Music

There was always music in our house and from an early age I was dragged off, kicking and screaming to classical concerts, chamber music soirées and light operettas. Mostly this was to see my parents perform.  Dad and Mum, before she became unable to play owing to severe mental illness, had constant musical sessions in the house with other players with a real love of chamber music. Banished to the bedrooms we could only wonder what all the raucous laughter was about amongst the strains of clarinet, flute, and cello wafting up the stairs

Mum tried to teach me the piano and cello and Dad coaxed my brother to play the clarinet.  We both failed miserably to do so.  I just couldn’t get my head around musical notation or the complexity of learning to play either instrument. At primary school I was also an abject failure in music, where the teachers, who knew my parents were pro musicians, expected so much more of me than I could actually cope with.  I was once stood at the front of the class percussion band and made to conduct.  The teacher screamed at me persistently as I failed entirely to keep his bunch of ragamuffins in time.  This and similar instances, made me deeply ashamed that I was unlike my parents, so fluent and au fait with all the vagaries of harmony, pitch and notation were they.  I just couldn’t get it and I shrank into a deep fear of making music.  It was when I was teenager, when both parents realised that I was not going to follow family tradition into professional music, that they relented and amongst all the clamour of Beat Music emanating from the radio, they bought my brother and I a cheap Czechoslovakian acoustic guitar.  This was the defining moment of my life, which was to instil in me such a deep insatiable love of music.  Playing the guitar was to become something I could do.  At school, (although hating much of it), I began to understand the power and beauty of the written word through the auspices of a throughouly traditional but enlightened English teacher.  This was combined with all the changes that were starting to occur in the melting pot of the 1960s.

My brother and I bought a little paperback called “Play Guitar” by Dan Morgan and I ignored all the stuff about how to read music and learnt some chords.  First song ever completed was “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie, in C.  Holding down that F chord.  What a major achievement! The rest was listening to records, playing them repeatedly with my increasing repertoire of chord shapes until they sounded something like.The major advance in my technique came after meeting Andy Inglis, a kid who although younger than me was an amazing player who had a battered EKO Ranger guitar, one of the first cheap jumbos around.  He introduced me to the work of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Rambling Jack Elliot etc. who all had fingerpicking styles.  I managed to persuade the old fella that I needed a decent guitar and I chivvied him into buying me an Eko Ranger on hire purchase.

Andy decided to start doing some gigs at the age of 14 and our first one was at Garston Dockers club.  I think it was his uncle who got us on the bill for Saturday night supporting a magician, novelty act and geezer playing the trumpet, Eddie Calvert style. As we walked into this den of gallons of bitter, brown ale for the ladies and chicken in a basket, the bar staff shouted” Don’t serve them any ale” We nonchalantly pointed out that we were one of the turns but they didn’t relent.  We went in the dressing room where the trumpet player took a shine to us and provided libations a-plenty!  God knows how we got on stage.  We regaled the jewellery bedripped audience with full-length versions of “Sad eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “Just Like A Woman” by Bob Dylan and actually went down a storm.  I was dead surprised.  I think they just loved our sheer nerve.  The trumpet player whose wig moved round his head as he hit the high notes loved us.  Mind you he did have make-up on.  Rites of passage.

I continued to play acoustic music in Liverpool and London, when I moved there, and finally joined a band in 1975. Information about the bands I've played with since then can be found on the music page.

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