"Happy days - Northern Irish slang for everything is ok, fine or cool."
My name is Stu-Option, one time lead guitarist, vocalist and principle song writer for the three piece hardcore punk bank from Oakville, Ontario called...zeroption. I decided to start this blog as a chapter in my own autobiography and a living history and an alternative commentary on the birth, life and demise of this little known punk outfit who have been credited with influencing bands such as killdozer and the whitestripes. Am I being nostalgic? In a sense yes, as my times playing with this band were some of the happiest days of my life. The summer of 1982 stands out as memorable. The punk scene in Canada was embracing the emergent hardcore trends filtering up from Los Angeles and the West Coast and later Boston. Zeroption was moving into its most successful incarnation, as a three piece which endorsed the best of punk past, while also embracing the emergent scene from the South. Undeniably playing with zeroption for me was a rite of passage, which allowed me to move onto bigger if not better things.
How it all started...
"They wanna have me here, Have me and hold me near, Hold me down fasten and tie...But the cars are all flashing me, Bright lights are passing me...I feel life passing me by..."
I grew up in Bangor Northern Ireland during the 1960s and 70s. In retrospect the situation in Northern Ireland during these two decades could be described in the military venacular as a low intensity civil conflict, we simply referred to it as... the troubles. My parents split when I was eight, which in a religously conservative country such as Northern Ireland was at that time difficult and which presented my mother with a stigma which was hard for her bear. I later learnt that she often referred to my father in the past tense, giving the impression that he was dead and that she was a widow. In reality he had moved to England and later to France, which doesn't quite count as being deceased, although the Dordogne can be... very, very, very quiet, especially in the winter.
Due to my parents divorce, we also became economically downwardly mobile moving from a relatively middle class suburbian Carnalea to what then was the upper working - lower middle class culdisac in Bangor west. I remember we got number 36 West Burn Crescent for £7,000. It had no heating and cast iron window frames that rattled in the gales that blew in from the Irish sea. My mother had always worked in a part time capacity but now having turned 40 and divorced she had to find herself full time employment, which to her credit she did, working first in a local supermarket and then as a receptionist in a borstal, which meant I often got `special issue` baseball boots which were available only to the discerning clientele of Her Majesty's Reform School for Boys, Rathgael. I stopped wearing them after a few weeks as most people assumed that I was on the run, which in truth was kind of true. It was just that I was bunking off from school rather than absconding from the borkie.
I spectacularly failed my 11 plus and even more so spectacularly failed its resit. Hence clad in a black uniform I joined the other `lads` from `the street` and made my way to Gransha Boys High School euphemistically known to us all as GBH school. I'll cover the Gransha years in another chapter, but I emerged at 16 with 4 GCSEs (with appalling grades), no discernable skills other than just about holding my own in a punch up and a healthy disregard for authority. By this time, however, I had discovered punk rock and could also play the guitar..badly.
My band days started with a garage band based near Bangor Dairies where I had had a part time job since I was 14. A three piece fashioned on the Jam, it consisted of an accomplished drummer Gary Grahame who went to go onto play with Bangor heavy metal luminaries Burning Steel, myself on guitar and an aspiring hairdresser named Ken on bass and vocals. Ken has done well in the hairdressing business, which is just as well, as he couldn't play nor sing. He gave me the Jam's greatest hits song book and told me to learn it. As reading and writing was not my strong point, our first, second and third practice consisted of a cover of house of the rising sun played repeatedly. Ken's contribution to the song consisted of him repeatedly plucking the same string while singing in a monotone voice. I learnt that a postmodern pop quartet from Manchester caught one of his later shows. Such was his influence on that band that they changed their look, fashioned themselves on his bass playing and singing and changed their name to Joy Division... the rest is history.
I got chucked out of `Bass by Ken's` band for not showing up for a gig he had put together for his mates. It transpires that his mates didn't show up either. My reasons were that I had been approached by the drummer of a punk outfit which was missing a guitarist. With Gaz `The Duke` on vocals, Russ on bass, Ralph on drums and myself on guitar, we became 70% proof...oh happy days.
My name is Stu-Option, one time lead guitarist, vocalist and principle song writer for the three piece hardcore punk bank from Oakville, Ontario called...zeroption. I decided to start this blog as a chapter in my own autobiography and a living history and an alternative commentary on the birth, life and demise of this little known punk outfit who have been credited with influencing bands such as killdozer and the whitestripes. Am I being nostalgic? In a sense yes, as my times playing with this band were some of the happiest days of my life. The summer of 1982 stands out as memorable. The punk scene in Canada was embracing the emergent hardcore trends filtering up from Los Angeles and the West Coast and later Boston. Zeroption was moving into its most successful incarnation, as a three piece which endorsed the best of punk past, while also embracing the emergent scene from the South. Undeniably playing with zeroption for me was a rite of passage, which allowed me to move onto bigger if not better things.
How it all started...
"They wanna have me here, Have me and hold me near, Hold me down fasten and tie...But the cars are all flashing me, Bright lights are passing me...I feel life passing me by..."
I grew up in Bangor Northern Ireland during the 1960s and 70s. In retrospect the situation in Northern Ireland during these two decades could be described in the military venacular as a low intensity civil conflict, we simply referred to it as... the troubles. My parents split when I was eight, which in a religously conservative country such as Northern Ireland was at that time difficult and which presented my mother with a stigma which was hard for her bear. I later learnt that she often referred to my father in the past tense, giving the impression that he was dead and that she was a widow. In reality he had moved to England and later to France, which doesn't quite count as being deceased, although the Dordogne can be... very, very, very quiet, especially in the winter.
Due to my parents divorce, we also became economically downwardly mobile moving from a relatively middle class suburbian Carnalea to what then was the upper working - lower middle class culdisac in Bangor west. I remember we got number 36 West Burn Crescent for £7,000. It had no heating and cast iron window frames that rattled in the gales that blew in from the Irish sea. My mother had always worked in a part time capacity but now having turned 40 and divorced she had to find herself full time employment, which to her credit she did, working first in a local supermarket and then as a receptionist in a borstal, which meant I often got `special issue` baseball boots which were available only to the discerning clientele of Her Majesty's Reform School for Boys, Rathgael. I stopped wearing them after a few weeks as most people assumed that I was on the run, which in truth was kind of true. It was just that I was bunking off from school rather than absconding from the borkie.
I spectacularly failed my 11 plus and even more so spectacularly failed its resit. Hence clad in a black uniform I joined the other `lads` from `the street` and made my way to Gransha Boys High School euphemistically known to us all as GBH school. I'll cover the Gransha years in another chapter, but I emerged at 16 with 4 GCSEs (with appalling grades), no discernable skills other than just about holding my own in a punch up and a healthy disregard for authority. By this time, however, I had discovered punk rock and could also play the guitar..badly.
My band days started with a garage band based near Bangor Dairies where I had had a part time job since I was 14. A three piece fashioned on the Jam, it consisted of an accomplished drummer Gary Grahame who went to go onto play with Bangor heavy metal luminaries Burning Steel, myself on guitar and an aspiring hairdresser named Ken on bass and vocals. Ken has done well in the hairdressing business, which is just as well, as he couldn't play nor sing. He gave me the Jam's greatest hits song book and told me to learn it. As reading and writing was not my strong point, our first, second and third practice consisted of a cover of house of the rising sun played repeatedly. Ken's contribution to the song consisted of him repeatedly plucking the same string while singing in a monotone voice. I learnt that a postmodern pop quartet from Manchester caught one of his later shows. Such was his influence on that band that they changed their look, fashioned themselves on his bass playing and singing and changed their name to Joy Division... the rest is history.
I got chucked out of `Bass by Ken's` band for not showing up for a gig he had put together for his mates. It transpires that his mates didn't show up either. My reasons were that I had been approached by the drummer of a punk outfit which was missing a guitarist. With Gaz `The Duke` on vocals, Russ on bass, Ralph on drums and myself on guitar, we became 70% proof...oh happy days.
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