My name is Brandon. I started playing drums almost 3 years ago in my first year of secondary school (December 2017). At first, I started playing drums to get out of some lessons in school, but after a little while i realised that I enjoy drumming and wanted to do only that. So, that Christmas I was given a small electric drum kit. It was only cheap, so it would constantly fall apart. However, I adapted and played almost every day. Whenever I could, I would go to my friends house and play his kit, as he had a garage out the back where he played. A year later, I got my first acoustic drum kit. I was still only playing the same 10 or so Green Day songs at this point, and I wasn’t improving much. I still carried on playing and 8 months later, I had asked a friend (Dylan) if he wanted to start a band. Of course, he wanted to.

So, it was just the 2 of us in this little local School of Rock festival. We played our second song we made called ‘Dive’. We later saw a guitarist play some really good riffs and we asked him if he wanted to join our band. A week later we had our first practice session a 3 piece band. We sounded 10x better with our new guitarist (logan). We played our first gig together at an Anti-Knife Crime event, where they had other musicians playing. Then, we played at a boating club about a month later and a few gigs after that, then Christmas came. I had a new 21” sweet ride and a custom 18” china along with new drum heads and side snare. I was so happy and my drum kit sounded so much better.

Then, I started listening to Blink182. Travis Barker’s playing style really inspired me. From here, my progression sky rocketed. I was learning groovy sped-up latin-style beats, and faster and cleaner pop punk drums. This expanded my playing so much. We played our last gig together at a battle of the bands competition, where were second place and were 1 point behind first place.  Then, Covid-19 happened and we hadn’t played for 6 months. When we had our first practice session after lockdown, we played for 3 more sessions then our guitarist Logan left (2 weeks ago since then we have found another bassist and a lead guitarist so we are now a 4 piece band).