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• Rochdale Health and Safety rule bans bands.

  June 20th saw Cigna, Marshall and I turn up at ridiculous o’clock (for musicians anyway), at the Exchange Centre in Rochdale.

  Nigel Pickering had organized a whole rake of musicians to turn up and play in support of our local hospice. The day was to run from 12.00 through to the evening. The first band went on and bemused shoppers got a free gig. Then yours truly… followed by Cigna with Marshall on backing guitar. They played a storm...
  
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Background

Born in Belfast too long ago, brought up in Glengad, in beautiful Donegal for a few years, transported back to Belfast and reared to near maturity. During that time I continued to sing in choirs (Me!! the boy soprano.. I still pity my voice trainers who were wonderful). Did the usual youth club gigs and graduated to playing with Gerry Creen and Hugh Fearon in 'Folkus" which was great fun but I wish we'd known as much then as we do now! We did some good gigs and a bit of Northern Irish telly and were nearly famous for minutes. My Ma was (and still is to some extent), part of the musical inspiration; for which I will always be grateful until I buggered off to Newcastle upon Tyne to learn how to become a teacher of Modern Languages.

All the while, I was writing songs (mostly crap) and getting slightly better at the guitar. (I was only young after all!). During the college days I played and sang with a few outfits, mostly doing Trad English stuff, or foisting my make-shift songs on a suspecting public.

Then I moved to Rochdale where I married my beautiful Julie and together we had two outrageously fab children.

Folk clubs (God bless them) were the main tolerators of my often mischievous sense of music and even paid me from time to time.

Then we formed Pegasus, the rock band, with our Gerry, Stu Pickering and Roger Scaife. It was actually a pretty good band, but rock and thinking songs did not tie in with the Punk which was gradually emerging and eating up our potential audience. Nevertheless, we did quite a few gigs and made a bit of a name. Our rehearsal studio (which we built ourselves), soon became a commercial animal and that was the end of the band.

I then gigged with various people and formed the Bracken band with Dom Williams. We took on a fine woman singer called Chris Waldron and went on to win the Best Band competition at the Edinburg Folk Festival. This led to recordings and some radio work and we played away merrily for a year or two until Chris had to leave for personal reasons. End of band.

Dom and I continued to do the folk circuit and did some good stuff on Radio Two and most of the local stations. Maart Allcock, one of my dearest friends in the world, sometimes did gigs with me and all I had to do was watch and learn usually!

In the interim, Desi was taking his master’s degree and holding down a full time job as well. Something had to give, and in the end, playing and performing became irregular and gradually faded into the background.