Best to start at the beginning I guess! I was born down in London and moved with my family at a very young age up to Edinburgh where I was brought up.


Neither my mum nor dad were musicians in the formal sense, neither played instruments or studied music in any way, though my sister did and that was an example I keenly followed.


But I do remember being surrounded by mu- sic from a very young age. Te music I heard varied from pop to folk and classical to jazz. But perhaps crucially I also remember my family singing regularly, all kinds of songs, but always with a strong emphasis on the music that I guess we might broadly describe now as ‘roots’. More oſten than not, whether blues, Dylan, or traditional Scottish ballads and lullabies, I was sung stories. And as my own musical taste began to expand and deve- lop one very simple but probing and regular question that came from parents stuck with me: ‘what’s the song about, what’s its story’?


I started playing music at a young age, pi- cking up the piano first at four years old and playing several other instruments along the way before finally settling on the combination of guitar and voice that now make up my performances. Generally speaking, I played classical music. But despite being absorbed by many of the pieces of music I played I remember feeling straight-jacketed by the rigid and doctrinaire approach and method of orthodox classical music teaching. When, while playing one of Chopin’s Nocturnes at school, I slipped in a blues note into one passage causing my teacher to fall off his


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