Music
I used to record other musicians for a living, or play their bass lines for the same reason. Dragondreams came about when I stopped doing it for other people and started doing it for myself.
I've been surrounded by music all my life. My mother was a huge fan of musicals, as well as the "crooners" like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Some of my earliest memories are of drifting off to sleep listening to the strains coming from her record collection. I also remember her joy and excitement when she got a copy of the Westside Story soundtrack.
My father has always been a fan of folk music, and is an accomplished concertina player. In my youth, we played together in a number of various ceilidh bands as well as dueting in folk clubs around the country.
My own musical journey began quite by accident! From a tender age, my sister and me had a Pifco reel-to-reel that my dad rescued from a scrap bin. At the age of around six, we were making our own "radio shows" to astound our parents with. On my first day in junior school, we were asked "who wants to play the recorder?"
I thought they meant "tape recorder", so my hand went up like a rocket. How was I supposed to know that the hollowed out stick with a whistel at the end that they gave me was also called a recorder?
It was tough, being the only boy in a recorder class full of girls. But I stuck at it. And the rest is history.
I still play the recorder, and have a modest collection of some really nice instruments, but it was bass that stole my heart by the time I was eleven. I stuck with playing bass and bass guitar for lots of years. It wasn't until I hit my late forties that I decided it was time to look at playing a six-string guitar in any sort of "serious" way. I dabbled with them in my youth. Now, rather than buy a Harley or a sports car as I hit my mid-life crisis, I got a decent acoustic and started drilling myself in the ways of this six-string piccolo bass.
As far back as I can remember, I've enjoyed diddling around with my own tunes. On these pages are a few of the tunes I've come up with over the years. Most of them, I wish I'd done better. But they're here, warts'n'all. Take a listen if you have the time. I wrote and recorded them for my own amusement and enjoyment. None of them were ever intended to be commercially viable or make me any money. If you like them, I'm glad. If you don't like them... that's fine. ;-)
I've tried to arrange the tunes into a rough chronological order. The really old stuff has mostly been rescued from cassette tapes that go back around 30 to 35 years. The more recent stuff was recorded on PC, usually without a real instrument apart from the bass being used.
I started getting serious about the guitar in 2007, so the tracks from that period up to the present day tend to be increasingly guitar-based. And to me at least, sort of chronical my development as a guitarist.
2010 sees a lot of new ideas buzzing around here in my bijou studio. Watch this space... ;-)