Steven Teague

I remember singing along to the top 40 countdown on Radio 1 on a Sunday evening whilst my brothers and I had our baths (in turn!) ready for school the next day. I had the box room of a 3 bedroom semi which I could just about get a single bed in there. My stereo system was one my dad handed down to me and it took up the whole of the top of my chester draws. I used to look down at the turntable and cassette deck, side by side through its smoke coloured perspex lid. Then I would hit the power button and watch it light up and the radio would play. As the radio played, I turned up the volume and I sang along to the charts , I used to feel so at home with singing and it was so normal and natural. It was then I realised I could sing like a girl as I competed against Mariah Carrey with our vocal ranges, though she would always win! I didn't know much about vocal ranges, scales or music in those days. All I knew was that I was happy and alive when I sang, even with school pending the next day. Did I want to be a singer? I don't think I ever thought that I could be like them, that is, them I hear week in week out through my radio! All I knew was that I loved to sing.
As time went on I realised when things were at a low in my life because I hadn't heard myself sing for a week of more. This was surprising to me and only drove me into a deeper sense of sadness when there was no song in my heart.
At 16 my dad bought me a keyboard for a birhtday present, it was a Yamaha and my friend Paul and I would sit on my single bed with it across our laps and Paul would play a bass line set to an analogue kind of sound and I would do the melody. We soon started to record what we had practiced onto cassette through my smoked lid stereo, which still looked as big as ever even though I had over the years.
I left school and started work straight away and wasn't interested in a career because all I wanted to do was earn some money so I could buy musical equipment. My friend Paul and I had grew up together through school; infants, juniors, comprehensive and now we were working together, both working for the same objective to buy musical equipment and create our own music and songs.
At 18, I remember Paul had got his own flat with his girfriend Anne in George Road, Erdington and there we had our first studio in a small or large cupboard, depending on the way you look at it. We began taking music more seriously and was into dance music, house, techno, then moving onto ambient and garage for myself. This was a big difference from our school day influences of Scar music, Adam and the Ants, Kraft Werk, Depeche Mode, Eraser, New Order, OMD...