Musician

I am a pianist and vocalist with a predilection towards Celtic/folk/blues/jazz – not necessarily in that order. I am also a composer and improviser writing and arranging music for singers, bands, churches, and businesses. I perform regularly, both solo and with other musicians. I am available as a freelance musician working in a variety of different environments from jazz clubs to cocktail bars, festivals to conferences, weddings to funerals.

History

My first recollection of music was learning to play the recorder age 5 – I taught myself from observing my elder sister. At around the same time my paternal grandmother (a talented concert pianist in her spare time), allowed me to crash her piano with my fists creating sound effects to the stories I was inventing in my head.

It was my fortunate luck to pass the choral test for a major Cathedral Choir where I worked under one of the last great Choir masters and organists of the post war period – Dr Phillip Marshall. He was inspirational, strict and a disciplinarian expecting a professional response from all the boys working for him. He was also a super master of improvisation – in later years he always told me to ‘play the words’. One of his other great statements was ‘music is about the notes you leave out.’ I developed a love for J.S. Bach, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

As far as my other music teachers were concerned I was a hopeless pupil – I never wanted to play from music but to compose and improvise. I also started developing a taste for heavy rock and pop which certainly didn’t help any classical studies at the time.

I gave up lessons and focussed on a dream to be a rich and famous rock musician – slightly at the wrong time as Punk was in the ascendency and my compatriots considered I was far too old fashioned (I was fourteen at the time).

Nevertheless I joined my first ‘working’ band – Dawntreader – playing covers around the northern club circuit. I did my fare share of British Legion and Liberal Clubs together with a miscellany of working mens clubs. It was a good apprenticeship.

At around this time I became interested in folk music. Two albums my brother possessed led me there – ‘Pleased to meet the King’ by Steeleye Span (1971) and ‘History of Fairport Convention’ (1972) (they of course have continued playing ever since so they were still in their musical childhood when the compilation came out).

When I was twenty I joined a new local Lincolnshire folk rock group – The Ragged Heroes. The band achieved national recognition and a bit of a cult status. The lead singer was a certain Vikki Clayton who has gone on to achieve international success as a solo artist. We played at all the major Folk Festivals including Leeds, Towersey, and Cropredy. The album ‘Annual’ (1983) was recorded in Dave Pegg’s (Fairport Convention) Woodworm Studios with tracks produced by Simon Nicol (Fairport Convention). Some of the tracks are available on YouTube). It is now a collectors album costing way more than we ever received in royalties. I rerecorded one of the tracks, ‘Bushes and Briars’ with Vikki in 1988 for her ‘Lost Lady Found’ album which can be streamed on all the usual players.

I moved to London for work and in my spare time worked arrangements of folk songs in the pop synth 1980’s style. For one of these songs I was introduced to Maart Alcock – a multi instrumentalist who happened to be able to play everything better than I could! 

Maart invited me to join a new band he was setting up – I was to be the pianist because I had ‘a certain sound’. Other members included Kieran Halpin (a top Irish singer/songwriter), Martin Bell (another multi instrumentalist who went on to join The Wonderstuff), and Fergus Feely (The Bully Wee Band, and others). We went into a rehearsal studio for one week and recorded an album the following week. The Band was called The Works – the album was never released. Maart sent the album to Dave Pegg for a listen and was promptly asked to join a reformed Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull as the Keyboard player – I think I know what I would have done in the same situation.

I moved to Kent and became a singing coach. Needing some extra money to live on I also started developing my skills as a cocktail pianist acquiring a taste for Jazz music – a genre I had never really studied before. I wrote two albums of piano music – English Moods Volumes 1 and 2 (the tapes have been lost, nevertheless I still perform some of the music to this day). I ended up joining a new band…

The Hurlimann Brothers led by the inimitable David Blosse (who wrote most of the material) was at the time a seven piece world/jazz/blues band with brass section.The band had a cult following in Kent and one of our regular monthly gigs was at The Pizza Express in Maidstone. We produced one album which we sold as a tape at gigs: ‘A Momentary Lapse’. We have found a tape and it has been re-mastered. The Hurlimann Brothers was the most enjoyable band I have played with to date.

However, all good things come to an end. I left and worked under the title ‘The Friends of Mr Cairo’ finding an assortment of musicians to play as a duo with me in Jazz venues. Amongst the people I worked with was a certain Phil Smith – he had played as one of the saxophone players in The Hurlimann Brothers. I still rate Phil as one of the best sax players and improvisors in the UK. 

I moved to Oxford and set up a small recording studio – Black Coffee Sound Productions. We taught singing, ran music workshops, recorded meditation and coaching tapes, wrote music for businesses, and helped our coachees write and perform their own songs. Occasionally I needed a sax player and Phil duly obliged taking the long trip on his motor bike from Kent to Oxford.

One day we set up in the studio and hit the record button. We improvised a complete concerto in four movements. We mixed it and sent it off to some of the main record companies. The head of Sony Jazz contacted me – he was interested and wanted to know when our next gig was. Unfortunately there weren’t any as we lived too far apart from each other and had too many other commitments. The recordings have been re-mastered and released under the title ‘Propinquity’. I believe this to be one of my best pieces of musical work.

At around the same time I met the internationally renowned Manickan Yogeswaran (Yoga) a Sri Lankan Tamil musician and exponent of Carnatic music. He was the singer used by Jocelyn Pook in the music for the film ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, a performer with ‘The Shout’ (London), and the international world music band ‘Dissident’.

Yoga wanted to record an album for peace in Sri Lanka so we started to record. I wrote four pieces and the album was finally completed in Germany and released as ‘Peace for Paradise’ in 2005. My favourite piece of music from the album is ‘Colours’ which I still occasionally perform solo.

I now live in Wiltshire. There was a gentle lull in my musical activity, however I continued to play and perform. Then in 2014 I went on holiday to Ireland and challenged myself to write a piece of music everyday as a form of diary. The results were recorded and released as an album later that year – ‘Circular Stories’. Then in 2018/19 I recorded the audio version of ‘The Insidious Vine’ with a full music score – 9.5 hours of music. It was the biggest musical project I have ever undertaken and I am more than happy with the results. The text and the music creates something unique which you can’t get from the writing or the music alone.

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Discography

Please get in touch if you have any of the recordings that show missing artwork.

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