Music Biography

My earliest musical memories are of the traditional jazz albums that my folks used to play and I spent hours listening to Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like Carousal and South Pacific, which I still love to this day. I used to sing along to all the songs and spent hours gazing at the wonderful gatefold album covers. Much of my childhood was spent with my Grandmother who came originally from Sussex and she would sing songs that she'd learnt as a girl to me. But I think my greatest influence in my early years was a very eccentric music teacher. She was heavily into Maypoles, Morris Dancing, folk singing and the suchlike. She also introduced me to the music of Delius, Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and organised the most exciting visits to concerts & music colleges.

Me age 14	Me with my first guitar

I was about twelve when I begged my mother to buy me a guitar and I started to accompany myself with early Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and English folksongs and struggled to learn fingerpicking. I loved playing the guitar from the start; it has always been my first choice of accompaniment. My folks decided to leave London and move to Lincolnshire where I started going to the local folk club and hanging around music clubs, scout huts and the such like. One day one of the kids at school brought in an album they thought I might like to hear. It was called Leige and Leif. I listened to it and musically I knew where I wanted to go.

Eventually I fell in with a set of local reprobates and we formed a folk rock band Ragged Heroes. We had a lot of fun, we drank far too much probably, and we made one recording The Ragged Heroes Album. I think the band had fallen apart by the time it was released, and there were so few copies pressed that they're probably worth a small fortune to a collector!!

Ragged Heroes

Next I joined another band with some of the fallout from Heroes and we named ourselves after an expression used by Percy Grainger, the composer and collector of Lincolnshire folk song. By this time I'd become a real Grainger fan and was reading everything I could about him and his work. BEE never actually released any recordings although we spent a lot of time fooling round with material in the studio, indeed the version of Sir Hugh of Lincoln which features on Movers and Shakers is a direct descendant of the song, which BEE sired.

Percy and I

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