Widow's Peak

Widow's Peak in it's current incarnation was formed by Terry Shanks in 2001. After years of experimenting with tape loops, hard drugs and Zoom effects pedals, Terry finally realised his future lay in digital technique.

"By the time I had reached my teens there seemed to be no new or exciting music anymore," states Terry, "when I was 16 in '92, all the progressive experimental bands from the eighties seemed to have disappeared."
Terry started his first band, 'Scrote' in 1993, with Greg Pearson and Neil Twining (later separated to form 'Mortal Constriction'). Scrote were well known around the Bradford area, where they were based, and often provoked quite violent reactions among the audience. The band were a standard guitar/bass/drums trio (Shanks on guitar and vocals), but addressed controversial lyrics with extremely harsh but organised semi-melodic 'music'. Shanks was known to use a plethora of distortion pedals to the extent that often, the gaps between 'songs' could not be distinguished due to the feedback. Scrote disbanded a year and a half after their formation due to often aggresive clashes between the members.
Between late 1995 and around 2001, Terry embarked on what he calls "Soul-searching". As he says, "basically in those years I got really pissed off about the state of music, it seemed like there was no-where to go, but I still needed to keep searching. For about five years I spent my days claiming the dole and doing sound engineering for thrash bands on the side, then getting home, digging shitloads of smack and spending hours on tape manipulations, electronics and effects pedal stuff. It was very blurry and I can't remember much but there are loads of reel tapes kicking about from then. Obviously I didn't have a computer then."
In 2000, Terry managed to get on top of his heroin habit, stating "Of course when you're on it you can't really do anything productive and be happy with it". By 2001, he had managed to save money for a computer. "Even though I hadn't really heard much made on computer before, I kept hearing digital noises, such as fax machines, CDs skipping etc, and wanted to create and experiment with these myself. As soon as I got the computer my whole world opened up. Within about one day of realising the potential, I had come up with the idea for Widow's Peak and made it official. Within a week of it, I had already arranged several gigs. Although at first I had to take the whole computer along to the gigs, which was cumbersome, people liked to see something new. I was mainly playing to thrash/metal crowds so they were quite receptive to what I was playing once they got past the idea of one guy and a computer rather than a full band".
Due to the fact Terry was a newcomer to the computer, his creations were, "initially a bit basic, but had the desired effect of complete power and control over the audience". As a result it was a few years until he had produced a release he was happy with.