early promise - late flower

This started out as a chronology, then became a bit of a conversation with myself over why I'd taken so long to make a first album, and about how my journey reflects a bigger picture of my generation - a generation without a name until Jonathon Pontell coined the phrase: Generation Jones.

I grew up in Liverpool in the early sixties, a mile or so from The Beatles. My dad was the organist and choirmaster of a local church, just up from Penny Lane. I was surrounded by music, old and new. Many truths were colliding in me...

I have never forgotten that the greatest pop music is concise and to the point. I aspire to this when I compose even though the idiom is different.

This was the time of great pop music ... She Loves You was on the radio. Naturally I wanted a guitar so a scaled down instrument was found for me when I was seven years old. At the same time my father taught me the piano, and had me singing in the church choir. I took a reasonable interest in the piano but I wasn't so keen on the choir.

In such an environment I heard a lot of polyphonic art music while young, especially J.S. Bach for which I am profoundly grateful. Even if I didn't really get it at the time, it did filter in eventually. I remember singing Fauré's Requiem. I now love Fauré's elliptical harmonies ... the crafty old bugger.

Meanwhile I explored the guitar untutored. Funny thing is, even though I bought lots of 45 rpm singles, I can't recall ever trying or even wanting to play pop music on the guitar at that time. What I do remember is just picking out different notes... and letting them ring on and across each other, and of being beguiled by a sense of mystery. I connect with that sound today just as I did then.

Eventually, at about the age of eleven I did get guitar lessons for two or three years from a local guitar pro George Dickinson. Upon meeting him my first impression was that I'd never seen such an intense shade of yellow, especially on somebody's teeth, but he was a gentle man who helped and encouraged me. Years later I wondered where he was. I never did get to go back and say thanks.

My folks always tried to me move along and they presented me with a Django Reinhardt Anthology roundabout this time. It was new to me, and I went at it. Can't say I ever really liked that music, but it gave me something to chew on.

Early teens and I got the blues ... just like all those other middle class white boys. They came Texan style, and rockin' courtesy of Johnny Winter. I was on the front row when Johnny Winter And (Johnny with Rick Derringer) stormed into Liverpool. What a band!

My first amplifier was an electric guitar overloading the input stage of an old Grundig reel to reel tape recorder, which was a bit of a thrill to put it mildly.

It was about this time that Mark Ramsden, a schoolfriend stricken with premature worldliness, introduced me to jazz, and anger. We weren't sure what it was we were angry about (which made us even angrier) but by God we were going to let everyone know about it. So now there was jazz, moving alongside the other musical threads. I also heard Indian classical music for the first time which connected at once.

Some time in the previous year I had turned down a chance to see Lifetime, a group unknown to me then. That would have been my first chance to hear John McLaughlin. So there was little to prepare me for The Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the release of Inner mounting Flame. Being then 16 years old and eager for a new horizon, I was dazzled by this shooting star of a band. The music was utterly uplifting.

After GCE O level exams I moved school to join a specially developed A level music course. It was bizzarrely situated... at the Mabel Fletcher cookery and nursery-nursing college, but it had a strong curriculum, and good tutors. One of the requirements was new to me ... classical guitar study. Piano was also mandatory, which I'd let lapse the past few years. I found out the hard way about playing piano with guitar fingernails when they got torn off between the keys.

I will never forget hearing Bartok and Stravinsky for the first time. I wish it had happened sooner. Ever since then I have listened avidly to Western art music ... to me it is incomparably rich.

Alongside this I studied sociology in a one-on-one class, with a jazz loving tutor. He gave me room to breathe and think for myself. I repaid him by not turning up for the exam. Strange, because I'd done more than enough homework on this subject : it interested me. I still don't know why I didn't show up. I have a poor long-term memory but I remember myself as a very shy intense young man ... though maybe as in the Woody Allen phrase "precociously shy".

Following A levels I wasn't sure whether to try for a 'serious' music degree. Without any feeling of certainty I ended up following schoolmate Mark to the new jazz course at Leeds College of Music in 1973. It came as a surprise when in the improvisation class they handed out books of preset patterns to play over II-V-I sequences and so on. I wasn't big on changes anyway. It seemed mundane to bring the mystery down to patterns. Two years later I was asked to leave before the course ended, and I gladly did so.

Tough job though teaching jazz (or some creative method) to someone as arrogant as I was. By then I was fast and I knew it. And fast was so important to me. I thought I'd got John McLaughlin down. But I suppose my arrogance was sincere as I'd worked hard on my own. Amongst other things, I had transcribed and re-recorded my own version of McLaughlins' My Goals Beyond album after it came out, in my mid-teens.

I met a lot players in Leeds and got out and about playing but it was my last year at college that I first saw Gary Husband, when he was just 14 or 15 years old and still at school. I heard him at backing a visiting London jazz name. Maybe he thought I wanted to hit on him, cause I stared at him throughout the gig. I didn't care ... this was fate!

Listening to him I was immediately struck by his elemental force. He possessed great clarity, but with a fluidity that transcended precision. Precision is learnable, but when he played he was never afraid to go back to a place where the pitfalls of the mechanical and habitual can be avoided. Ever since he has been a great friend and inspiration.

Right away we formed a band, and I had my hair crew-cut like his - out of solidarity ....there may also have been some wearing of all white clothes, and beatific smiles on my part. I was young.

That band was Girl By The Stream. We didn't do many gigs. One was a concert at Gary's school. We played my transcriptions of Mahavishnu Orchestra pieces, like Dream ; Noonward Race ; Be Happy ; together with some of our own early stuff. I seem to remember running out of material, and the sax player running out of the gig, while the audience was still present. To fill out the set we had to make a sudden change to rock'n'roll standards.

So there I was, just going pro, but in Britain all aesthetic aspiration was suddenly declared verboten. Punk, the fashion scam perpetrated on the musical underclass, was exploited by the British media. It had practically no redeeming factors, but more or less overnight, with that crucial media connivance, it cut the oxygen supply to anything that didn't conform to the new orthodoxy. It was philistinism, but Great British philistinism. Something post Empire - in which we still led the world, and could be proud of God dammit (...)

During the mid sixties to mid seventies, rock, blues and jazz, together with Eastern music, had been colliding and developing. Much of this was output by a vital and healthy record industry ... it filled the horizon. This was the golden age that gilded my youthful years, but now it had come to this ... talk about missing the boat !

For me this this cultural peak would cast a long shadow, as it did for many others too. Now I know ... we would only watch from the sidelines, and not be major players in that creative cycle.

We were just a bit too young ... we were Generation Jones.

...so what kept you ?

So right after college I turned pro. Those early years were spent in local Mecca bands, summer seasons, cabaret & TV sessions. I moved down to London in 1977. Pretty soon I hit the big time - with the Joe Loss Orchestra - playing a metronomic 4 to the bar rhythm for some very old dance music. If I departed from that formula he would quickly turn from facing the audience and begin robotically indicating what I should be doing. It was the birth of air guitar...

1978-80 : Drowning Not Waving ... Organist Hugh John & myself formed a band out of the ashes of GLAA winners Swift. We were a forward thinking band with 20th century classical influences as well as rock & jazz. There were two incarnations : firstly, Hugh, myself, John McCullough on bass and Brendan O'Neil on kit. Later on Lyn Dobson (Soft Machine) joined on saxes/flute. Towards the end Paul Rogers came in on on string bass. I wrote a couple of things for the group but Hugh was the main composer and hustler.

For me the best thing was the partnership with Hugh. I admired his different way of coming at it all possibly because he'd been a late starter musically and was technically limited, but he possessed refined sensibilities, and often transcended his technical limits. His instinct within band improvisation was a sort of lateral but sympathetic underscoring. It was quite new to me, and discreetly persuasive ... definitely a counterpoint to my get out of the way, I'm coming through approach. It's a shame this band was never properly recorded. We did many gigs and some broadcasts in Britain. It lasted a couple of years, but in Punk Group-Think Britain it was a struggle to get enough work.

There was however a reasonably healthy scene of improvising bands, both live and in rehearsal studios: 1979-80 : John Stevens Group with Nick Stephens on bass. Many gigs with these pioneers on the free scene. I liked Nick & John. We played some uncompromising stuff, and they were good to hang out with to.

At the same time Gary and I were active getting bass players along to rehearsal studios or church halls ... to just have a blow, or try out compositional ideas. This was just after Jaco Pastorius came to prominence, and bass guitarists were often found to be simpering on the fingerboard. It was all hugely exascerbated by the missing frets. Anyway itseemed like some mass Julie Andrews alter-ego had taken over as the hills were alive ... with the sound of bass guitar tunes. What mattered was that it was a problem finding someone to fulfill the instruments primary function. We needed someone to glue our all-out style together. The man that did that was Paul Carmichael, and really quite heroically... especially on a studio blow that we put together at Woodcray Farm in 1980, later released as the cd What It Is. I definitely recommend checking that out on the Listen & Buy page. Planet Carmichael is a strange place ... canny and very musical.

I had first heard Allan Holdsworth circa 1970 on English jazz radio broadcasts playing with the great Pat Smythe. I thought "what the f___ is that ? I have no idea how he is doing that. Even worse ... I like it. By 1980 Allan seemed to have formed his own complete musical world.

In 1979 Gary met Allan and invited him down to a local church hall to blow with us. I had some stuff together so I was up for it. Though I was rough edged, he was gracious and very encouraging to me. My respect for him his undiminished to this day. Thank you Allan.

Allan formed the band IOU with Gary and Paul Carmichael. It was a showcase for his striking new chordal style, set in very strong personal compositions. His solos weren't bad either. Late in 1980 I joined Allan & Gary on a short Scottish tour as an improvising group under the name Handlebars.

1981-83 : Crunch time arrived ... I had to make some money. I left town with the huge debut tour of Jesus Christ Superstar, which lasted nearly two years. It was an interesting time socially ... something of a sentimental education for me. I met keyboard player Kevin Fitzsimmons on this, who became a close friend. He's a rare musician of the highest quality, and a name that might appear on a future album of mine, so watch this ____ I also met the terrific cellist Frank Schaeffer, who appears on my album Late Flower. I don't recall coming back with any money though .....

In early '81 when I left London on the JCS tour I had a strong idea of who I was, but problems were looming. I was very aware of the extent to which my soloing had come up against its technical limits, developed as it was out of 90% alternate picking, and my hero of the 1970's John McLaughlin. Compositionally I couldn't reconcile the different threads of my musical influences into a fully personal style.

So in late '81/82 this was coming to a head. I started a very intense period of guitar practice as muscle-memory/brain retraining, to try and adapt some of Allans pioneering legato methods. I wasn't in danger of doing a grotesque theft of musical persona that many have done, and are still doing to Allan. I mean I never once set out to try and copy his lines or chordal approach verbatim. But over the next years I was undoubtedly falling under the spell of his wonderful sound... and from the sound comes the playing.

What I wanted was to gain some of the liberating attributes of that technique and use them to expand my precise rhythmically driven picking style, as evolved up to 1981 playing with Gary. Good idea in theory, but I found out this is very hard. I haven't heard anyone achieve what I wanted and I know I haven't done it yet.

1983 : back to London, and freelancing ... and some pretty sparse times too. Through an introduction by Yes engineer Nigel Luby I started playing in a private studio with what was an early, but transitional version of Esquire, the Yes influenced band formed by Nicki Squire and Nigel McLaren. This project was very much on and off at first - at least as far as my involvement went - as they hadn't yet signed to Geffen Records.

1984 : Alice ... a show of some note : the original Genesis guitarist Anthony Phillips wrote a musical, which was set inside a computer. Lots of nice 12 string parts and tuneful stuff. We premiered it at Leeds Playhouse with Kevin Fitzsimmons as Musical Director.

I formed a rehearsal band called The Force Feeding with Larry Dundas, Pete Jacobsen, and Steve Clarke, but realised I wasn't ready. I was very unhappy with myself .... I shelved this project. Over a period of a couple of years the ex. Swift guitarist Larry Dundas kindly gave me technical guidance & access to a multitracker. This enabled me to demo up and develop ideas which I would build upon later. He has a keen and open musical mind so it was always a pleasure to listen to and discuss the music in his large collection.

1986 - 87 : Esquire .... I now joined this post-progressive rock band which was highly produced by Trevor Horn and Chris Squire. It had signed to Geffen Records. They were aiming for a very high standard in the idiom, but I think it's fair to say that what had contained promise and good ideas suffered. The whole project got bogged down in overproduction and ... procrastination. Formed by Nigel McLaren (bass gtr) who I'd known from early London days, and Nikki Squire on vocals (wife of Chris, the Yes bassist) ... together with pianist Charles Olins. They were the core band ... the main writers.
One album was released (Esquire), the single To The Rescue, and one video (on which Gary H. also joined us).
The album cover had black writing on a black background ... and this was before Spinal Tap. Charles is still a good friend, and it was he who eventually introduced me to the TV & Film composing world, in which he's very active.

At this time I lived in a beautiful 16th century house near Windsor by the River Thames with some other theatrical strays.
Early 1988 Gary suggested me for Level 42, so very soon we were whizzing round Israel, South East Asia and Europe on tour.

This didn't work out ... I've got to admit it wasn't really for me musically, and I should've known it, but I'd planned on being there longer than I was!

I was very fit and looking good too (if I say it myself) but this was a very low time musically. What had happened to my musical future ... was it behind me? However my interest in the classical canon really blossomed properly now and I searched and listened to a lot of music, especially Bach and 20th century composers. Importantly for me I discovered Faure properly. So many neglected masterpeices of that unique and refined composer. I took what consolation I could in driving a lovely old Saab 900 around Britain and Germany on yet more theatre tours. And smelling the flowers as I went.

When I returned I recorded a couple of tracks on a sampler cd - for the fledgling label Six Strings and a Plank of Wood that was set up by Les Davidson and Davie Boyle. [my tracks were The Itch and Ache ; Jo ]

1990/91 ... in a new London flat with my talented mate Paul Stacey ( guitarist, producer, actor, chef ... ). I got into co-composing TV music with Charlie Olins. We wrote music for BBC2 ; ESPN and others ... also many jingles. I developed a midi studio and got au fait with the technology, and pretty hip with the sequencing as well. Paul was getting out there and playing, and I was stuck inside doing this TV/jingle work when I could get it, but I did develop my writing to a brief skills.

Jack Bruce Band ; yet again Gary H. connected me to this. A few festivals in Germany & Rumania ... sort of filling in until Gary Moore was free to take over, together with Ginger Baker, for a Cream Mk2. Jack has such musical breadth ... he's one of the big beasts. His voice is amongst my all time favourites, and he's written some beautiful songs.

1993-96 : pretty busy with various freelance & commercial work, but my bread and butter was on the West End scene : I was working on up to nine London shows at a time. In '94 Gary formed a trio for some projected European gigs with Paul Carmichael and myself, but they were aborted when Gary got injured. These pieces that Gary had written would show up in a few projects over the next couple of years, including a trio with Mike Mondesir on bass. Also played Fashion Police on Gary's instructional video ... that video was a typically ambitious affair, but Gary didn't have editorial control and some good things ended up on the cutting room floor ... I'm told I was one of them!

Somehow the long shadows of Allan Holdsworth and John McLaughlin were receding. I could hear the clear water between me and those icons. At last I could venture out and into a recording studio!

During 1996 I developed the ideas which would become the music on my debut album Time And Distance.

© overdown 2003