Early Years

​

I was a lively child. They would say “oh he is very naughty, a bit wild, but clearly quite intelligent”

I was lonely at times, being the older sibling with a gap of 5 years. Yes and I did misbehave in school, a combination of attention seeking and hyperactivity and under stimulation!

Conditions that we label today generally went unacknowledged then.

 

Also from an early age I had an innate curiosity of how things were put together and so I would enjoy taking things apart to see how something was made and usually I managed to reconstruct them. Like my parents' old upright Hoover!

 

Nowadays, I have transitioned that pastime into song writing.

​​

My mother was an excellent artist and I followed her in being good at with drawing, painting and handicrafts. But I was not a stand-out natural artist and didn’t devote the necessary time to perfecting my craft. At same time I was a good all-rounder in academic subjects. So, my academic ability outshone my artistic talents and sadly I did not take the more romantic Art School route - like so many great British music icons of the 60s/ 70s/ 80s. 

 

Like so many who grew up in post war austere suburbia, from an early ageI used to to escape into stories as sources of creative stimulation: books and movies, in particular. 

 

Somewhat later around 9 or 10, I began to be inspired and enlivened by music. I remember travelling on a red bus through outwardly boring suburban London and feeling so alive singing a new pop tune.

And yes there was creative muse burning inside me that wanted to express how I felt about the world even from a young age.

 

I started writing lyrics at about 15/16 And although by 16 I was mainly specialising in sciences at school I handed my lyrics in to the Head of English at my school to get his feedback. I made a real effort using my best handwriting which was normally terrible. After some weeks of not hearing back I cornered him in the school library. Sad to say he had not been impressed and they were handed back without additional comment. 

 

At 18, I went to University in Norfolk, UK to study Biological Sciences. Why Biology?  Because of some romantic dream about working with wildlife and swimming with the fishes in the topical seas. But it turned out I the syllabus was more focused on  studying cell and chemical equations which I found absolute torture. I was lucky enough that the University let me change after 2 terms.

 

So I carried on playing guitar combined with some writing but focused my university on a different route studying Art History, Sociology, Anthropology. This really did start to give me a different insight on the way the world was constructed and has developed.