As you might suspect, everything changed with Uni. A whole new horizon of opportunity opened up in front of me. I still played guitar daily but the new found freedom of living on my own, alcohol, clubbing, partying combined with what I was learning in my degree (I was doing an English & Creative Studies degree – that in itself pretty much blew my mind and turned me on to a load of new things I’d never explored such as philosophy, photography, art, film etc.) Amongst all this new stuff putting a band together just wasn’t a priority. In fact I think I was glad of the break. However by the following summer I was getting itchy feet. I’d been writing songs all the time and so when I got home I decided to work with Nathen on writing a few songs and putting a live set together. Time didn’t really permit us to do anything to grandiose so we just worked on writing a few acoustic numbers. I’m not sure whether it was something I’d suggested to Nathen or vice versa but what was instantly clear was that he’d worked on his singing quite a lot. Since getting swept up in the whole Vent thing originally he’d started to teach himself guitar and bass and it had paid dividends. I came up with the name Shiva which I think was a name I got from Salman Rushdies Midnights Children. I liked the sound of it mainly and the meaning of it was also pretty cool. Shiva was the destroyer of bad habits. It was never meant to be an ongoing concern. Thinking back now trying to remember my motivations there are a couple of things I can recall, one was I still felt bad for giving Nathen the push from the band and this in some small way made it up to him, secondly I wanted to play live again! And lastly I’d continued to write all these bloody songs and no one was getting to hear them! So we worked on the songs and that summer performed them at that years Anglers Retreat music festival. As it was just an acoustic set we couldn’t exactly rock out and blow people away but I think those who saw us were surprised by what we came up with and the improvements in Nathen’s singing. Still the only time those songs were ever played were at that festival!

Funnily enough Nathen dropped me a mail a few weeks ago whilst I was working on the Sideproject stuff asking if we could record some of those songs. Time’s beaten us right now but this is something I’d like to do when I get back. So lookout for the Shiva sessions!