MUSIC
My musical tastes have always run in parallel with my love of creative writing. I was fortunate to be born at a time when my formative years, my mid-teens, coincided with the tail end of the punk revolution. Like so many of my contemporaries, hearing those classic singles and albums - by The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Stranglers, The Jam, The Skids, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Chelsea, Generation X, X-Ray Spex, Buzzcocks, Alternative TV, Magazine, Ultravox!, The Saints, Wire, Subway Sect, Adam and the Ants, and so many more - inspired me to buy a guitar and make my own noise. And no matter how amateurish I sounded, or in need of tuning my first guitar was (a Gibson copy), in my mind I was following in the footsteps of Steve Jones, Mick Jones, Steve New, John McGeogh, Paul Weller, Keith Levene and Brian James.
My first band was a punk group formed in Shandon, Edinburgh, in the summer of 1979. We were called THE SEDUCED, and had a female singer. One of our songs was an 'attempt' to cover Art-I-Ficial by X-Ray Spex. We never played any gigs, but in true punk style we did gain local notoriety when our drummer spraypainted the band's name across the walls of our local launderette!
Our youthful enthusiasm vastly outweighed our technical ability, but those primitive attempts to conjure the next 'Anarchy in the UK' or 'That's Entertainment' from my fretboard stood me in good stead for the bands that would follow, from the 1980s right through to the present.
My first band was a punk group formed in Shandon, Edinburgh, in the summer of 1979. We were called THE SEDUCED, and had a female singer. One of our songs was an 'attempt' to cover Art-I-Ficial by X-Ray Spex. We never played any gigs, but in true punk style we did gain local notoriety when our drummer spraypainted the band's name across the walls of our local launderette!
Our youthful enthusiasm vastly outweighed our technical ability, but those primitive attempts to conjure the next 'Anarchy in the UK' or 'That's Entertainment' from my fretboard stood me in good stead for the bands that would follow, from the 1980s right through to the present.
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