Pedestrian zero is the recording/performing name for Toby Hawkins. That’s about as much third person as you’re going to get.
I’ve been playing guitar for nearly 30 years, and have been playing in bands for nearly as long. The first serious band started in 2000 as My Kid Sister before changing name to strangeday in 2002. We played rock music up and down the country and a couple of times in Serbia. Highlights include getting to the final of the Stable competition in Tunbridge Wells, recording an album – Please Intervene, playing Exit Festival in Serbia, being on Serbian breakfast TV, and creating our own music event in Kent – Smackbosh.
Around 2010 I started writing a lot more songs than in the previous decades, in part due to co-running an Open Mic twice a month for 10 years. Not all of these songs were rock songs and I started a new band called Roo’s Radio, an indie-folk-pop band. Amongst other things we recorded an album called The Way Home.
After The Way Home I was trying to work out what to do next, and, partly inspired by Jonathan Coulton, I decided to try recording and releasing a song a month. I was going to do this as Toby Hawkins, but there are already two Toby Hawkinses out there, so I became pedestrian zero (an old username from the 00’s). Starting in January 2016 I recorded and released a song a month for 3 years with Paul West and over 25 Kent musician friends I’d made over the years with strangeday, NAG Open Mic and Roo’s Radio.
To date I have released 34 singles, one 4-song EP and a reimagined version of that EP. Though broadly indie-pop/rock, the genre has actually varied across these singles and includes rock, pop, indie, blues, punk and acoustic, with a smidge of samba.
The plan for 2020 is to play some gigs, release some more singles and get into the studio to record a pedestrian zero album.
Evertheoptimist.com is an attempt to catalogue some of this involvement, as well as being a place for new stuff and something of a jotter for some half-baked and probably semi-coherent thoughts about music.
Your patience will be appreciated.