Blog Tag: 5 Things You Didn’t Want To Know About Dave Pattern

Eeeeek — I’ve been tagged by Brian Kelly, so here’s 5 things you didn’t want to know about me (with lots of links)…
1) For the last 8 months I’ve been raising a farm of mealworms to feed the birds in our garden, and there are several thousand of them wriggling around boxes in our spare bedroom as I type this.  Occasionally some of the mealworm beetles escape (I’ve yet to find out how they’re doing this) and you’ll spot them making a painfully slow bid for freedom across the floor… presumably with the insect equivalent of the theme to “The Great Escape” going through their tiny heads.  The garden birds love eating the mealworms, and it’s incredibly cheap to raise them.
2) I spent Christmas 1994 touring Bangladesh, playing bass guitar in a bhangra band.  Over the course of about 7 weeks, we played around a dozen shows (starting in Dhaka and working our way up to Sylhet).  Lizards, cockroaches, and spiders with bodies the size of your fist were de rigeur in the majority of hotel rooms we stayed in.  We were even filmed playing for a TV show, although someone forgot to bring the backing tape to the studio (we had planned to mime), so we had to feed vocals, guitars and keyboards through one tiny practice amp… it probably sounded like a slightly tuneful 5 minute long fart.  Plus I came out of the make-up room with a face the colour of a ripe orange.
3) Prior to all that, I was the bass player in a band called “The Headmen” during the early 1990s.  We were signed to a local label (Positive Records) and released a demo tape (“The Happy Shoebox”), a single (“Kissed to Pieces”) which got quite a bit of Radio 1 airplay, and a 12″ EP (“Reach the Sky”) — the demo tape was supposed to named “The Magic Shoebox”, which was the name of a shoe shop opposite the “4th Wave Records” shop in Huddersfield.  Most of our studio recordings were engineered by Steve Whitfield, although all of the master tapes were lost when the recording studio was destroyed by a fire.  The highlight (for me at least) was getting to play support for “The Wedding Present“.  If anyone asks nicely, I might even try and convert some of the recordings to MP3 😉
headmen1
(from http://www.vinyluk.com/search_result.php?vartist=headmen…)
4) When I was a young spotty lad, I used to do computer game reviews on Pennine Radio‘s “Chips” programme (as in “computer chips”) — I vaguely remember reviewing “Tir Na Nog“, “Atic Atac“, and “Skool Daze“.  I also got to review an early model of the ZX Spectrum+ and “yes”, the keys did fall off when you turned it upside down 😉
5) I can’t stand touching cotton wool, and the mere thought of any cotton wool touching my teeth sends shivers down my spine.  Fingernails scraping down a blackboard I’m fine with… but not cotton wool!


I think most of the bloggers I know have already been tagged, but here’s who I’m planning to do…
1) my partner Bryony
2) my good friend Iman Moradi
3) the one and only Ben Ostrowsky

13 thoughts on “Blog Tag: 5 Things You Didn’t Want To Know About Dave Pattern”

  1. hi dave,
    way back in 1992 or thereabouts i bought the reach the sky 12″ via mail order and it still gets airplay every now and then as mp3s on my computer. i also own a copy of kissed to pieces but it would be nice to hear the happy shoebox too, if you’ve got the time to make up some mp3s. i can send you the mp3s of the 2 headmen records if you’d like…

  2. Hi Bobsy
    I’ll have a rummage around and dig out some of the tapes! I’d love copies of those MP3s too, as they might be better quality than I can make. I think I’ve also got a demo 4 track tape that we did after leaving Positive Records, which had quite a few new songs on it.
    Simon (the singer) formed another band in the late 90s called ROI, and I’ve got a CD somewhere that I’ll convert to MP3 (I’m sure Simon won’t mind).
    Matthew (the drummer) left the band in the early 90s to study at Hull University and joined another band (whose name I forget, but I’ll look it up).
    I’ve no idea what happened to Nik (the guitarist) — I think someone said he’d become a roadie for a Leeds band.
    The Headmen had an amicable split up after playing a gig at Bradford Queens Hall (as part of the yearly Bradford Festival) — we all wanted to go off and do other things, with Simon and myself wanting to go to university (Simon went to Nottingham Uni and I went to Huddersfield).
    I’m pretty sure I’ve got a box full of Headmen memorabilia somewhere, including some of the early publicity material, so I’ll have to dig that out and scan some of it in. I might even have some of the band fanzines!

  3. Ah..I had read these, I had…bhangra, mealworms..it’s all coming back to me. Christmas has blacked our all memory of things that came before it. Sorry about the double tagging.
    My mother-in-law was breeding mealworms to involve and excite her grandchildren. I’ve met the critters in their sawdust.
    We’re ickier here and breed worms.

  4. hey dave i left this comment and promptly forgot all about it until now…
    can you email me about exchanging those MP3s?
    thanks!

  5. Errr… I was talking to my brother on the phone and we were talking about what we were doing about our respective vinyl collections (amassed during the 1980s/1990s from places like rotate in Brighouse and fourth wave and fulcrum in Huddersfield) – both of which are sat in boxes in lofts mostly unplayed since the advent of CDs and Mp3s. my brother mentioned your record ‘kissed to pieces’ which he bought aged about 16 after going to a gig. he also recalled owning a t-shirt with the headmen logo on the front which I also remember borrowing and subsequently losing after playing 5-a-side one evening at rastrick high. Anyway, I thought I would look it up on the internet and hey! here I am. thanks for the memories!!!

  6. Cool! 😀
    The t-shirts were definitely “limited edition” (i.e. we couldn’t afford to get many printed!!!)
    The “Happy Shoebox” demo tape was named after the shoe shop that was opposite Fourth Wave in Huddersfield. If my memory is right, we were all in Fourth Wave browsing thru the LPs and decided to name the demo tape after the first thing we saw when we went outside.

  7. hi dave,
    i have the mp3s of the 2 headmen records ready if you’d let me know where to send them to…
    also still waiting patiently to hear the happy shoebox tape.

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