Slow learner but started in teens with steel string accoustic.  Singing to myself walking along suburban streets and then years spent in Central London and Barnsley. Everything from Everley Bros, Chuck Berry Little Richard, Beatles, Stones and Dylan and then at the First Cambridge folk festival inspired by Stefan Grossman to learn fingerstyles for Delta Blues, Robert Jonson and closer to home Bert Jansch, hanging out down the steps in Cousins – Roy Harper, Incredibles.  Hans Fried who ran Collets Folk Record Shop was an inspiration in thought and love of new developments in music all the time, everywhere at once! Still remember his face when I walked in the day Sergeant Pepper came out. Stunned! The start of a new era.

Later moved to Devon and spoke to a senior, a piano teacher, Mrs Jackson- who entertained the troops during the second World War and now taught children. There’d been a ropey old upright in the YHA I was working in and I’d started learning Be Bop a Lula but lost the plot. I asked Mrs Jackson if she could teach me to play rock and roll on the piano. She looked me severely in the eyes  – extra frightening – she had Mary Whitehouse type horn rimmed specs and said – ” I can teach you to play the piano. What you do with it then is your own affair!”   Irresistable !!  I was so grateful to her I got to Grade 6.  But it wasn’t til i started playing with other more experienced musicians at dance camps in the UK, Poland and Latvia that gradually I learnt to really watch and listen and become able to pick up melodies and chord sequences by ear and gain confidence.  Most recently I was lucky to find WMM and again that magic inspiration came fostered by Edd, Camillo and Fernando and especially at the beginning by Niwel Tsumbo.  My YHA boss had introduced me to music from Soweto  way before Graceland  and I was also drawn in by Doctor Nico, Fela and Senegalese music and a love for Salif Keita.  The most impressive thing with all our WMM tutors is their straightforward clarity, honesty and integrity of approach and the sheer Joy and exuberancethat is never far below the surface.  It’s taken my fingerstyle guitar playing to places I never expected to reach.  Thank you All.