Earlier this month, 80s pop progsters “It Bites” were, according to their Facebook page, forced to withdraw from what may well have been the biggest gig of their careers – the Holmfirth Prog Splash in West Yorkshire. Donnington had fast cars and metal, Holmfirth had Last of the Summer Wine and prog. Niiice.
The genre-defying band (think Tears for Fears does Marillion), apologising to fans, cited technical issues and a memory card malfunction. Apparently, keyboard player John Beck’s entire 30 years of music programming for the band has been lost. It was a disaster. Fellow keyboard player Dan Parratt explained in the comments that the card in question was in storage and it was an ancient volatile battery backed-up RAM card. “The battery simply expired whilst the keyboard was in storage, as John only uses it for iB – and did not work in his keyboard or my identical one.” He added that, “Once the battery expires, there is no way of recovering the data as it’s not flash memory nor magnetic hard disk type memory.”
Sad news for keyboard player and fans of the band, famous for their second single, the June 1986 hit “Calling all the Heroes” with its Marillion style proggy artwork. “It’s going to take an extreme effort for John to reprogram all this, and only he can do it, as I’m sure all keyboard players will agree, we all do things our own way,” said Parratt. Here’s their big hit, you can hear where Everything Everything and various other modern pop progsters may well have got their first inkling of musical possibilities.
The moral of the tale? Well, backup, backup, backup again. Of course, with archaic and obsolete technology that may well not be possible. There are probably lots of relic keyboards and early digitial cameras etc that take steam-driven memory cards from back in the day. Best to extract the data in a format that will work with the current equipment if you can, back that up, back it up again. Keep your digital art current in terms of the tech. Everything I had backed up on floppy discs and then zip drives went on to CDs, and then DVDs and USB sticks and USB hard drives. I also keep a copy of everything in the vast chambers of my laptop’s solid state drive. You know it makes sense. If you don’t backup, it’ll come back to bite you…