“I was born in Gateshead which is over the river from Newcastle in England. Technically I’m a Geordie, although when I was 12 months old we moved to Blackhall Colliery where we stayed until I left school at 18. It was a mining village but the pit closed when I was 7.
My father was the Vicar so I was involved in the church until I decided not to be which was about 15 or 16. For my 7th birthday my parents gave me piano lessons and although we had the largest house in the village we were not well off. We had a free house which came with my fathers job. The three most disliked, bullied people in the village were the Policeman’s son, the Magistrate’s son and the Vicar’s son because even back then the Methodists were at war with the Catholics who were at war with the Protestants so they would wait for you when you were walking home. I didn’t have many friends so I invested my time playing the piano. I played all the time and I really got into it. I had a beautiful lady called Lydia Jordan, who lived down the road and she encouraged me by giving me new music all the time. Because of that I could read music like you would read a book. That skill has stood me in incredible stead throughout my life because it meant, for example, I could play with Eartha Kitt on live TV without ever having seen the music.
When I was about 12 Lydia said, ‘I cant teach you anymore so I’m going to send you to my teacher’ who was a Professor from Durham. If I had gone to him first I would never have kept it up because he was horrible. He wanted me to practice the same piece over and over again so as time went on I became more interested in playing rock guitar. I grew my hair long and was listening to bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.
By the end of high school the bullying had stopped and my first public appearance was Toad of Toad Hall. The first half I got sick from stage fright, so after intermission I gave myself a good talking to and went on for the second half and never looked back. The last couple of years at school I did maths, double maths and physics. The teacher was Scottish and talked me into going to St Andrews in Scotland to study Astronomy. Astronomy was my interest until I got to Uni and it ruined every vested interest I had in it. It was also my first time away from home so I could re-invent myself. I was playing guitar in 3 to 4 bands. When my dad came and visited me in London to see us play we had to stuff tissue paper in his ears.
I contracted Glandular Fever so decided to go to London for a while and take a year off. On the way to London I met a guy on the train who was a singer songwriter. At the time we were squatting because there was all these empty houses and it was so expensive to rent. Out of the blue I got a letter to – Fred the Keyboard player from the guy I met on the train, inviting me to go and do a session in a studio, so I went along to Budget studios. They were building a new studio in Convent Gardens and I offered to give them a hand so on completion they asked if I would like to be an Engineer, which sounded a lot more exciting than going back to Astronomy. I did a lot of sessions over the next year. We were only a demo studio but had lot’s of great bands including bands like Thin Lizzy. Whilst building I stayed on site as the night watchman and taught myself to play drums. Eventually I got the sack for bringing my band in to record after hours. However after that my skills helped me earn a lot more money because I was doing session work. I played in a pub rock band called the Amazing Mike Khan band. Mike was a half Pakistani street fighter and if someone heckled him he would get off the stage and beat them up out on the street then come back and carry on with the gig. It was pretty wild.
I got involved in the community housing association. We would get people together, who were homeless, We would fix up the houses and the contracts stated people had to live together communally but for peanuts rent. That also enabled us to get accommodation rather than living in a squat.
During that time I met a lady called Emilia Rzeszotarska. She couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Polish. She’d escaped from Poland during the Communist era and there was fear she would be deported so it was suggested to me that I should marry her which I did. It was the biggest non wedding that the pub had ever seen. Somebody rich had got us a Rolls Royce, it was a big event.
Emilia kept her clothes in our flat and one day I came back to the house and Emilia was there so we pretty much were together from that moment on. We decided to buy a Kombi and go travelling around Europe and we ended up in Greece where we stayed for a year. She was an artist and I still have some of her work. We decided to drive up to Warsaw. Her parents had both passed away and the flats that her parents had owned had been sold but you weren’t allowed to take money out of Poland so we lived it large as they say. We stayed in the best hotels and ate at the best restaurants, bought some art including one of Beksinski’s works which I wish I still had now. Anyway the only way we could smuggle these paintings out is Emilia signed them with her name and we ended up in Munich with no money at all, after living like kings.
We got jobs at The Hilton cleaning and after a month we went to stay with some friends of hers in Alsace and the Russians went into Afghanistan which was too much for her. She thought the war was coming, so she left me there. I was stuck with all my piano gear and I ended up getting a job running a jazz club with this guy called Fritz. I met some great musicians through the jazz club like Billy Cobham, Chet Baker before he died, John Schofield and Tommy Flanagan. I used to write but I look back and really I knew nothing. I was a rock piano player attempting to play jazz. It was interesting.
I went back to England and bought the Kombi off Emilia. She took off to live on a community in the US and then to Guatemala and eventually ended up here in Terania Creek living on Dharmananda and although we were married we weren’t really solid. She was writing to me regularly and I was writing back but due to her moving all the time she never received my letters. When she moved here and wrote to me I wrote back and she finally got my letters. She said there’s a beautiful place here with beautiful people and I never want to leave, which was unlike her as she was a restless soul.
I was doing a lot of cool things in Germany but it didn’t feel like home so I came over here to check it out. This was back in 1981 and I went to the train station but being school holidays I couldn’t get a ticket for 4 days. I went to the Australian Consulate and they gave me a bus ticket. On the journey up here we stopped, I went to the toilet and when I came out the bus had gone with all my stuff on it. I caught the next one and caught up with my stuff in Ballina. It was cold when I arrived and Emilia had slept in the bamboo here in Lismore next to the river as she didn’t have a car. I had to walk her around to thaw her out. We had to hitch out to Terania and in the end she and I only lasted about a week. I remember that 2 years were very wet. You’d go to Byron and it was sunny but when you came home it was raining. Emilia decided to leave and I’ve never left. She’s now back in Oxford.
I had started fiddling with piano tuning in Germany and carried on with that when I moved here. I met 3 local guys who were doing it, one Fred Jones in Magellan St who had lost an eye in a piano factory. When he passed away he gave me a compressor which I still have. Harry Neilsen who built most of East Lismore had a piano shop and he was also a funeral director. I found out that we ended up living in the house he ran his business out of in Bridge St.
I ended up moving into Lismore town, met a couple of muso’s and I started playing with Barry Ferrier aka Dr Baz who is Bangalow based. At one stage we had a duo called Double Vision going and we played at Julian Rocks Restaurant in Byron. He could play any song and make it sound good. Barry Ferrier got the gig as Musical Director for Eartha Kitt so he sent me off to do the promo shows around the country on National TV. Off I went, met Eartha, had no run through but we did it. Eartha was in her 60’s with so much energy.”
