The Sandpit

Welcome to Dave and Ian’s AI Sandpit.

AI creates music and videos as directed…

Dave and Ian just write the lyrics and are having a lot of fun playing with and learning from their new toy.

You’re invited to come along for the journey.

Firstly, meet Dave and Ian.

Dave Prior and Ian Heydon have been mates for over 30 years and have collaborated on a number of projects (seven albums, a couple of stage shows and over 70 podcasts).

Dave grew up on a huge cattle station, Hamilton Downs, in the Northern Territory and completed secondary school as a boarder in Adelaide. He preferred playing with his guitar to football and after months of practice could kick it fifty metres. In the 1970’s he was an announcer on 8HA Alice Spring and 8DN Darwin before hosting his own TV show and fronting a band for 12 months on the cruise ship, The Fairstar. He returned to radio and became station manager in Alice Springs and Port Lincoln while still performing. In 1994 he moved to Sydney to manage a radio syndication company, Independent Radio Services and that’s where he and Ian met. After the stint at IRS he managed AM and FM radio stations in Murray Bridge and Geraldton. Then, at the tender age of 50, he decided to become a full-time entertainer, threw his trusty guitar onto the back seat, drove off into the sunset and never looked back. The rear-view mirror was broken. Dave and Ian are both 1954 vintages and, like fine wines, are aging nicely and benefit from a good lie down.

Ian grew up in the country town of Gundagai in New South Wales and completed secondary school in Sydney as a boarder. In the 1970s he did a Bachelor of Arts degree at university with a view to becoming a teacher while working part-time pumping out septic tanks and running a bistro in a pub. Not at the same time. His hobbies were writing and painting. Canvases, not houses. In 1980 he sold his first sit-com script to a show called Kingswood Country and never looked back. The rear-view… bugger, already used that… As well as writing on a number of sit-coms, Ian published Kid Zone!, a magazine for 9 to 14-year-olds and wrote and produced radio shows including The Samuel Pepys Show, How Green Was My Cactus and The Year My Country Broke. He also wrote and produced the radio version of the TV travel show, Getaway along with the Getaway website. This led to producing many travel websites and eventually having his own online travel agency and writing a book on Australia after driving across our wide, brown land and… Damn. The rear-vision mirror thing could have worked there, too!

The Sandpit project is unpredictable in its planning because it is about both original creativity and reacting to the wonderful world of AI. Dave and Ian don’t pretend that they are producing the vocals or music – that’s AI’s job because a) it is comparatively cheap and b) it does a better job than they could. They just produce the words.

They can even produce words for you if you have a special birthday or occasion that would suit a humorous audio ‘card’.

They are going social media mad with Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram along with weekly podcasts updating the project’s progress.

And they have created a character called Artie Fishel who, with his AI backing band, has released an album of comedy songs titled The King of Twisted Song. It is available for AUD$25.00 including postage to anywhere in Australia. Payment can be made by direct debit into Artie’s account or PayPal.