How did your interest in music come about?
It used to be that, years and years ago, I became interested in music, especially lyrics, because my dad would come into the house with a Bob Dylan album that somebody had given him, and he would play it until the record was worn out. That’s a typical 1970’s story. My dad would come home, maybe with a few drinks on him, and he would try to sing along to the Bob Dylan record. He would play that record again and again and he would sing along and was very good at doing that. I was probably only 5 or 6 and my parents would play the Beatles, other groups. It was sort of bred into us. I just loved music.
So the love of music starts at home?
My life was the same as a lot of kids where we lived. When we were growing up there was only three TV channels, and they used to show repeats all the time. But we had music and that made a huge difference. It was a release, listening to music.
Did you learn to play any instruments?
I went to Cairnmartin School, which was a really rough school, and there wasn’t much money going into it. I wanted to learn guitar but the school told me they only had one guitar. I wanted to learn to read music and the only instrument they had was a trumpet. So was going to learn the trumpet. There was one problem with the trumpet. You can’t play it quietly or softly, so every time I tried to practice people in the house would be screaming to shut up. I grew up in a family of six so there really wasn’t much of a space to practise.
The other problem was that it takes ages to get good at it. You end up playing Three Blind Mice for ages trying to get better at the trumpet. Like any instrument, say the violin, you play it in the beginning and it sounds terrible, it takes time to learn to play any instrument properly. Eventually my family hid the trumpet so I couldn’t practice.
Did you keep trying to learn an instrument?
I did learn to read music though. And that helped me a little because I could read music to a basic level. I did learn the guitar and I also loved to sing. It was very difficult because no-one had any money. I can remember going to the music shop to get the music to play a Beatles song, but the book you had to buy cost a fortune and more often than not had about 2 songs out of ten that you actually wanted to learn, and we just didn’t have the money to buy music books.
That’s why I love what we have now. I love the internet because we can get access to tutorials and tips. You can get all the information you need which we couldn’t get when I was young.
That sounds like it was pretty difficult to get involved with music?
One thing I loved was musicals. Not many people listened to that type of music where we lived but I loved it. I was in the school plays and we did Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, Oklahoma, Calamity Jane, we did The Wizard of Oz, things like that. I loved that and I loved performing and singing.
Do you keep working on the singing?
When I left school everything stopped. It just went off the edge of a cliff. There just wasn’t much of a chance to do anything. But me and my mate tried to work on something.
We worked in a shop together, and eventually that shop was firebombed and my mate was paid off. It was hard because we didn’t have much money spare, and we used to get overtime money but that was all gone after the fire-bombing, but we would sing and perform every now again. We did what we could.
You also learned about the equipment side of the process?
Yes. We had a little bit of equipment and I have an analytical brain so I was always trying to work out how things worked. We had a mixing desk, I knew how to work it. We would get pieces, amps, microphones, instruments, over the years and I would always find out how everything works. I learned how to use and manipulate software I could make cds. I would work on any piece of equipment and soon learn how to use it
