After persuading my two friends (Mark and Mark) to learn the bass and drums, I took the rather odd decision to stop playing the guitar. I didn't stop, as such, but I focused on singing instead. In retrospect, I'm not sure why, because I am not a good singer. Mind you, I'm not a good guitarist either. The upshot was that a classmate, Malcolm, ended up as our guitarist. I really can't remember how or why we ended up in this configuration, but we called ourselves Andromeda, we learnt several Queen and Iron Maiden songs and we were truly awful. I have some recordings somewhere to prove just what a cacophony of tuneless drivel we produced, but the chances of them appearing on the companion website are slim at best. Suffice it to say, you'd be hard pushed to recognize which Iron Maiden and Queen songs we were trying to play. I try to comfort myself with the fact that we were only 14 or 15 at the time, but even youth does not excuse the depths of ineptitude to which we sank. Still, we garnered a reputation for being too loud in school assembly and we did a successful tour of our friends' houses (much to their parents' amusement, I'm sure). We even started to write a few songs (I wrote one called 'Escape From Inside' about the film The Fly that contained the wonderful rhyming couplet 'I am a fly, I want to die' - genius). The only thing that we did that resembled the activities of a 'proper' band was to split up due to 'musical differences'; these differences being that Malcolm wanted to write 15-part symphonies about a boy's journey to worship electricity pylons and discover a mythical beast called the cuteasaurus, whereas I wanted to write songs about flies and dying (preferably both). When we could not agree on a musical direction the split became inevitable. We could have tested empirically the best musical direction for the band if Malcolm and I had each written a 15-part symphony and a 3-minute song about a fly. If we'd played these songs to various people and measured their screams of agony then we could have ascertained the best musical direction to gain popularity. We have two variables that predict screams: whether Malcolm or I wrote the song (songwriter), and whether the song was a 15-part symphony or a song about a fly (song type). The one-way ANOVA that we encountered in Chapter 11 cannot deal with two predictor variables - this is a job for factorial ANOVA.