Music is central to my life and I could not exist without it. This biography reflects my developing relationship with this powerful art form.

EARLY LIFE

I was born in Kent on the 9th May 1956 and brought up in the village of Offham. My father was a scientist and inventor and ran the family business in London which had been started in the 19th century. My mother was a miner’s daughter from Newbiggin in Northumberland and she had been brought up in poverty. Her life was dominated by raising a large family of six children. Apparently she had a wonderful singing voice when young but by the time I was born she had fallen silent.  I’m the youngest of her children and there are a large number of years separating me from the others.

I was quite a solitary child with many interests and my home environment was full of contrasts. There were fascinating books in the house and I loved wandering through the woods and fields thinking about life and I had a great inner drive to explore and create.  I had a passion for science and there was an unlimited supply of equipment and materials which enabled me to make all kinds of dangerous experiments and build and set off explosions.  The village policeman regularly visited the house to tell me off.

From as far back as I can remember I often heard music within me. Yet nobody in my family had ever played a musical instrument and there weren’t any in the house. Around the age of eleven I was finally lent a guitar by a distant relative. Playing came naturally and I started to develop my own music instinctively. I felt that making music gave life meaning on every level and I was able to use creativity and imagination to transmute reality.

I had to get a job in my older brother Lou’s garage to save up and buy my own guitars and some other instruments. After trying the piano, saxophone, flute and violin I decided to devote myself solely to the guitar. I chose it because it was an intriguing and alluring icon and I was utterly certain that it was my destiny. And it was possible to play both chords and harmony as well as single lines with expressive and varied sounds and textures. I played steel string acoustic, classical and electric guitars. There were never any guitar lessons and I didn’t know anybody who played seriously so I remained completely self taught. Fortunately my older brother Mick was interested in music and he owned a large and inspiring record collection. He was encouraging and occasionally took me to hear live music.

At home I often practised for many hours with great emotional intensity. As my own music developed it didn’t seem to interest or entertain anyone and my family’s reaction ranged from utter indifference to open hostility. I went to Maidstone Grammar School and I loathed the atmosphere and the hidebound conservative teachers. The guitar was not viewed as a serious instrument and improvisation was the ultimate heresy. By this time I had become a rebel and at 14 I decided to run away to Sussex, where I worked on a farm. I slept in an old barn and one night I had a vision of the future and saw things which would happen later on in my life.

My father had always been fanatically opposed to my music for some reason and when I returned home I found that all my musical instruments and many of my possessions had been burnt at the end of the garden. I always remember finding the metal parts in the ashes. There is no doubt that this helped to forge an intense determination and I went back to the garage at every spare moment to save up and buy another guitar.

My development was not based on copying guitar styles and right from the beginning I started to experiment and create my own music. I did have a friend at school who was a drummer and we played together yet never managed to find a bass player!   I longed to leave school and felt that my environment was a cultural wasteland and there was a profound sense of alienation. Yet there were many good things, including my girlfriend of the time.  And I was able to go to libraries to read about music and the arts and I loved the rich detail in the Kent landscapes surrounding my village and this became part of my musical inspiration. And I was strongly drawn to Celtic mythology, English folklore and ancient history and I sensed that this was part of my own lost cultural heritage. These perceptions were profound and I knew that my music was there to magically restore lost worlds.

At 16 I was becoming independent enough to take control of my life. My family removed my guitars in order to make me concentrate on my ‘O’ levels and my reaction was to throw the exam papers on the floor and walk out of school. My only regret was that I hadn’t been able to do this at the age of 12. I felt a huge sense of relief, probably like someone being released from prison and I shattered nearly all my links socially with my own age group.  When I managed to get my guitars back, I worked with ferocious intensity and total dedication, and often played for over ten hours a day. Technically I progressed very quickly, and I planned to get away from my limiting surroundings and visit London where I knew that I would be able to play with serious musicians. In London I met the saxophonist John Surman and by coincidence it turned out that he had moved to Kent. He invited me over to his house on a number of occasions to listen to music and play with him. This was inspiring and made me feel that I’d entered a new world. After working for a few months on a farm I moved to London where I was able to seek out and listen to interesting and adventurous music. I fervently assimilated the atmosphere of the city which acted as a catalyst on many levels. But it was difficult to get by and and I found myself washing dishes in the House of Commons!

So I had to return to Kent and I planned to save up some money, get a good quality guitar and pass my driving test and buy a car. I worked with my brother Mick as a woodcutter. This is a great job if you want to die under a falling tree, accidentally cut your leg off with a chainsaw, go deaf or develop uncontrollably shaking hands. Ideal for a young musician.  So I worked in the woods and orchards of Kent for a year cutting down trees and I was paid by the ton to produce logs for a paper mill. This was physically tough and as a nature lover I found this type of work distressing. After this I started doing jobs in factories and on building sites.

In order to develop at this time I looked at musical ideas from a wide range of sources and I was mainly interested in jazz and classical music. Even at this age I was already wondering if it was going to be possible to fit in with a defined field or genre professionally. At the age of 18 I was finally able to leave home for the last time and move to London to concentrate on playing full time. And I had to leave in order to detach myself from the internecine emotional warfare which dominated the relationships between all the members of my family. Fortunately by this time I got on well with both of my parents. I often tried to bring some positive perceptions and humour into their lives. They were much older than me, and had lived through some difficult times. My mother was kind to me and I felt sorry for her because she suffered from ill health. My father, who was an exceptional person with many interests designed and built me an amplifier and metronome which I took with me and used for many years. He charged me for them of course.
They are long gone now-my father died when I was 21.

MIDDLE PERIOD

I’ve had a mercurial relationship with the music profession so rather than telling my life story and writing down some kind of musical CV, I’ve decided to ‘fast forward’ through this period. For a number of years I lived in Ealing in west London. The musicians I met are largely irrelevant in terms of my music today, yet there were important people such as Bob Cornford, a really great musician who had a tremendously positive effect on my life. And I played and performed with some interesting and talented people.

Playing with John Stevens

I was 24

At this stage of my life I often felt that I wasn’t able to express myself and convey the things I wanted to say as an artist. Although it was gratifying to be regarded as as an exceptional talent, I walked away from many playing situations and opportunities. There is no doubt that I felt out of kilter with the times and as well as my own generation. Nevertheless many of the key elements that form the the core of my musical identity were conceptualized during these years and in my early twenties I started to find my own voice as a composer. I rarely played solo. Normally I performed in duos or small group lineups. I led my own trio now and again but I found it difficult to come to terms with the music business and I was hopeless at promoting myself or hustling for work. Amazingly, I didn’t release any recordings as a leader. After briefly playing commercial music to make a living I decided instead to undertake some private guitar tuition to bring in some money. I enjoyed this and it helped the process of developing my own approaches to technique improvisation and harmony. Some of the people who came to see me in Ealing became life long friends.

Living in the city heightened my feelings for the countryside. I explored all parts of Britain and many places became special to me and often bound up with my interest in folklore, mythology and history. I dreamed of escaping from London and at the age of 28 I moved to a remote part of Oxfordshire for four years. While there I spent some time based in Berlin. Living on the edge of the Cotswolds was uplifting and for the first time I came across strands of traditional folk music closely connected with the area I was living in. This helped me to think deeply about my identity as an English artist with a universal outlook and a wide range of unusual influences. Around this time I also became interested in playing on a classical guitar and I had some instruments built for me by Christopher Dean who had his workshop nearby.

Not long after returning to London I withdrew from performing. Just after this I was approached to write The Complete Guitarist.  And at this time I met the maker Russell Fong and took the first steps towards having a special instrument built. The first round shouldered cutaway guitar was made in his atmospheric workshop in Southwark overlooking the Thames. The next few years brought many changes and I totally exiled myself from the music scene. I moved to many different places and spent a year living in downtown New York between Greenwich Village and SoHo. I spent a small amount of time acting as a consultant to Christie’s advising on things such as the sale of Charlie Parker’s saxophone and other material owned by Chan Parker to raise money for her medical costs and I put together Eric Clapton’s guitar event in New York in 1999, writing the catalogue and fronting the sale worldwide to raise money for the Crossroads drug rehab centre in Antigua. In 1999  I moved to a very special magical place in Sussex and a premonition was fulfilled. By this time I’d largely written a book called Guitar Music History Players and this came out in 2000. This period felt like the end of an interlude where I had almost lived a lie and become somebody else for nearly ten years. The matter which was hugely important was that my original vision and feelings about my real destiny as an artist and musician started to return in full flood. I saw my path forward with great clarity.

RENAISSANCE

Powerful inner forces brought me back to playing the guitar as my sole activity. I saw that my real abilities as a player and composer had remained hidden from the world and were as yet unfulfilled. By this stage of my life a deep and long lasting synthesis of irreconcilable musical influences and philosophies had melded together. Dreamlike pastoral and gritty sosphicticated urban elements started to coalesce. I now wanted to further develop my own linear harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary for open creativity and composition in ways which transcended genres and styles. By now I had unique areas of knowledge and experience and this made a crucial difference to my sense of perspective.

From the beginning of 2001, I gave up virtually everything which got in the way of practising full time and followed the ideas and concepts I had developed over many years with a relentless dedication. I had always loved the sound of nylon string acoustic guitars and I decided to concentrate solely on playing this type of instrument. It greatly helped that I came across the guitar maker David Whiteman at this time. I’d tried to make the transition from steel string acoustic and electric guitars before and in order to make it work this time I slowed my playing right down, altered my technique and rhythmic approach and rethought all areas of my playing. This required many hours of intensive practice and and I worked virtually every day, averaging at least 25 days in each month. I also looked through and partially rewrote many of my compositions and wrote new pieces. In 2002 I started working on recording my music the in Cowshed studio in London with the sound engineer Joe Leach. I brought in bass player Paul Morgan and drummer Mark Fletcher and then at a later stage the harpist Rhodri Davies.

During this long period only three things impinged upon this activity and they took up a few weeks of my time – I revamped The Complete Guitarist in 2003, and oversaw a spin off title from my existing books called Eyewitness Guitar. And Paul McCartney asked me to work in his studio in Sussex in early 2005 and create an official archive of all his instruments and a great deal of The Beatles material with their use on recordings.

After years of work on my playing locked away in the house in Sussex, I returned to performing and my group played a pilot series of concerts in 2008 and they were a success.