Leaving School and Musical Adventures

Have been indoors mainly this week and as I was organizing things, saw an old folder that was used to keep important documents, following traits of my late father (with little success).

Examined its contents and found my school leaving certificates. At school, I was a very shy and quiet person, not socializing that much. You can perhaps see signs of this in my school leaving certificate of my co-curriculum activities (very few).

Perhaps the next one will surprise many (found together with my school leaving certificate).

This is for winning a 'singing competition' or rather a talent competition that we participated in. We, T-Blues Band, we called ourselves, comprised of Ayub Los (lead guitar), Amiruddin Zain (second guitar, vocals), Abdul Malek Eusoff (bass) and myself on the drums (also Khor Tze Ping as guest keyboardist), actually competed twice. The first one, we played two songs; an original by Ayub Los (can't remember the title) and Muddy Waters' "Walking in the Park". We did not win then. It was the first time that I get my hands on a real drum set (before that, I was just drumming in my mind or at best, on a table). 

The second time, we played songs that have more commercial appeal. The Malay song was relatively unknown song from Discovery called Malam Sepi. Right after we played this song, it sort went popular for a while at the school. The english song, we played next, is Ten Years After's "My Baby Left Me". For these, we won the competition (I think it was the group category, unsure if there were other categories). Why we chose blues/rock n roll genre, I can't remember why; but I knew that we wanted to be different. 

The next document in the folder was the school leaving certificate from Daws Road High School, the school that I went to for matriculation education in Adelaide.

As you can see, I remained the person with quiet personality (even more quiet). The photo below is my class with Mr. Hopkins as our class teacher.

I continued to pursue my musical interests after school. Played drums during the term holidays while I was at University of Adelaide.

One special jam session I had was with Mustaffa Ramly, who visited Mile End, Adelaide in 1987. We played Police and Dire Straits music. Mustaffa later went on to be the guitarist who played with Zainal Abidin. Other musician-students that I had jammed with then was Harith (don't know his full name, but partially visible in picture below), Anuar Kasim. Pic with Mustaffa is shown below.

Back in UPM, sometimes I was asked to play guitar for some events but I was never really good at it.

I have now laid my guitar to rest (somewhere in the store).