Music is central to my life and I could not exist without it. This biography reflects my developing relationship with this powerful art form.

E a r l y   L i f e

I was born in Kent and brought up in the village of Offham. My father was a scientist who ran a family business in London. My mother was a miner's daughter from Northumberland. Her life was dominated by raising a large family of six children. I'm the youngest with a large number of years separating me from the others.

From as far back as I can remember I constantly heard music within me yet nobody in my family played any instruments and there weren't any in the house. At the age of eleven I was finally lent a guitar by a distant relative. Playing came naturally and I started to develop my own music instinctively. I realised that it gave life meaning and it enabled me to use imagination to transmute reality.

In order to buy my own guitars and some other instruments I had to get a job in a garage. After considering the piano, violin, and saxophone I decided to devote myself solely to the guitar. I chose it because it was possible to play chords and harmony as well as single notes using sounds and textures which were expressive. The instrument intrigued me and I felt that it had great potential. I played on steel string acoustic, classical and electric guitars. There were never any guitar lessons, and I didn't know anybody who played anything seriously so I remained completely self taught. There was no connection between what I was interested in and music at school. Fortunately my older brother Mick had a tremendous record collection. He was encouraging and supportive and we sometimes went to hear music.

At home I often practised for many hours a day with great emotional intensity, while my family's reaction ranged from utter indifference to open hostility. At 14 I decided to run away and I worked on a farm in Sussex. My father was fanatically opposed to my music and when I returned home I found that all my musical instruments had been burnt at the end of the garden. I always remember finding the metal parts left in the ashes. There is no doubt that this event helped to forge an intense determination and I returned to the garage at every spare moment to save up and buy another guitar.

My development was not based on copying established guitar styles and right from the beginning I started to create my own music. Although I played with a friend from school who was a drummer, increasingly I felt that my environment was a cultural wasteland and a sense of alienation became overwhelming. Yet I loved the rich detail of the landscapes around where I lived and the countryside became part of my musical inspiration. And I was strongly drawn to Celtic mythology and all types of folklore and I felt that this was part of my lost cultural heritage. These feelings and perceptions undoubtedly had a profound influence and I felt that my music was there to magically restore lost worlds.

At 16 I walked out of school in the middle of my 'O' levels. For a number of weeks after this I worked on the guitar with ferocious dedication, often practising for over ten hours a day. Technically I progressed very quickly. I soon felt that I needed to get away from my limiting surroundings and visit London in order to meet other musicians.

After working for a few months on a farm I decided to move up to London and I sought out and absorbed inspiring and adventurous music, fervently assimilated the atmosphere and explored the city which acted as a catalyst on many levels. But it was difficult to get by and I found myself washing dishes in the House of Commons. So I decided to return to Kent where I worked in the woods with a chainsaw for a year cutting down trees to produce logs for a paper mill. As a nature lover I found this type of work increasingly distressing so I started doing various jobs in factories and on building sites.

In order to develop I looked at musical ideas from a wide range of sources. Even at this age I was already wondering if it was going to be possible to fit in with a defined field or genre within music professionally. By the age of 18 I had an advanced technical understanding of the structure of music and my playing was developing rapidly. After saving up some money and buying a car and my first good quality guitar, I started to make plans to return to London permanently. Finally I was able to leave home a few weeks before my 19th birthday to concentrate on playing full time and start performing.

Middle Period

I've had a mercurial relationship with the music profession so rather than telling my life story and writing down some kind of musical CV, I've decided to 'fast forward' through this period. The musicians I met and performed with are largely irrelevant in terms of my music today. However, I played with some interesting and highly talented people and I will add some information about this to the site in the future.

At this stage of my life I often felt that I wasn't able to express the things I really wanted to say as an artist and although it was gratifying to be regarded as an exceptional talent, I walked away from many playing situations and opportunities. There is no doubt that I felt out of kilter with the times as well as my own generation. Nevertheless many of the key elements that form the core of my musical identity were conceptualized over these years and in my early twenties I started to find my voice as a composer.

I played solo, as well as in duos and led my own groups on a number of occasions. I found it difficult to come to terms with the music business and I didn't release any recordings as a leader. Instead of playing commercial gigs or sessions I decided to undertake some private guitar tuition to make money. This activity helped in the process of developing my own approaches to technique improvisation and harmony.

Living in the city heightened my feelings for the countryside. I explored all parts of Britain and many places became bound up with my interest in mythology and history. I dreamed of escaping from London and I moved to a remote part of Oxfordshire for four years and spent some time playing in Berlin. Around this time I started using a classical guitar built for me by Christopher Dean who had a workshop nearby. Living back in the countryside was uplifting and for the first time I came across strands of traditional folk music closely connected with the area I was living in. This helped me to think about my identity as an English artist with a universal outlook and influences. I will write about this in some detail under the 'Music' section on the site.

After returning to London I withdrew from performing. Just after this I was approached to write The Complete Guitarist and within a few months of its launch in 1993 it became the most successful guitar title in the world and went on to sell over a million copies due to its tremendous success in the USA and Britain. At this time I started to think about having a special instrument made for me and the first round shouldered cutaway nylon string guitar was built for me by Russell Fong at his workshop in Southwark.

The next few years brought many changes. I moved to a number of different places and   spent some time living in New York. Most importantly my original vision of what I was destined to do started coming back, this time with great clarity.

Renaissance

Powerful inner forces brought me back to playing the guitar. I saw that my real abilities as a player and composer had remained completely hidden from the world and were as yet unfulfilled. And by this stage of my life a deep and long lasting synthesis of almost irreconcilable musical influences and philosophies had melded together. Dreamlike pastoral and gritty sophisticated urban elements started to coalesce. I now wanted to further develop my own linear, harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary for open creativity and composition in a way which transcended genre and stylistic musical influences.By now I had unique areas of knowledge and experience and this made a crucial difference to my sense of perspective.

From the beginning of 2001 I gave up everything which got in the way of practising full time and followed the concepts and ideas I had developed over many years with a relentless dedication.

I had always loved the sound of nylon string acoustic guitars and I decided to concentrate solely on playing this type of instrument. It greatly helped at this time that I came across the guitar maker David Whiteman. I'd tried to make the transition from electric and steel string guitars before and in order to make sure that it worked this time, I slowed my playing right down, and altered my technique, rhythmic approaches and rethought other areas. This required many hours of intensive practice and I worked on my technique virtually every day for over five years. I also selected and often partially rewrote many of my compositions and wrote new pieces.

At last I started recording my music in the Cowshed Studio in London with the sound engineer Joe Leach. I brought in bass player Paul Morgan and drummer Mark Fletcher and later added the harpist Rhodri Davies to provide and layer harmonies and play a number of solos.

During 2007 I undertook extensive rehearsals with Rhodri and Paul and we played our first date in London at the end of the year. This was a small pilot event to try out the repertoire in a live situation and it was a success.