| About The Band |
| The Freak Travel City Kids began life in May 2000, in Teignmouth, Devon - when friends Simon Laughton and Gary Day hit upon the idea of making a band. After much deliberation, coffee drinking and messing about on the computer, the name Se'pia was decided. Gary seems to remember the name being chosen: "We ended up just flicking through a dictionary and we chose it that way". A few days later, mutual friend Peter Muscutt arrived in Teignmouth. "I went down Simon's house (as I frequently do) and he showed me this (rather naff, I have to say) CD cover that he and Gary had made on the PC. I didn't really know why they had put an apostrophe in the band name, I don't think they do either, but we decided we should write some songs and try and get something started". Things, however, stalled at this point, what with Peter returning back to university to finish his exams, Simon breaking his back all hours at the local supermarket, and Gary...well, being Gary. Things really started moving in June, when Peter got back from university for the summer. "I hadn't got myself a summer job at that time, it being about two days into the break, when we really decided to kick start the whole thing. I guess, looking back, it's the kind of thing friends do when they have nothing else to occupy their time, we were no different, so we naturally thought, hey! Let's start a band!" Song writing began in earnest on the very first day of the band's formation, and although unclear to the exact day, it is estimated this was sometime around the 20th June, 2000. "The songs written around that time were not very good at all, to be honest" remarks Peter. "People who look at the site can visit the song lyrics section and see for themselves - in actual fact, most of the early songs aren't even in existance anymore, I threw them away because frankly they were unbelievably awful". An early bone of contention was the band name. For reasons as mysterious as it's initial addition, the strange apostrophe from the name Se'pia was dropped. "We also had talks about whether the band should be called something else - we had a list of names which eventually became song titles because they didn't fit as the band name, some of them included Canine Psycho, Subside and Underfell (which was even unused as a song title". THE EARLY SONGS As mentioned, an awful lot of material was worked on during the enthusiastic period of the first two days. Peter wrote most of his early Sepia material from experience, resulting in songs such as Subside (about "feeling angry") and Canine Psycho (a partial ode to Simon's pet dogs, Smudge and Megan). Simon began song writing in this early stage, but withdrew most of his earlier efforts due to feeling uncomfortable about their worth. Gary spent most of his time playing WWF Smackdown on the Playstation - his only composition until this day being the only evidence of his song writing, an uncompleted parody of the Blink 182 song "All The Small Things". |