Zed

Zed's disappearance was the culmination of a whole series of weird events surrounding him. The first weird thing is of course his name. The simple fact is that none of us knew what his real name was, we only ever knew him as Zed. When he came up to us at an early gig and told us he was the guitarist we didn't know we were looking for, we thought the name was amusing but that as we got to know him better we'd find out more about him. But I don't think we ever found out any more: nothing of his background, his family, what he did with his time, or even where he lived.
For a while it became a joke and we'd try to catch him out by calling out random names and seeing if he responded. He thought that was pretty funny. I thought it would be a problem when it came to putting our names to songs but that wasn't a problem because (a) we ended up never recording anything and (b) bizarrely, he wasn't interested in any royalties.
In 1983, just after we'd finished the four-track version of 'A World Of My Own' he crashed his Jag. This Jag was his pride and joy. It was a silver XJ6 just like Arthur Daley's. He told us he'd taken a corner too fast - this was January and it was pretty icy - and ploughed into a tree. The funny thing was he took us back to the supposed location of the crash and there was nothing there. No dented tree, no crashed car, no witnesses - nothing. He swore blind he wasn't lying and he wasn't behaving as if he'd taken anything. He just had this mad grin on his face.
Now being a clever sort and having contacts, I tried to trace the number plate. And this is the weirdest thing of all. There were no records that the number plate had ever existed.

The first song

The first song I've been working on is from 'The Face In The Crowd'. On this song, Warren Street, Beth played this fabulous keyboard melody and achieved a really interesting effect by singing it at the same time. Recreating this is obviously a bit of a problem without Beth's voice but I can approximate it with a pretty good sample patch I've found.
Warren Street tube station is where we first realised that we'd lost Zed. We were all on a pretty crowded train on the Victoria line going to sign our record contract in North London. The signing was to be postponed until Zed turned up. We waited for three hours before calling it a day - he never turned up. You can imagine how mad we were.

Discography

Not sure if I can really call this a discography since we never actually committed these to anything remotely resembling a disk! However, these were the albums that we wrote and performed.
1982: Flying (Robert Fenn, Zed, Beth Hale, Graham Bennett, Jen Chaplin).
1983: A World Of My Own (Robert Fenn, Zed, Beth Hale, Graham Bennett, Jen Chaplin).
1987: A Face In The Crowd (Robert Fenn, Beth Hale, Graham Bennett, Jen Chaplin).
1989: Opium Of The Masses (Robert Fenn, Graham Bennett, Jen Chaplin).
I'll go into why Zed wasn't on the last two albums and why Beth wasn't on Opium Of The Masses in later entries. As a teaser I should say that 'A Face In The Crowd' was named after a famous gig we did in Croydon where we thought we saw Zed, who'd been missing for several months, in the audience. I haven't seen or heard from him since then.

Introduction

'The Empty Vessel' was a progressive rock band of the 1980s. We wrote and performed four albums from 1982 to 1989. Although we were never signed to a record label we came very close in 1984. 'The Empty Vessel' consisted of five members. Myself, Robert Fenn, lead vocalist and occasional instrumentalist and four others: Zed (lead guitar), Beth Hale (keyboards), Graham Bennett (drums) and Jen Chaplin (bass).
When we split in 1990 I put the music of the band behind me and moved on to other things. However, despite my bitterness about some of the things that happened I never felt it was properly closed as an episode in my life. I've now decided that with home studio technology having moved on so much the time is right to go back to the music, which I still maintain was pretty good. So I'm going to realise the entire oeuvre of 'The Empty Vessel', all four albums, all by myself. And I'm going to record the whole process in this blog. Will it be interesting? Who knows?