Xoundboy (Ben Roberts)
Xoundboy.com is a portoflio of sound recordings made by myself, Ben Roberts, a freelance sound engineer / musician / producer originally from Nottingham, UK.
Until June 2006 I was based in Manchester. I then spent a year touring around South America with my wife Petra on the look-out for original artists to record and promote. Since June 2007 I have been living in Prague setting up as a web developer and building this web site, amongst others. I hope to return to doing music one day soon and plan to build a new recording studio in the near future.
This website contains the best work I have been involved with.
The design and programming of the site is all my own work, originally based upon the old transistor radio that my Mum gave to me when I was about seven years old. That one was permanently tuned into BBC Radio 2 ... the tuning knob had stopped working. I took the radio to pieces in a desperate attempt to make it receive other stations but unfortunately when I put it all back together again it had completely stopped working. I was distraught. Thirty years later I have banished that painful memory forever (hopefully) by creating this fully-working virtual model that is permanently tuned to "Radio Xoundboy"...
The 80's
In 1983, when we were thirteen years old there were a few of us at school that wanted to be rock stars. We listened to Iron Maiden, Kiss, Rainbow and Dio, grew our hair to be as long as our mothers would let us (which wasn't very long really) and bought as many heavy metal records as we could afford (quite a few, because we were too young to buy anything else more exciting) and wore denim jackets (because our mothers wouldn't let us wear leather biker jackets)
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The 90's
We left school, our band split up and Leeds University beckoned after a year off galivanting around South-East Asia and Australia. Continuing on the theme of dodgy names I joined a Bradford-based band called "The Barbarelles" (- we were hoping that Jane Fonda might actually turn up to one of our gigs dressed up as Barbarella, but she never did! Ah Well!) We recorded a few songs at Martin Cooper's (the guitarist from Beeston Carpark who left school early to start a small recording studio).Here is one of the songs, Mr B.mp3, still sounding fresh nearly 20 years on.
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