When I was but a tiny, tiny child........

I was born in the election weathervane constituency of Basildon in Essex in 1955. As with so many of my working class contemporaries in the mid 1960's, music became vital to me with the arrival off the coast of the UK of exciting and seemingly dangerous ship-based pirate radio stations like Caroline and London. Their output appeared to stand in deep and unflattering contrast to the received pronunciation of folk songs on BBC children's programmes and stuffy bits of dead classical music that we were occasionally, mortifyingly subjected to at school.

The world at the time had the appearance of having divided on class lines, and our lot appeared to be winning.

At the age of 11, I passed an exam and was sent - alone from my junior school - to a boys-only grammar school. Where the posh kids went. Music lessons were a grotesque conflation of physical abuse, favouritism, folk song and Schubert lieder. Lifeless, irrelevant and rebarbative.

Not a hint of anything that used electricity. Popular music did not exist. Well, apart from the Schubert lieder of course.

Perhaps we weren't winning after all.

It was whilst at grammar school, however, that I was drawn into the burgeoning 'underground' music scene by the impact of a record I heard called 'Volume Two', by the Soft Machine. It was 1969. I went out and bought a copy of the album. I played it until the grooves wore out, and decided that music like that was what I wanted to do. Somehow.

My brother was learning to play the pianoforte at the time with a venerable LRCM, a lady who shared a house with 'mother', an even more elderly lady. So I signed up too.

I quickly surmised that my new teacher of pianoforte and music theory was not overly familiar with the music of the Soft Machine. For a year I dutifully took a pair of carpet slippers to her house and, in her porch, exchanged my world for hers in the deeply symbolic and deeply anguishing act of shedding my street shoes for carpet slippers, before entering her house.

I never saw 'mother', who remained mysteriously hidden behind a frosted glass window that let into the back room of the house. Every so often the piano teacher would stiffen, cock her head towards the frosted glass, raise a hand to demand silence and then hurry out of the room with a quiet 'mother's calling me'. I never heard a thing - but I had seen 'Psycho'......

We never did get round to the Soft Machine.

'Third', the next Soft Machine album, gave me my instrument. 'Third' heavily featured the band's new member, Elton Dean, on saxophone. I played the new album until the grooves wore out, and decided that music like that was what I wanted to do on the saxophone. Somehow.

My parents could not afford a saxophone and the nearest thing to it available at school was the excruciatingly uncool clarinet. Metaphorical carpet slippers all over again, but I signed up for lessons anyway. Though I couldn't stand playing the clarinet, I found the school clarinet teacher amiable.

I bashed unmoved through stuff on the unloved clarinet until I discovered some transcriptions of the Bach cello suites, which I played until my reeds wore out.

By now I was also scouring the pages of 'Melody Maker' each week for reviews and listings of the most obscure and avant-garde musics available. I made my way to gigs in dark clubs or in the upstairs rooms of obscure south London pubs to watch and hear key British and American jazz and free improv musicians play.

Only once did the clarinet teacher ever ask me what I wanted to do on the clarinet. I was so shocked and embarrassed that I blurted out 'jazz', which, it turned out, was rather too wide a label.

To my horror, he expressed great enthusiasm for 'jazz', and told me that he had once depped in a trad jazz band. Whatever that was. To compound the teeth shattering embarrassment of the moment he proceeded to bash out something entirely unintelligible on the piano and invited me to improvise over the top. Was this jazz? What was I supposed to do with it?

So I squeaked. For what seemed like several lifetimes, I squeaked tonelessly over what I now assume must have been a blues progression. And then we stopped, and carried on with another morceau of Mozart.

Leaving clarinet lessons marked the end of my 'formal' musical training. I tooled up with a bass clarinet and soprano sax (thank you, John Surman!) and launched myself at the 20th century..........

......since which time the bands, aliases & projects have included: Red Square, The Duffs, B So glObal, Omlo Vent, Miramar, A Single Field, Drift, and, currently, the Colins of Paradise  & Comus (both with Bobbie Watson).

Those key spinning discs so far;

YEAR | BAND | ALBUM | LABEL
1976 | Red Square | Paramusic | Bang! Records
1977 | Red Square | Circuitry | Bang! Records
1988 | The Duffs | Rebel Without A Fridge | Repeater Discs
1993 | B So glObal | B So glObal | Fo Fum Records
1995 | Omlo Vent | Mild Landing | Chillum
1996 | B So glObal | The World Is Covered In Windows | Chillum
1997 | Miramar | Test Tunes | Emergency Broadcast Records
2004 | Drift | Glow | Fo Fum Records
2008 | Red Square | Thirty Three | FMR

I have been responsible throughout these bands and albums for some combination or another of the following: saxes, bass clarinet, piano, keyboards, bass, vibraphone, synthesizer, tenor recorder, flute, percussion, toys, composing, programming, mixing & production.

PS - In 1972 I found a copy of "First Utterance" in a record rack in Boots in Southend-on-Sea. Repelled by the cover, I put it back again and bought something else instead.

Quite possibly the first Black Sabbath album........

I can't believe I've just told you that.