After the usual school bands thing my first ‘real’ band hit the road in 1977 playing country music in the pubs and clubs, mostly in South Yorkshire where country music always had a great following. My band mates, Ani (who would eventually marry me, bless her) and Gren, used to travel in a Cortina estate with Ani sat on a cushion on the handbrake!


As I’d learned to play the bass shortly after getting a guitar meant I was lucky enough to be in one band or another from those early days in the pubs and clubs right up to the late 1990s. Ani continued to play in a number of outfits and even managed to produce two beautiful children. She’s always been great at multi-tasking! We played, rock and roll, country, blues, our own ‘pop’ material and I even played in a band with a singer (who was the also the drummer) who’d been in big bands. It was interesting doing Sinatra numbers with guitar, bass and drums.


In 1989 I was asked if I’d like to play guitar with a


couple of guys who I’d worked with before. Drummer Andy Taylor had been in a few bands with me and I’d met bassist Nick Downes at the Woolpack in Otley. The Woolpack, which is now an arts centre, was the collective home of all Otley musicians. Pete Knights was the landlord and I’d know Pete all my life as he lived on our street. His band, Peter and the Wolves, were one of a few ‘nearly famous’ bands all fired up by the Merseybeat explosion in the 60s. The ‘Woolly’ had live music on several nights a week; ahead of its time actually and many years before ‘open mic’.


With Nick and Andy and vocalist Phil Stanway we became The Above Average Weight Band and now, twenty three years later, we are still playing. We were incredibly lucky to be able to use the tag ‘the hardest working band in showbiz’; in Yorkshire at least. It’s was a ‘golden time’ for bands and we regularly did stints of fourteen or more gigs, unheard of these days for pub bands.


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