Everybody’s Got To Grow Up Sometime

I’m an electrician by trade and worked at this job for most of the 1980’s. Although I made friends then (mostly with music as the commonality) that I still have to this day I felt when I stepped into the workplace that I was in prison, especially when I was on a huge dark, cold building site. All the way through my time as an electrician I put my efforts into writing songs, recording and performing them. My mum passed away when I was 16 and my dad died when I was 21, so I had a lot of conflicting emotions to get off my chest and the creative side of music certainly seemed to help. I wrote a load of songs in the 80’s (92 according to PRS) and, luckily, many of them were recorded (five vinyl albums by The Jasmine Minks were put out on Creation Records) and, amazingly, are still available to listen to today. I also had wonderful people around me to help alleviate the pain. By the 1990’s I was writing less and less music.

 

I qualified in 1995 to teach craft subjects at high school level in London and that seemed to take over a lot of my energies (my own children notwithstanding). My wife, child and I moved to the west coast of Scotland in 1999 and have settled here, adding three more children to our clan since. But somehow music has still been a major part of my life, whether as a fan/listener or, less frequently as writer and performer, and sometimes as musical director of school shows and pantomimes (yes, I was the dame once too!) I love my job as a teacher and put a lot of effort into and gain a lot of satisfaction from it. It has paid me well and allowed me and my family to enjoy a relatively consistent lifestyle.

 

Excluding my family my other love is music. It goes way back to when my mum used to sing hymns to me in bed or play harmonica for me. My sister used to sing the hits of the day to me and send me to sleep with her lovely voice. She had singles by artists such as Donovan and Simon and Garfunkel. She corrected me recently of a memory I attributed to my mother. We were evicted a few times when I was a toddler (my sister remembers it better as she is eight years older than me). I remember being sung to by my mother as we stayed in a friend’s hotel in the same street of the flat we were removed from in Jasmine Terrace. We slept in a wee bed in the boiler room up in the loft of the hotel in-between the rafters. I remember being consoled and being sung the song Groovy Kind of Love. But it was my sister singing as she can remember it very well. At about 10 years of age my sister taught me how to play a picking style on the guitar (a style I still play to this day). I have used music as a salve, as a drug but also as an inspiration to get up and change the world. It’s been a huge part of my life. In my early adult years I would spend my evenings sitting on the sofa, absent-mindedly forming new chord shapes on my guitar. I could sit there for hours and de-stress. This year, for the first time in decades, I have found myself doing the same thing – learning guitar parts from artists such as Bert Jansch and Nick Drake or playing through the Beatles songbook with my youngest daughter while sitting on the sofa. It’s been a good year for me musically (which from experience means that other areas of my life have been less satisfactory).

 

2018 – I sang in my first choir performing Mozart’s Requiem in April. At our performance of the full requiem (40 minutes of a beautiful and sometimes complex interplay of voices and harmonies) we, the choir, were helping each other to reach the right notes while the professional soloists were sublime, young and confident. It took a lot of concentration and a few bum notes but it was the hardest music I’ve ever performed in my life and I’m proud of myself for doing it. Having got the choral bug I was delighted to be asked to join the Lochaber Gaelic Choir. Again it was hard work, the music being in a different language – Gaelic this time, not Latin. But the choir are a great bunch and we did ourselves proud at the Mod in Dunoon in October, coming 4^th in the toughest choral competition. This is the choir I will try to continue to be a part of, hard as it is to learn the songs and the language. There is still The Jasmine Minks too, this year was more for me as a role of producer of wonderful songs by Tom and Wattie which will come out in 2019 (although I have a backlog of dozens of songs which I hope will see the light of day sometime). But more and more I find myself joining the dots of my musical life and I find it impossible to separate them from my actual life.

 

My family are growing up (my youngest is 13 now and my eldest is 22) With that comes joy at seeing them go off and do amazing and heart-warming things but there is also a level of fear and anxiety too as the changes occur and get dealt with in different ways. But all through it, as I have done my whole life, music is the backdrop. May 2019 be a harmonious year for all of you, musically or not!