that How Soon? Sweet Achilles is effectively three parts rhythm section.... and one part Rob. He doesn't seem to be complaining. Indeed, the last time the band began work on a peice of new material (currently titled "the sixth one"... do you get it?) its erstwhile guitarist was seemingly delighted by the fact that, due to the song's melodic basis being a six-string-bass motif, he was able, apparently, to "noodle his arse off."Whilst it doesn't entirely sum up Rob's attitude to the guitar and, more specifically, the guitar as sole-treble-based-instrument-being-forced-to-negotiate-two-very-loud-bass-instruments-and-a-fair-bit-of-somewhat-esoteric-drumming; the above quote nevertheless gives at least some indication of the scope and freedom afforded him... and his response.

It's probably also worth mentioning that I personally spent at least three months convinced that Rob didn't actually exist. Rather, that Pete, for some bizarre reason, had invented an imaginary friend, with whom he attended gigs and discussed heavy metal. This is all the more believable if one is aware of the distinct lack of an alternative culture extant at Beacon Community College, Crowborough between the years 1998-2000/2001. There were a few professed "rockers" in addition to Pete and myself, but they were known to drape themselves in Oasis merchandise with alarming regularity. Rob was, apparently, an ex student of the aforesaid college, a long-term friend of Pete's (I believe they've now known each other for well over a decade, which is rather cute really) and a fellow attendee at the 1999, Metallica hosted, "Big Day Out" festival, at Milton Keynes. A festival I myself attended completely separately. Spooky.

But I digress.

Rob did in fact exist and indeed, to this day, he still does. The first guitarist to join Mark and Pete's hypothetical and increasingly unlikely looking proposed group who regularly turned up for practices and seemed capable of / actually interested in playing his instrument, it soon becoming apparent that Rob was the way to go and shortly after an initial and somewhat curtailed "practice" in Pete's garage, the nascent Weave line-up began to take shape. Despite the band's later adding a second guitarist to handle rhythm duties and Mark eventually working out how to actually play the bass sufficiently well to bring song ideas to the table from time to time, Rob quickly became and remained Weave's core songwriter and the most obviously proficient member of the band. A fact that, despite being arrogant as hell about almost everything else, he's bizarrely incredibly modest about, to the extent that he's quite likely to cut this part when he puts this online. If you're reading it then it's safe to assume that Rob was feeling pleased with himself recently.

Even if Sweet Achilles' hadn't originated in a pre-proposed jam between Rob, Mark and Pete, a year or two after Weave's fragmentation, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone else would have been considered for the guitarist's position. And almost certain that any other axe twiddler we had asked would have found themselves incapable of negotiating, or even finding, the sonic space within the band that Rob occupies. One response to the group's inaugural performance described Rob's playing as "complex (but tasteful) lead guitar," and I'm fairly sure that I could expend far more space attempting to describe our guitar sound and the role it plays within our music, and yet come up with little more than a lengthier paraphrasing of the above opinion. You might be inclined to think that a band with two bass players must, via its very makeup, completely re-locate the position and role occupied by the traditional rock-guitar. We couldn't really confirm or deny that: Rob took it upon himself to re-evaluate his instrument before we had much of a chance to re-locate anything. Armed with no more effects and processing equipment than the footswitch that came with his amplifier, an occasional bottleneck and the customised pick ups on both of his preferred instruments, Rob consistently manages not only to be distinctly heard above the band's thick rhythmic substrate, but also to produce a truly individual racket, as integral to the band's sound as it is to his own musical identity. Even a recent dalliance with an ebow has done little more than accentuate an already established sound and style... In Rob’s case functioning more as a piece of a puzzle for which a space always existed, than as the sonic enabler it might have been to a more conventional player.

Beyond the purely musical sphere, little remains to be said... He's potentially one of the rudest, most obnoxious people I've ever met (my first impressions of him were somewhat hijacked by his greeting Pete with a mouthful of insults and select ethnic slurs... it's funnier and almost loveable when you get to know him) and yet he's as close a friend to the rest of us as anyone and strangely proud of his prickly demeanour. Despite being the youngest member of Sweet Achilles (albeit by barely a year), Rob's generally proved to be a remarkably useful person to have around, learning to drive before the rest of us, being the first to obtain some genuinely live-ready equipment and generally serving as Sweet Achilles' representative and de-facto manager, a role he also performed in Weave.

He's Rob really. The only guitarist we'll need, something of a secret weapon, a consistent and interesting song-writer, a diligent and dedicated representative, a fantastic drinking buddy and a complete arsehole. Drinks a lot of Guinness too.