Bio

Back in the Winter of 2000 myself and my good friend by the name of Daniel Silverton talked about getting together to play some punk rock. Daniel was the bass player of a straight edge metal band called Arcane who I used to go see as often asd I could (check out the AK/H-town compilation 'All we have is metal' for two of their tracks), they were part of Hamiltons flourishing Hardcore metal scene of the late 90's playing with bands like Vargas and Vendetta, back then the Hamilton Hardcore/punk scene was mainly metal influenced. I can remeber going to a great show with such awesome contrasts between the C tuned ultra chug-chug metal of Arcane and the melodic hardcore of Sommerset who had Stuart from Shinkasta playing guitar for them on this particular tour. One of the best shows I remember from this period was State of Grace, Vendetta, Good riddance and the mighty Sick of it all at Hamiltons Meteor theatre (before it became to expensive for punk rock shows). I will never forget the huge pile of bodies surging up from the pit to sing along to Vendettas 'Hamtown Smakdown' I never felt so proud to live in this city.

After Vendetta broke up and Arcane went their seperate ways Dan and I started hangin out more as we both went to the same school (Hamilton Boys High) talkin about the bands we liked.. to me he seemed to be into what I considered obscure at the time bands like Earth crisis and Mouthpiece, Fugazi and Slayer, whereas I was into what you would call mainstream punk rock bands like Lagwagon, Good riddance and NOFX with the only metal/hardcore exceptions being local kinda stuff like two of my all time favourites Ghidrah and Shinkasta.

Dan helped me discover a whole other world of music that at the time I never thought I coulda had any affinity for, it was after we left school that we started playing together in a band called Blazon, we had both been listening to Snapcase and were inspired by the drummer from AK band Act of Vengance and Day One (the new version after Ryan (Sommerset) and Ben left, full respect to the former members though). Blazon never really turned out as we had planned but nonetheless we still had an awesome time with our bro Andre, otherwise known as the godfather of H-town hardcore. While Dan and I were in Blazon we talked about doin a punk-rock side project, it soon became obvious that this was our main interest and when Blazon dissolved we were already hard at work getting together what was to become My Two Cents.

The first step was attaining our guitarist Joe Hitchcock, Joe and I had been friends since our old bands (Thrifty and Atomic Garage) had played together on several occasions, we started jamming and the songs we wrote a year ago are the ones that we played at our first show. we had Dan on bass, myself on guitar/vox and Joe on second guitar but we still hadn't been able to find a drummer, I ended up askin a guy called Brendon who played in a local band called The Letdowns who had opened for Less Than Jake and played heaps of other small R18 gigs around town. We rehearsed a few songs with Brendon for a couple of months (stuff like 'Glass Eye' and 'Worst Yet') but it became apparent that Brendan was to busy with other commitments and we would have to find someone else... It wasn't til a month later that I got in touch with a kid called Jono, one night Blazon was playing a non-toxic gig at the meteor with Misled By Lies, a high school punk rock covers band called Mullet Patrol opened up the show, I heard them covering Rancids 'Don Giovanni' from outside and when in to check them out, the band was loose and disorganised but the drummer impressed me with the control of his kit and the ease with which he was playing some pretty technical stuff. After a few nights of ringin around a vast array of Hamilton punk-rockers I finally got Jono's number off Nick from Non-toxic and got him to agree to having a jam with us... after our first rehearsal it felt like Jono had been there from the start. We spent a few more weeks driving to Te Awamutu to get Jono for rehearsal by which stage we had a pretty good set of original songs that everyone was happy with, at about this stage we lost Dan. This was a real shock to me because this band was what we had always wanted to do, I didn't really understand at first but in the end I came to realise that Dan was to busy with Uni and although he loved the music he just couldn't spare the time anymore.

At this point I'd like to thank Dan for everything he's done for us, all the driving.. giving us somewhere to practice and his continued support which most recently meant giving us a bass guitar when we needed it more than ever. So even though Dan isn't part of the starting line up he's still part of our band at heart.

After Dan left we kept writing as a two guitar three peice until we briefly had Mark Newbold of Vargas/Shinkasta/Daredevil infamy join us on four string, unfortunately Bolds was a bit metal for us (we love you bro) and an old school friend of mine named Jody joined us on bass for the last three shows (two with Kitsch and the Holdfast CD release).

After the last Kitsch show Jody left us due to time pressures on his own band and his studio commitments (engineering and production duties). This leads us to our present situation with Steve on bass. Steve and I met at polytech where we immediately hit it of with our combined love of girls the ocean and The Ataris.

Band Members:
Steve (bass)
Joe Hitchcock (guitar)
Luke (guitar, vocals)
Jono (drums)