Justine: Music: Fat Rhino

Fat Rhino is more of a distant memory to me now than ever. There is the original Fat Rhino which I formed in 1992 with drummer Carl Taylor (my first memory of Carl was of him running up stairs in his underpants!).

We had a very live sound and played our first gig at the Dog & Trumpet, then run by Gus McGrath. This whole band thing was such a relief to me after previously having sang in covers bands and entertaining British Army soldiers, US and RAF soldiers in Germany, club land up and down the country, (stopping for bingo) at the tender age of eighteen.

I had dropped out of A' levels and left home from the age of sixteen and moved into the YWCA at nineteen. It was £26 a week, and this is where I really started to song write.

I left the hotel job I was doing at the time, went to Stratford College to study drama, then on to Coventry Centre for Performing Arts to study Small Scale Theatre. By this time the original Fat Rhino had run its course and I was now working with a cello player called Andrea.

My music crossed over into a few theatre projects, taking me up and down the country and to the Edinburgh Festival on a few occasions, but my main love was still song writing and I wanted to record these songs which is where Fat Rhino sprang up from the grave again, only this time with a more electric sound produced by Matt Waddell. Our main influences being Massive Attack and Portishead. We were a 3 piece, using a lot of programmed sounds, eventually we enrolled drummer Daz Dumbleton to give us a more organic sound live.

We partied everywhere we went, not one of us was ever totally sober! Then one day I realized that we had our last gig, months before, it was over; I don't know how or why, we never sat down and made a decision to split up......It had been a lovely time though. Naturally I went back to my acoustic music, my first love.