It all started because I couldn't work out the chords for proper songs. Of course I had a number of songbooks and my exercise book with songs I'd been given by friends. But there were a lot of songs that weren't easily available. It must have been about 1972, when I was 19. I suppose I didn't have a good ear and I wasn't gifted musically. It was hard enough trying to tune a guitar. No digital tuners in 1972. No Guitar Tabs. Life was hard.
I particulary remember trying to work out the chords to some early Eagles song. I just couldn't do it. So I wrote one in what I thought was the style of the Eagles. It was alright too and I'd enjoyed writing it. And it wasn't much like the Eagles. So I wrote a few more. Some were better than others, but I did enjoy the process.
A few years after that I started playing with Bob Clark - a tall American who was doing Arabic and Russian at Leeds. He was about 10 - 12 years older than me. I'd met him through Martin Taylor, my friend and future brother-in-law, who was also doing Arabic. Bob had a Martin guitar (D28 I think) and a good reel to reel tape recorder. He could also sing in harmony. Bob lived in Micklethwaite, a small village outside my home town of Bingley. I don't think we ever played songs by other people, we just wrote our own songs and recorded them on his reel to reel. He wrote his songs and I wrote my songs. Then we tinkered with them. I suppose over a year or so we wrote about 10 songs.
By 1977 I was married to Michele and we had moved to Lancaster. Michele and I played with Tony Ryden for a while. He was a very good guitarist and singer. About the same time I played with Alan Armstrong, a friend and colleague at school (St Cuthbert Mayne High School). We concentrated on writing silly, cheeky songs about other teachers and performed them in front of the students. They loved them. Fame and stardom at last.
In the early 1990s I started playing and writing with Richard Varey. Thursday nights - drinking, talking, writing and singing. We're still at it. Richard taught me the importance of the words. I think up to that point the words of my songs had largely been about being inoffensive. Soft rhymes and the sound of the words mattered more than what was being said. Richard taught me that a song can say something. The lyrics matter.
