We had a lot of instruments around the house, and along with my two older brothers and my Dad we often made up a family band - I started gigging on drums when I was about 14. I remember doing a pub gig on Jubilee Day in 1977 anyway. I joined a champion barbershop chorus in Crawley, and won a gold medal singing with them in a convention in Brighton. I did some 4 part harmony arrangements for quartets. I learned the flute and took some Associated Board exams, and learning to read music for that was to prove useful. My middle brother Stephen is a classically trained pianist and has a teacher’s diploma. He has always been a professional musician and has travelled widely with his job - QE2 cruises, residencies in London hotels including the Dorchester and the Atheneum, stints in South Africa and Amsterdam. My older brother Philip is a now a solo artist, playing keyboards and vocals. He gave me my first guitar, a sunburst Antoria acoustic, around about 1975. At one time I made it into an electric guitar, drilling holes into it and fitting a pickup and vol/tone controls. I also took it to school a lot, and I still have it and play it most days.

At about 18 I bought some keyboards (A Fender Rhodes Stage 73 and a Solina ‘String Machine‘) and followed in my brother’s footsteps playing in a function/club band called ‘Harvest’ for 2/3 years, including many dinner dances at The Rede Hall Hotel near Gatwick. We were given free meals at first, but towards the end of our tenure, the German owner ’Helmuth’ gave us pie made with pike from the lake and we never asked again!

I became interested in bass guitar and vocals, mainly as result of being a keen fan of ‘The Police’, sleeping on the pavement in minus temperatures in December 1979 to get tickets to see them at Lewisham Odeon. I formed a trio with my brother Philip on drums and a keyboard player. I was playing mainly bass but some guitar on some Shadows numbers - we then had a busy 5 years playing in clubs around Crawley and South London - 1985 to 1990 - although I did leave for a spell in 1989 to turn pro - first in a band called ‘Midstream’ which played nightclubs in Torquay and a Warners camp at Doniford Bay, Somerset, then in a four piece called ‘Twix’ which had a residency at Pontins, Camber Sands. We played 6 nights a week plus Sunday lunchtime in the ‘Rye Bar’, a 1600 seater cabaret venue, and this included backing visiting acts including Bob Monkhouse, the comedian Mike Reid, and Bert Weedon.

In January 1991 I moved to Manchester, and soon formed a duo with a keyboard player, playing pop and rock covers. By now I was on guitar, and getting a kick out of playing my Rosewood Telecaster through a rack system which included a Marshall pre-amp and a Roland GT-6 effects processor. I programmed a Kawai sequencer to play some powerful drum and bass synth modules - we were called ‘PCM’ - which stood for pulse code modulation - a type of sound synthesis. After a couple of years I began to collaborate with a different keyboard player to form a more ‘across the board’ duo called ‘Home Run’, and we went on to play many clubs in the North West, North Wales and Yorkshire, including several venues in Liverpool the Beatles had played in during the 60‘s. ‘Home Run’ ran between January ’93 and June ‘96. I had by then started playing keyboards and singing each Sunday lunchtime in my local in what they called a ’free and easy’ session i.e. getting guest singers up and backing them . It was quite a wrench to leave my Sunday lunch residency in the ‘Spotted Cow’, Oldham but I was moving down to Poole in Dorset.

By the end of 1996 I was getting established as a solo act on keyboards and guitar in Bournemouth hotels. I gained a good Saturday night residency in ‘ACs’ in Alum Chine but was approached to join a rock and roll band. This was a trio that lasted two years - July 1998 to June 2000. I was playing a Fender Strat through a Twin Reverb amp. Rehearsals for the first version of ‘Rockin’ the Joint’ commenced in February 2001, with the first gig at Bluebirds, Longham, Dorset being at the end of April. By September that year we supported Charlie Gracie at the Eddie Cochran Weekender at Chippenham.

I now play a Gretsch Brian Setzer signature series 6120 guitar, through a Fender Hotrod Deville amp rated at 60 watts. The ambition is to continue to expand the RTJ repertoire of rock and roll and rockabilly material and continue to do what we have always done which is to mix the material and vary the sets constantly. My current faves are still Brian Setzer and the Stray Cats, but also Reverend Horton Heat, the Quakes, Marco and Simone Di Maggio. Outside of rock and roll I am into John Mayer, Rufus Wainwright and lot of alt. country like the Drive-By Truckers, Rodney Crowell and Brad Paisley. The country guitarists I admire are Brent Mason and Steuart Smith. My favourite guitarist would have to be Robbie McIntosh, side man to John Mayer and before that Paul McCartney, Norah Jones and the Pretenders, who I have seen in Dorset several times too, but the best live guitar work I have seen was by Jessie Stewart in Joe Ely’s band at Manchester Uni, Jan 1996. Awesome Texas bar room country/blues, and he is sadly no longer with us.