At the age of 15, I was on holiday with my friend Mark (the drummer) in Cornwall. I had a pretty decent mullet by this stage (nowadays I just wish I had enough hair to grow a mullet) and had acquired a respectable collection of heavy metal T-shirts from going to various gigs. We were walking along the cliff tops one evening at dusk reminiscing about our times in Andromeda. We came to the conclusion that the only thing we hadn't enjoyed about that band was Malcolm and that maybe we should reform it with a different guitarist.1 As I was wondering who we could get to play guitar, Mark pointed out the blindingly obvious: I played guitar. So, when we got home Scansion was born.2 As the singer, guitarist and songwriter I set about writing some songs. I moved away from writing about flies and set my sights on the pointlessness of existence, death, betrayal and so on. We had the dubious honour of being reviewed in the music magazine Kerrang! (in a live review they called us 'twee', which is really not what you want to be called if you're trying to make music so heavy that it ruptures the bowels of Satan). Our highlight, however, was playing a gig at the famous Marquee Club in London (this club has closed, not as a result of us playing there I hasten to add, but in its day it started the careers of people like Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin).3 This was the biggest gig of our career and it was essential that we played like we never had before. As it turned out, we did: I ran on stage, fell over and in the process de-tuned my guitar beyond recognition and broke the zip on my trousers. I spent the whole gig out of tune and spread-eagle to prevent my trousers falling down. Like I said, I'd never played like that before. We used to get quite obsessed with comparing how we played at different gigs. I didn't know about statistics then (happy days), but if I had I would have realized that we could rate ourselves and compare the mean ratings for different gigs; because we would always be the ones rating the gigs, this would be a repeated-measures design, so we would need a repeated-measures ANOVA to compare these means. That's what this chapter is about; hopefully it won't make our trousers fall down.
1 I feel bad about saying this because Malcolm was a very nice guy and, to be honest, at that age (and some would argue beyond) I could be a bit of a cock.
2 Scansion is a term for the rhythm of poetry. We got the name by searching through a dictionary until we found a word that we liked. Originally we didn't think it was 'metal' enough, and we decided that any self-respecting heavy metal band needed to have a big spiky 'X' in their name. So, for the first couple of years we spelt it 'Scanxion'. Like I said, I could be a bit of a cock back then.