I am a 52 year old songwriter and musician. My main instrument is a guitar shaped bouzouki. It superseded my guitar playing about five years ago although I still play a lot of guitar. I released an album of my own compositions earlier this year called Let The Feast Begin. How did I get here? I can describe the musical journey to date but I have no idea how it will end.
I grew up in Belfast in the 1960s and 70s. There always seemed to be music in the house. There were jazz and blues albums. Sgt Pepper by the Beatles was played frequently. There were Dylan EPs which intrigued me. One of my favourites though was a recording of ‘Portland Town’ by the Belfast Gypsies. Here was electric folk music at its very best. This clear and powerful recording still resonates with me. Many years later I got to know one of the musicians from the Belfast Gypsies. I wrote a song about this formative period called ‘Always Summer Then’.
I started playing guitar at 13. At 14 I began classical lessons. My teacher was a wonderful old man whose house was a shipwreck of musical instruments. He was a true teacher and I never got to thank him properly. The classical finger picking style he taught me stayed with me and a gear change into folk style guitar or on to bouzouki works well. From 15 to 17 I played in a rock band. We did well. Two of us could write songs. We won a talent competition and had a bit of a following. But young, fragile egos got in the way just as doors were opening. It wasn’t to be.
In my twenties I rarely played in public but I wrote some songs and improvised. There were opportunities to play in cover bands which I didn’t take. I preferred to improvise or compose chord progressions with plenty of fingerpicking runs. Sometimes I would take an Irish folk tune and lean it towards a classical guitar style. By the age of 30 I was really into folk music. I liked Woody Guthrie’s rolling bass guitar style. It evoked the hobo lifestyle of hitching lifts in trucks. I developed my own version of Woody’s
guitar style with fulsome picking and thumbing of the bass strings. A friend invited me to Brussels to play a small concert featuring Woody Guthrie songs. It went well and later I developed this show into a narrative of Woody’s life and performed it at the Belfast Festival at Queen’s along with other musicians.
From the age of 28 to 50 I worked as an English teacher. I sometimes brought the guitar into the classroom and used it to interpret poems.
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