I’ve always wanted to get back to performing live in some form or other. I started out as a guitarist playing in bands from the age of about 14-15. Writing music has always been my main ambition and, as time went by, that became more and more important to me. Later on I found it difficult to stay in a band for some reason or other for any length of time.

By 1972 the last (and best) band I was in had split and I started playing acoustic guitar more and more. I continued to write songs and did some solo gigs, but I took on simple day jobs in order to sustain a home and enable me to continue writing. I worked during the day and wrote into the night. Then, in 1975 my hermitage was interrupted by an offer to work for two weeks as guitar roadie for Genesis. I jumped at the chance. Three years later I was still working for them when I was asked to open 5 Genesis shows at Pine Knob in Detroit, Meriweather Post Pavillion near D.C., and Saratoga Springs in New York. I had arrived!

The next thing I knew it was 2003 and, though I stilled worked for Genesis, I had not done a gig in very near 25 years. The fruition of the desire to perform looked all the further away because, over the years, I had become a “recording artist”. Now I have to say, I love writing songs and recording them,.. I really do. But I was aware that I couldn’t actually play my own songs so I had a dilemma. A friend Russell Hastings was very encouraging, nonetheless. Russell does a very good tribute to Paul Weller and he asked me if I would like to join him onstage for a few songs to play second guitar and backing vocals at a gig. Russell saw it as a way to get me back on a stage after all those years without the pressure of playing my own songs, which I couldn’t do at the time anyway.

I did Russell’s gig and loved every second of it. If one listens to my cds one will see why I couldn’t play the songs in that format. They are layered recordings and, much as I love them like that, they are unplayable by a single acoustic guitar. Russell advised that I “strip them back to the chords and main vocal and see if they work”. So that is what I did. I was pleasantly surprised that some songs transcribed very well. I had to lose the long instrumental passages, but as songs they stood up. I began to work them out and that took a while. It was hard work. I had to practice long hours to be able to play the guitar for any length of time and singing the melodies at the same time took practice. I had not had to do that before. Of course my writing was immediately affected in a very positive sense.

Then in April I met, by chance, Sean. He happened to be standing next to a friend while I was telling him how I was looking for a place to play. Sean mentioned that he was doing a charity gig in a few weeks time in a tea rooms on the Hog’s Back near Guildford, and that I could perform at that if I wished. I agreed to do 20 minutes. I didn’t have twenty minutes of my own songs to play at the time so I figured out a few tunes by Paul Simon, James Taylor, The Beatles, etc. in order to fill out the time and soften the blow of my material for the audience.

The Big Gig, as it is now known, takes place every 3-4 months. We will be doing our fifth in March, 2004.

In October, 2003 The Musical Box, an excellent Genesis tribute band, asked me if I would open for them at the Birmingham Hippodrome at the end of the month, only two weeks away.. I had been of some assistence to them in staging their reincarnation of The Lamb Tour the year previous. By this time I had the material to do and I thoroughly enjoyed the gig. I felt at home on a theatre stage. Two weeks later they asked me to go to Montreal to open for them at the Montreal Spectrum on two successive nights. Those three gigs gave me a total audience of around three thousand people in one month. That was beyond my wildest dreams. I now hope to do more. I’ve prepared the material and I’m writing more all the time. On Friday, 12 December I did my fourth Big Gig and can’t wait for the next chance to perform!