About Me In General
My Grizzly History: Born 17th March 1962 in Preston, Lancashire, England. By early teenage, I had already started off on the road that would lead to both my current professional and leisure interests; having already decided to follow a distinctly scientific line at school and beginning to learn the guitar. I took lessons for a while until one day when I requested that my guitar teacher should provide me with some more modern and interesting pieces to learn (old folk tunes up to that point).......and he gave me "Rock Around The Clock" !!! At this point, I decided I was wasting my time and taught myself from there on in. Not long after this point, I formed the original version of Electric Yoghurt with some friends from school and began to have some serious fun with the guitar at last.
Student Days After finishing of A-levels and following the demise of the original E.Y. band, I took my guitar gear off to University with me. For reasons I still don't understand, I spent a year at Manchester University Dental School: this was bad for both my musical and academic development, as I spent the whole year having an alcohol-infused social life which didn't leave much time for either ! Having realised that I needed to get my act together and that I really didn't want to be a dentist, I went to start a degree in Biochemistry at Lancaster University. This was a good move, as I made a lot of very good friends with whom I managed to have three great years of fun and get a decent degree. It was also a "golden age" for music, as I spent lots of time playing guitar; including with several different bands. I was up to having semi-decent gear by then: an Aria Pro II Explorer-type guitar, a Peavey combo and a home-made pedal board, comprising mainly of Boss effects. My best time playing with other people was with another guitarist (Steve), who often played the bass parts on his Telecaster and an excellent drummer (Bill) who had an impressive drumkit and knew how to use it. We played some of our own stuff and a lot of time playing Rush songs (or trying to at least), as instrumentals. That was a lot of fun and I even still have some (badly) recorded tapes from those practice sessions !
While at Lancaster, I became interested in the recombinantDNA/molecular biology revolution and went on to Newcastle University to study for a PhD. This period set up my professional career as a research scientist and enabled me to meet my now partner, soul-mate and part-time music critic, Gail. On the down-side, it was disastrous from my guitar interests :-( I didn't really find anyone to play together with and it then became apparent that I wouldn't have much in the way of "free-time" to spend on pursuing my non-scientific interests. I played less and less and the final calamity came when two of my best friends from the Lancaster days got married: I was so short of money that I had to sell all my guitar gear to be able to afford to go down to their wedding ! This started a Dark Age of serious guitar deprivation that lasted for many years.
The Swedish Years: I moved to Sweden in January 1989, to begin my first "real job" as post-doctoral scientist. It was supposed to be for two years only, but I'm still here after ten and a half years ! I worked at various places, starting with the Center for Biotechnology in Huddinge, then the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and ended up at Uppsala University. I now head my own research group, working on molecular aspects of human cancer, as you can check out on my university home page, if you're interested !
Music-wise, not a lot happened for quite a while after I moved to the Frozen North. Gail bought me a Washburn flat-top acoustic as a present when I got my PhD from Newcastle in May 1989, so at least I had a guitar to play again at last. After a couple of years, when we were established here, I splashed out on an Ibanez Artistar semi-acoustic guitar, a little 10W Samick amp (currently residing with Jimmy) and a Boss ME-6 multi-effects unit. That got me re-activated with playing guitar again for a while......but I was still just playing on my own and sort of lost interest again. This was probably due to the frustration of having "lost it" after so many years of not playing at all.......it is difficult to accept that your fingers just won't do the things you want them to anymore...and I just got discouraged.
Seeing the Light So how do you get from total musical inactivity to where I am now: playing every day, with a nice collection of guitars, also playing bass and a bit of keyboards and totally addicted to the recording bug ? The first PhD student that graduated from my group, Steve, had a brother called Jimmy; currently the other half of Electric Yoghurt. At that time (1996), Jimmy was taking a diploma in sound engineering at Soundtrade studios in Stockholm. One of his assigments was to produce/engineer an acoustic song, but he was having trouble finding a band to do the recording at the time he wanted to do it. Steve mentioned that I played guitar and he himself fancied a go at singing, so we were invited to go into the studio and cut a track ! I was dubious, but I'd always wanted to have a go in a real studio and we took the plunge. Me, Gail, Steve and his girlfriend Fariba drove down to Stockholm and recorded a pretty awful acoustic version of Neil Young's "Like a Hurricane" (partially saved by Gail's haunting recorder track). As a reward for doing this for Jimmy's course-work, we got a second afternoon session free in the studio and recorded an absoloutely DIRE attempt at "Sweet Home Alabama".
This experience had two effects on me: 1) it showed me how much fun playing was when you put a recording studio into the equation and 2) it showed me how bloody awful my guitar playing had become !! After this session, I began to play guitar a lot more frequently and was determined to improve my playing back up to the level it had been at previously, when I was at Lancaster. Jimmy and I kept in touch and started playing together from time to time. We began writing/recording, initially on a very old Fostex 4-track analog portastudio and realising that this worked out pretty well, we began to devote more time and effort to pursuing this common interest and Electric Yoghurt #2 was born !
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