I don't know where the phrase "shaggy dog story" comes from, but I know that my own musical history is one. I hadn't thought much about it before trying to write this, but once I started, I could see how many things shaped me and my music, such as it is.

I don't know where I got my interest in music from. I cannot find any family connections. I did have some classical guitar lessons when I was about eleven, which I did not ask for. After the first two or three, the 'lessons' consisted of me hiding my guitar in my Grandma's coal shed and going to play football. The guitar and the lessons cost my Mum money she didn't have. My older self is very ashamed about that.

One day a couple of years later, at a friends house, I heard the sound of a guitar being strummed - very hard. We peered over the yard wall where the sound was coming from, and there was an old guy (actually he was 21, maybe) playing Hawkwind riffs on an Eko Ranger VI. To me it sounded amazing. I can still hear it. I realise now that was the first live music I'd ever been up close to (apart from my classical guitar teacher showing off).

I dug the old classical guitar out of the coal and tuned it up (my lessons had taught me that much, at least).

I plinked around for a while on my cheap classical guitar, but was then fortunate enough to be hit by a car and badly break my right leg*. To cheer me up, Santa (Mum again) brought me an electric guitar; an Audition (FW Woolworth brand) sunburst semi-acoustic, and a small amplifier. The image is from the internet is as close to it as I remember. It didn't stay in tune very well, and the tremolo bar never came back in tune when you released it, but I loved it! I know I tried to learn the sort of music I was listening to, but I can't quite really remember what my first attempts were - pretty sure Gene Genie was in there somewhere!

*Stepped out from the front of the school bus on a dual carriageway (who would let a school bus disgorge on a dual carriageway these days?!) into the path of a Triumph Toledo doing 40mph. Landed about 50 metres away with my right shin in an L-shape but no other injuries. 3 months off school though.

Like many/most teenagers in the 1970s, my schoolmates and I collected records and went to gigs. The first major bands I saw were Sparks, David Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Judas Priest, Queen and Status Quo. Why? Just because they came to our town! Gradually musical tastes hardened and tribes formed. I leaned towards prog and heavy rock, but actually I also liked lots of other styles and genres. A big thing for me when I was about 16 was to see live bands at the Regent Hotel (pub). Pub rock at it's purest (pub bands I hear nowadays sound like tribute acts to those bands). It was mostly formulaic rock'n'roll fare, but I do remember some unique performers and original music along the way. Band names like 'Thunderbird Sabden', 'Rockin Horse', and my favourite 'Forever' (they split and re-formed frequently). I aspired to be in some such band.

As a wannabe guitar player, I loved a riff, but never made much progress with the lead solo stuff. I was technically OK, but never really felt it. At the Regent I saw a 17-year old guitarist of extreme precociousness and realised my talent shortfall. Gradually, I also realised that songs were what I was interested in. A band at the Regent called 'Slipstream' had a folk-rock thing going on, with an acoustic guitarist and fiddle player, and a female vocalist. Can't remember a single song (Driftaway, maybe?) they sang, but they made a big impression on what I wanted to play. I guess the Beatles had always been there lurking - I had The Complete Beatles Chord Book. but then a bigger shift occurred when I saw John Martyn on TV (BBC2 In Concert), and a friend's older brother's record collection led me to the band, Family. I had never before heard a band that put the song first and played whatever style of music it required.

Suddenly, I was heading down a different path. I went acoustic (the opposite way to Dylan!). I worked and saved for a black Ibanez, Gibson-style dreadnought from the wall of Reidy's Home of Music. The Johnny Cash signature style was lost on me because I'd never heard of him. It was just the nicest of the two or three that were in the price/quality bracket. of my savings. The pic below is the best I can find of that model. I am sure (but not totally) that the pickguard on mine wasn't as fancy. I later acquired another acoustic guitar with a lighter tone and complexion that became my mainstay for the next few years. Can't remember the make or model (Terada?). I think my brother still has it somewhere.

Epilogue: The Ibanez died in a car crash on the M6 (the friend I had sold it to was relatively unscathed by the incident, but has no actual recall of what happened).

So, my big interest was in songs, but by about 17 years old I still hadn't really sung in public. I had a couple of friends (they were brothers actually), who each fancied themselves (and were actually pretty good) as singers*. All I had to do was strum or pick the chords and riffs. We're talking the likes of Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Peter Frampton, Chris de Burgh, and the ubiquitous Beatles. I had a good social group and a role in it. I was happy with that.

I still hadn't gigged either, but that changed when I was asked to drop into a scratch band at a local festival. I knew the person who had been asked to put the band together, and arrived to hang out just as another guitarist I vaguely knew flounced out (I literally arrived to see him putting his guitar and amp into a taxi). We just had time for a run through. The other three were all in gigging bands, and they carried me fairly easily. I only remember 'Here Comes the Sun' from our set of energetic pop. Unfortunately, the audience were all kids of about eleven years old, stood on the other side of a rope cordon, awaiting a punk band (punk was very new) called The Activators. We played to a restless silence, but felt fortunate because when The Activators got up the entire front row spat copiously upon them (known as 'gobbing' in punk circles - a sign of appreciation). After the gig we went off to the pub with an entourage and spent the modest fee on rounds of Guiness. The other band members said I had done great, but that remains my only hometown gig.

Soon after, I went to live away from my home town to work and study in Manchester. I lived for a year or two in Whitefield. Through a classmate, I found a new set of friends in Bury at the Two Tuns pub, where I had a similar role as backing musician to anyone who wanted to sing. I seem to remember Leonard Cohen songs featured a great deal.

Then, at age 21, I moved again to Cranfield, Bedfordshire to study. I joined the music club - just a few guys with guitars (Cranfield at that time was an engineering postgraduate campus, 99.5% male), and found no-one sang, so I started to sing as well as play. To my surprise, nothing bad happened, so I carried on.

Epilogue: Nowadays I am a fairly confident vocalist although I remain unconvinced that I can actually sing. I still gravitate to projects where I am not the lead singer, or where my voice is not the most important part of the sound. I especially like accompanying distinctive female voices.

*The Veevers brothers were like Liam and Noel Gallagher relationship-wise. I had a strong friendship with each, but alternately, never together. Their mum was a professional singer, and they also had a sister who sang and I played for on occasion.

Another chap at the college music club was an excellent musician. Ian Entwhistle had recently picked up the violin and mandolin and was teaching himself how to play traditional Irish tunes*, not by going to Irish music sessions, but just using sheet music (he later built his own violin and mandolin in much the same way - from a book). I look back on this and can't believe that I didn't think this was totally astounding. It sounded good, I jammed along, then before long we had hived off from the music club and were learning traditional sets, mixed in with other folk and contemporary songs. Our contrasting styles made it quite interesting. We found empty lecture rooms at lunchtime to rehearse.

When we got up at a couple of folk clubs around Bucks/Beds to play some of it and had some feedback from 'proper' folkies, it wasn't all good. We realised our approach was a bit quirky in how we naively mixed nations, time signatures and tempos, but we caught the ear of a renowned local fiddler, Jon Ginn, who encouraged us, and we were received on his nod into the local scene. This helped me broaden my knowledge and experience of traditional music and contemporary folk. We were building nicely with regular pub gigs, but then Ian burned his hands (and a lot of the rest of him) in a lab accident**. He did recover after many months, and we played together again, but by the time my course was ending and I was preparing to head back North to work. Ian went on to play in local bands with all the musos we used to look up to, and thus became one of those looked up to.

Sort of in parallel with this, I used to take a guitar into the common room of the block where I lived***, and thus met an outrageously good flautist, Glen Turner. His record collection was basically everything with a flute on it. Jethro Tull, Focus, PFM (an Italian ELP) formed the basis of our set (but it even had a bit of James Galway in it). We performed mainly in that common room, but also got a few other gigs opening for local and college bands (more about that later). Glen's stage persona as an outrageous, camp archetype was it's own attraction before a note was played. This persona was based accurately on his off-stage self (imagine Quenten Crisp, Elton John and Freddy Mercury fell into a blender).

I think I can kind of remember a sort of Venn diagram arrangement where Ian, Glen and I played occasionally as a trio, and I also think I remember the success of that being patchy, but excellent when it came together.

After two years my studies ended. I returned to Manchester and a musical square-one.

*Turned out Ian also played guitar and sang beautifully, influenced by Donovan, Ralph McTell and other folkies. More recently he has become known as a James Taylor tribute.

**Trying to loosen the stopper on a large bottle of ethanol using a bunsen burner. Yes, really!

***Milton Keynes is nowadays a fairly big and established city. In the early 1980s it was was an embryonic 'new town' created by developing the agricultural land around 20 or so villages between the small towns of Bletchley and Wolverton. Granby Court was a complex of apartments and bedsits close to Bletchley, but hemmed-in by industrial/commercial estates and the railway. Designated originally for construction workers, it became a place to house singletons coming in as key workers in health and education, and young professionals employed by relocating companies. It also had a sub-set of phD students from the Open University. The accommodation was fairly comfortable. When I lived there it had morphed into also housing vulnerable people, partners (men mostly) ejected from the marital home (separatees?), and any other person that didn't fit the happy family vision projected by the city's Development Corporation. Partly this was because it was somewhat isolated from the main residential zones. Aspiring professionals therefore rubbed along with the strugglers in a strange social experiment which resulted in interesting exchanges of ideas, substances and involuntary wealth redistribution. It was quite a crazy place. The common room reminded me of the Space Bar in Star Wars.

I spent the next year or so back to being a bedroom musician. I found some excellent music, but didn't join in, except for weekend visits back down to Milton Keynes. The only thing of note was that I became able to purchase a better guitar, a Guild D25M, which I still have today. I had admired such a guitar in the hands of a folk player on the Milton Keynes scene (I can still remember the guitar, but not the guy). I saw one advertised nearly new, and bought it immediately.

Then, onto a new day-job in Nottingham. I found a busy folk club scene. In the early 1980s folk clubs were the principal venues for contemporary as well as traditional acoustic music, and there was a recognised pathway/hierarchy for musicians. 'Singarounds', could lead to 'floor-spots' (essentially support when a paid guest came to play) or 'residence' (being the main musicians hosting club nights, or topping the bill on nights when there were no paid guests). Decent residents would then get paid bookings as guests at other clubs, and if suitably talented and ambitious, become regular performers on the folk circuit.

Pendragon (not the semi-famous prog band, still going strong) were the residents at Carlton Folk Club, Nottingham. The club was based quite far from Carlton, in Mapperley at the Duke of Cambridge pub. The group had already existed for 17 years, comprising the two founding members, Graham Morgan and David Ball, and other members who came and went every few years. Multi-instrumentalist, Roger Strickland had been around for a few years, and I replaced Bob Ballard, a charismatic and renowned local singer. Each member had a distinctly different vocal style, and there was no designated lead singer. The most suitable voice took the lead, and then all these distinct voices made a huge four-part harmony in the choruses. There was a large, established repertoire of traditional and contemporary folk songs to learn. They had a decent reputation. I don't know what they saw in me, or why they stuck with me when they found out how poor I was on the harmonies.

All four Pendragon members played guitar. Dave could switch to mandolin, and Roger could play anything, but overall, we needed less guitar in the mix. To balance things up, I decided to learn bouzouki. At that time I was infused with traditional tunes from my time in Milton Keynes. We already had a couple of mandolin options, and fiddle or woodwind was a jump from what I knew, so the bouzouki made sense. Part of my choice was also that I had often admired a *Fylde Octavius in the window of the Ivor Morantz shop in London. So, one day, after no research, and without trying any other instruments, I went there and just bought it.

So, I was now a bouzouki owner and got practicing until it became my main instrument in the band. I also took many of the lead vocal parts, and overcame my lack of harmony by creating unconventional harmony lines that seemed to work and energise the whole thing in a different way.

I played with Pendragon for four or five years. We were solid, with an almost ritualistic gig calendar, but our repertoire wasn't changing much since we now all had day jobs and young families to attend to. These priorities gradually squeezed playing music out of my life altogether. Eventually, I left the band.and the fallow years began.

* I often wondered if I had always seen the same actual instrument each time I passed (about 3 or 4 times over a year or two), or if it had been replaced each time the display one was sold. Many years later, I contacted Roger Bucknall (The man behind the Fylde brand) to try and source a suitable case, and he emailed that they didn't regularly sell that model through Morantz and mine would have probably been a one-off sample.

around 2012, an old college friend , Alex Smith got in touch. This is the back-story.....

Another friend, (Big) Kev Ginley and I studied together at Manchester Poly, and he was the first person I met as I came through the gate at Cranfield. Kev was a folky and had a mandolin to prove it. My digs were pretty soul destroying and I ended up spending a lot of time jamming with Kev in the kitchen of his shared house.

One of Kev's housemates was Alex, a very cool, dry-humoured Glaswegan. He played a left-hand sunburst stratocaster through a Roland Jazz Chorus amp. He was pretty much a rock guy with no interest in acoustic music.

These tribal interests meant we never played together, but we did interact quite a bit through the college music scene (such as it was). We often played on the same bill at events, and I looked after the Student Union p.a. system, so was the roadie/tech for Scree (or was it The Scree?), the band he made with fellow-student, Don, and his best-friend Davey (who had coincidentally moved to nearby Milton Keynes).

We were decent friends by the end of our studies, but not close enough to stay in *touch. So, I was surprised to receive his email, asking me if I was still an active musician.

I answered, sadly, no. But, we struck up a dialogue over Whatsapp. He was these days U.S. naturalised and living in Washington DC. He owned a very successful company and was able to do music as a serious hobby - producing professional recordings with many different collaborators.

He persisted, and I agreed to see if I could do some acoustic guitar parts for some of his tracks. Recent tech advances enabled remote recording, and so with only a small outlay (Garageband, a sound card and a microphone), I started to contribute. Rusty to begin with, but I was soon enjoying it.

*we did once meet about three yrars after college, on a tube train for about two stops. My wife, Sally was several months pregnant at the time. She thought Alex was a nice name, and so we gave it to our eldest son.

Somewhat in parallel with my time playing for Alex, I moved from Nottingham to a place just outside Penzance, Cornwall, where I now live. I also began to gradually wind down my day job commitments towards retirement. I acquired a decent Taylor guitar, and played music a lot more, but still wasn't playing it live or with other musicians. However, I did find a rich local music scene based around 'open mic' and 'singaround' sessions. Open mic didn't really exist when I was last playing, and it seemed to have replaced or displaced folk clubs. I started attending a regular open mic at a pub (now closed), the Alexandra in Penzance, but nobody there knew I had ever played or performed.

Then, one Summer evening, I called into the pub in my village quite late and found an open mic singaround hosted by Dan Tolchard. There were only a few punters and Dan had turned it into a less formal session. I chipped in with a couple of songs on a borrowed guitar. Over the next couple of months, with Dan's encouragement, I did gradually more, and started to play at the Alexandra and other sessions, getting to know and play with many other musicians.

A few years later and here I am. I have written a few more songs, bought and sold a few more guitars, and made many more musical acquaintances in the vibrant and varied local music scene. I am like many others hereabouts - music is on a sliding scale somewhere between a serious hobby and a profession.