Our music teacher in secondary school let us play in the music room after the last bell, which was either generous or a quiet act of sabotage against the maths class that had lessons in the room directly above us. They had equations. We had two guitars, a drum kit and no sense of volume. I still feel a little sorry for whoever was trying to teach algebra under all that, and not sorry at all, because that room is where the whole thing started.
That is where we learned to love it properly. Not the playing in bars, which taught me how to be on a stage, but the playing together, the four or five of us in a room working out how a song goes, arguing about a part, landing on something that suddenly sounds like a band instead of some people in a room. We were terrible and then slightly less terrible and then, on a good afternoon, briefly good. You chase that feeling for the rest of your life.
We started bands the way you do at that age, quickly and with strong opinions. We played a lot of shows around the Netherlands. We started hardcore bands, My Right Thumb and All In The Game, loud and fast and earnest in the way only teenagers can be, and we drove to towns we had never been to in order to play for half an hour to people who had also never been there. Later, in Utrecht, some of us started a band called We vs Death and ended up touring most of the world with it for about a decade, but that is a longer story and it gets its own post.
The part that still surprises me is that we never really stopped. More than thirty years after that music room, the same core of people is still playing together. Bands ended, bands started, people moved cities and had kids and changed jobs, and somehow the thing that began as an annoyance to a maths class outlasted almost everything else from that time. That is the thing you cannot buy and no platform can manufacture. You find a few people you can make noise with and you keep making noise with them, and one day you look up and it has been three decades.
If you are young and you have a room and a few people, use it. That is the whole secret. The room below the maths class is where it starts.
Love,
Marten
