My Name Is Thomas

My name is Thomas. Nothing much happened for the first part of my life. Mainly a series of movies, video games and trampolines. Then, at some point in 2008, I was approached by some school friends and asked to join a band. Since that day it seems I haven't stopped. The name of that band is The Temps. We average at about 60 gigs a year. If each gig I played with had 2 other bands on (which it is usually more) using my simply astounding mathematical prowess, I can calculate that over the past 3 years I have watched 360 bands. Give or take. Although we are fans of travelling, before we had the ability to do so we mainly played Liverpool and we still do play Liverpool quite a bit, but I think this has given me a fairly accurate view of the state of the music scene here -and how the rest of the UK relates to Liverpool.

More recently I have been getting involved in another aspect of the arts. I gained a BTEC in Theatre Technology and have been working on and seeing a fair amount of Liverpool’s theatre chops. It was a bit of a culture shock moving from a musical performer to a back stage theatre worker. The sheer levels of stress that are involved for the latter, seem so distant from the fairly laid-back approach of rolling onto a stage a few minutes late and hitting an instrument with battered and bloodied hands. The theatre scene in Liverpool is also a very different affair to the music scene. The music scene always seems to follow a pattern. One year in was entirely indie bands, the next it was entirely metal bands and the latest year it seems to be the combination of rock music and electronica that I don't think has been labelled yet, so I will do it myself: ‘Beepcore’. While the theatre scene seems to never follow a pattern. Every show I go to or am involved with seems to be a world apart from the last one.

I think the main reason that theatre is so creatively free, while music is sounding somewhat uniform at the moment, is a simple one. Theatre is not as popular. This means that only a person, who is truly in love with it, aspires to be a part of it. Because music is more in vogue, it seems that most of the musical outfits are only half thought out and as a result...not too great. This isn’t to say that I have fallen out of love with music. To the contrary, amazing music is still being created all throughout Liverpool and the UK, and even the world. It has just become trickier to find. This is why I have stayed to see 360 bands over the past 3 years. So I could see the 20-30 bands that made me say ‘wow’.