Dumb Instrument - No-One Knows What It's Like to Be Me

Dishwasher to Dance & Theatre composer. Now that is a wide and varied spectrum by anyone's standards, but this eclectic employment history has allowed songwriter Tom Murray to pick at the scab of every strata of society for inspiration in his writing.

Until he bumped into Keiron Campbell (bass) and Mikey Grant (keys), when they were all shelf-stacking at the local Co-Op (in aisle four anonymity), he didn't know what to do with it, but they provided the trolley for him to burst out of the shop front and out onto the high-street.

Mikey thinks Scott Joplin is the greatest artist ever. Keiron believes instead that it’s Janis Joplin. Both of them are right.

Influences abound when all three get together to make music but no one has ever quite sounded like Dumb Instrument.

Nicely summed up by the fact that the closest the Ayrshire Post could get, when describing the band, was “Ivor Cutler on Irn Bru”.

Sometimes Tom thinks at great length about people he admires; cutting edge performers like Cliff Richard particularly inspire him. In ‘What If Cliff?’ Tom even goes to the trouble of informing his hero that: “If the afterlife is true I’ll find you in hell and nut you”. That’s not a threat Cliff. That’s a promise.

Tom Morton of BBC Radio Scotland was moved to use adjectives like ‘Unique’ and ‘Outstanding’ when he first heard them and called ‘Suffering from Scottishness’ an anthem for our age.

‘Reverse the Hearse’ is a wry take on the inevitability of death. It’s funny, provocative and poignant, all at the same time (Jim Gellatly at Xfm Scotland described it as “probably the best song about death I've ever heard!"). Tom obviously has a problem with throwing off this mortal coil. He’s not the first to feel like this and he won’t be the last. Sadly the outcome won’t be any different.

Under to ground, at a depth of six feet, when you stand beside his gravestone in years to come, you’ll still be able to hear him muttering darkly about Sir Cliff Richard. It’s to be hoped that one day he’ll get to meet him in the afterlife and explain himself fully.

myspace.com/dumbinstrument and dumbinstrument.com are the places we call home on the worldwideweb and you can buy the album direct from these sites.

Even if you don’t have an internet you should still be able to pick up a copy at a traditional, bricks and mortar shop – details to follow.

‘No-one knows what it’s like to be me’ is the name of the debut album. Peppered as it is by wry and witty narratives, it’s hoped that by the end of it, people will indeed have a better understanding of what it’s like to be me. But if you do find yourself beginning to feel that ‘me’ is taking over ‘you’, please bear in mind that.....

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You”

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