I arrived at Stirling University in September 1973 with an amplifier and a couple of guitars, but no loudspeaker, so the first thing I did was to set about acquiring one. Somehow I met up with a couple of cowboys who used to hang about the campus all the time with their student girlfriends. They offered to build me a speaker cabinet, a standard one with four 12" speakers in it, or so I thought. Unfortunately I didn't specify the dimensions, so they produced a monster which would hardly fit into my (admittedly tiny) room. Actually the student rooms on the Stirling campus were like prison cells. Their only saving grace was - Duvets! - what a novelty a duvet was back then.
Anyway, as regards as the speaker cabinet, there was an extremely well-equipped workshop in the Psychology Department at Stirling. I ingratiated myself with its head technician, my fellow countryman Angus Annan, and got the cabinet cut down to a more sensible size. It gave good service for many years after that, even making a brief appearance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, then as one half of The Klingons P.A., and finally getting a good home with Percy Aggett and the Donuts (see Chapter 4 for more about The Klingons and Percy).
Over the next couple of years I bought another couple of guitars and a combo amplifier, but as yet no more live performances. There were a few fellow musicians in the Psychology Department, and we tried to form a band, tentatively called The Crynoids (or was it Psyclops?). Mark Farrar had an early Roland synthesiser, which was quite a novelty. Unfortunately, as with most synthesisers in those days, it was monophonic, i.e., it could only produce one note at a time, which was a bit limiting.
We worked on esoteric numbers such as Soft Machine's "Hibou, Anemone and Bear" and "Fletcher's Nose Job," but no recordings of these exist as far as I know. The Crynoids/Psyclops also included the talented Don Christie on bass, and the extroverted but rather less talented Carlos Roldan (all the way from California) on guitar, but the band never really got going, and never performed live. The lack of a drummer may have been part of the problem.
Fortunately, there were other outlets for creative talent. Our head of department, Professor Moray, used to wear a computer printed circuit board on the end of a bit of leather as a medallion, that's just how hip and trendy the Psychology Department was in those days. Just along the corridor was the University's Artist In Residence, Francis Pratt, and our department rather took him under its wing, since his office was next to our tea room. He was given access to all technical facilities, and staff and students alike were encouraged to assist him in his ventures.
This was around about the time that the Tate Gallery acquired Carl Andre's "Equivalent VIII, 1966", a low-lying sculpture consisting of two neat layers of 120 bricks, for £2000. The tabloids screamed "What a Load of Rubbish," there was general public disgust, and someone even defaced the exhibit by throwing dye over it. In Stirling, Francis Pratt decided to put on an event in response to all of this, and I, amongst others, was recruited to help.
In the auditory laboratory, we recorded 120 people speaking the work "brick" into a tape recorder, and then we started playing around. We constructed auditory piles and pyramids galore, by means of overdubbing and multi-tracking, etc., and the results sounded most unusual to say the least. I don't have these recordings any more (you'll probably be pleased to hear!), but if you can imagine the following pyramid in sound, you'll be getting there. (To save you the trouble of counting - yes, it contains exactly 120 bricks.)
Francis subsequently organised various other events, including the "L-shaped Happening," so-called because it took place in a L-shaped room, at which Mark Farrar and I provided music and/or sounds of some sort, the precise details of which escape me now.
At the end of the long, hot summer of 1976, I left Stirling to take up a job as a post-doctorate research fellow at the University of York. I had enjoyed myself at Stirling, and had done well academically, obtaining an MSc, completing the groundwork for my PhD, and acquiring the computer programming skills which have served me so well ever since. However, it was a fairly unproductive period for me in musical terms, in contrast to the musical explosion which I was about to experience over the next few years in York.