The History of Shattered?
In the beginning, there was a two piece band called Ruff As Guts formed by Shag and a drummer called Richie. Anyway, after a while they needed a bass player, so Snails joined. They gigged for a while then decided they needed another guitarist, so Chris joined. At this point they decided that the band sounded just a bit different than it did before, so they all tried to come up with a new name. Shag said Shattered? and everyone agreed they were. That was it. Shattered? was born. Otherwise the band might have been called Knackered? and that doesn’t work so well on a poster, does it?
Then Richie decided he didn’t want to do it any more and left. Can’t blame him really, would you want to be associated with blokes called Shag, Snails and Chris? They looked around for various other drummers, auditioned a few, didn’t really find anyone who fitted in with the band. Then Shag remembered that he once nearly had a fight with a drummer in a pub in Woodbridge. “Sounds like an ideal bloke”, they thought.
To cut a long story short, they asked Paul to come along and jam with them. He did, they liked him, he liked them and the band was set for the next three years. Then in 2006, Paul was made an offer he couldn’t refuse and left the band to go and play weddings and dinner dances. Naff music but plenty of wedge in his pocket at the end of the night.
Fortunately, Paul’s brother Mark was available and - most importantly - he is also a drummer. So in October 2006 Mark auditioned and got the gig. Remarkably, Mark learnt the sets in just three weeks but is now on an intensive course of personality-altering steroids combined with anger re-enforcement electro-shock therapy because he is far too nice and is learning to beat the living shit out of his kit rather than playing it with respect, subtlety and delicacy.
As usual with local bands, everybody knows or has played in bands with each other more times than they care to remember. It’s a good job they’re all blokes, cos if they started bonking each other and managed to produce each other’s babies the poor sods would all have six fingers on each hand and have a collective IQ of 40. Yes, that’s at least 10 IQ points more than the band’s current collective best score... But hey...
