Another extract from my book The Home Recording Handbook published by Dunlin Press earlier this year (links in bio/see Bandcamp). An ideal unwanted Christmas present. HOW ENGLAND GOT ITS ECHO In autumn of 1967 my family relocated to Balham in south-west London. A pop-crazed 14-year-old with my first guitar, I went out one day in search of somewhere selling guitar strings. As I walked down Balham High Road I came to a guitar shop called Watkins Electric Music and wandered in,

I got talking this week to a talented and very bright young songwriter in his mid 20s. He asked me whether or not I thought it was wise that he went into the music business. I told him that it was great, if that was what was calling you. But also warned him that there may be tough times ahead. I mean, I struggled, really struggled at times and suffered mockery, condescension, poverty and insult. Not constantly, but regularly for much of my young life. So here is an honest acc

“Say for what were hop-yards meant? And why was Burton, built on Trent.” The words of Housman’s poem returned to me recently when I read that home-brewing is currently undergoing a boom in the UK. I came across an old picture of myself taken in October 1982. Here I can be seen busily pulping apples with a German-made crusher and cider-press. A friend and neighbour Steve Roberts had borrowed this rustic device from a community then living on Osea Island, in the Blackwater estu

Following let’s just say my ‘troubled’ teenage years, having returned to Essex at 19 years old, under something of a cloud, aged 20, only months later I’d emerged like a butterfly to become the singer in a Colchester glam-rock band. I was also still on probation, as my father dryly described it, for being stupid enough to get caught. My new probation officer was in Clacton. I think she was a first-timer. After an initial meeting she said that she’d need to visit me at home. “

It was late November 1972 when I arrived back at the family home in Goldhanger, a tiny Essex village on the Blackwater estuary. I was 19 years old, underweight, a little scrambled mentally and ill with bronchitis. I’d been fending for myself since I was 15. A working lad since leaving school, things had originally started off okay. I’d had some reasonable jobs, rented a tiny flat in London and had learned to manage for myself. Relationships with my family having become str