Tom Alty; lead guitar (19)

Andy Haines; bass (21)

rift needed a new biography and I was sat in an internet cafe before a computer screen staring at some html(most of which was gibberish to me) with twenty minutes left before my time ran out.

I've been in rift all my life it seems. Before rift started I had uber-geek status and lived my life in the comic books I wrote and drew. I always felt that Peter Hill and Nick Howard asked me to join their band, in a Biology lesson in 1996, because my older brother was arguably the best guitarist in school, and they hoped to poach him through me. It doesn't really matter I guess. By December 23rd '96 the rift that played their first gig was an somewhat different model. Tom Alty, a younger kid I got the bus with, with impressivley fast fingers, was on the lead guitar and my brother Ben had stepped in to help out on bass. Peter was on the drums and Andy's mum wouldn't let him out that night to see us.

I won't bore you with all the details of how we got to be who we are, I'm not sure which bits are relevant anyway, and I'm the worst person to ask what we sound like. Hopefully I can get some people to help out with that on this site. It really matters to me to have this outlet. I'm a fairly emotionally unstable person and I'm sure I'd fall to pieces without the expression. Thanks for caring if you read this and I hope I can write something a bit more flashy soon, as i said before...

...the story continues...