So my marriage was over and I was starting out again. And something very strange happened. I actually found my voice, quite literally. Some friends of a friend invited me round to their place and by pure chance they had a range of musical instruments and recording equipment in their house. If I see a […]

After the band folded I went on to royally screw up what was left of my education. I sat my A Levels more because I didn’t have a sufficient enough excuse not to than any expectation of doing well. Predictably I didn’t do well. I got a summer job working in a plastics moulding factory […]

To get in my face Chris would have to bend down, quite a bit actually, but he had no hesitation doing that. He was well over six feet tall and had a mop of curly hair bouncing around on top of that. He once famously told our audience to stop clapping because the song we […]

Despite my musical limitations I soon wrote quite a few songs, the most important of which was called Fotheringhay. So much so it pretty much became the band’s anthem. Everyone at the folk club could sing along to it because we played it so much. Fotheringhay was an imaginary tale of some ancient battle where […]

After having the guys learn my song I felt I was in the band on some sort of merit. There was no formal initiation ceremony just an acceptance that I was expected to turn up for rehearsals and when we had a gig I was on stage with them. What I didn’t understand were the […]

The holy grail was getting a guitar with steel strings. What it looked like, who made it and even what it sounded like were completely secondary because I was fixated on getting a ‘real’ guitar now that I had an opportunity to be in a band. The aforementioned Gerry McLoughlin from school saw me coming […]

I’d known Chris Halstead since we were four. I still know him today. He was always head and shoulders taller than me and we fought like cat and dog throughout infant school, primary school and secondary school. I never really knew why and I bet he doesn’t either. Not really. We travelled by train together […]

If a thing is worth doing it’s worth doing badly. I remember the first time I heard that saying and I remember the first time I gleefully repeated it to my mother. Her reaction was pretty predictable and came with the question about why I couldn’t aim to do the ‘thing’ well as in ‘If […]

I’m pretty sure that my parents never met John Lennon. Or to be more specific John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi. But whether they did or not they were of the same opinion as her. As she had famously told John playing the guitar was all well and good but no-one ever made a living out of […]

So you want to play a musical instrument? You think you can write songs? You have a dream to one day record these and put them in front of the public? Welcome to my world. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine and this is story of how it happened, the journey I’ve been on. […]