Fragments 1986 - 1996

In the Easter of 1986, I recorded my first 'album', singing with The Zane Gray Incident recording some songs they'd written. I knew I wasn't up to the job, a fact that was hammered home when we started work one morning and I found that the bassist had spent the evening re-recording the vocal of the song we'd worked on the previous day. And done a better job of it than I had.

Now I really was at a low ebb, a grim state of emotional affairs that was worsened by failing my first year exams and having to re-take them over the summer. Six years earlier, I'd been top of my year at school. Where had it all gone wrong? I returned to Liverpool in the autumn, thoroughly miserable.

That term, though, a friend of mine back home put me in touch with a keyboard player in New Malden called Simon Foster. I went to meet him and was disappointed to find that we had totally different tastes in music. But I was desperate and I suggested we do some writing together, anyway. The first fruit of our labour, a song called 'Working Jerusalem', turned out to be great! I was bloody delighted. We wrote enough songs that, at Easter 1987, we recorded eight tracks, calling the collection 'Tereschenko'. 

By the time I left university in July 1988 - scraping a degree, against all the odds - Simon and I had written and recorded some songs that I was really pleased with. Now, I just wanted to play them live. Our first gig, in a church hall, was fine but definitely not what I was aiming for; I wanted a proper band and to play real venues. In a happy twist of fate, the members of The Zane Gray Incident were moving east from Cardiff to London and Ash, Ric and Chris - the guitarist, bassist and drummer - joined Halo Jones, the band Simon and I had formed.

As a counterpoint to these excellent developments in the musical part of my life, I had stumbled into a job as a computer programmer, despite having no apparent aptitude in this department. Still, I did come first on my Cobol course at Christmas, which suggested that my IQ hadn't completely evaporated. Mind you, I still couldn't code for toffee. 

That all changed in the new year, though, when I attended a course on Jackson Structured Programming, which changed my life (professionally, at least). I shuffled out of the office one week without a clue what I was doing and strode back a few days later, deleted everything I'd done to date and started writing good, working code as quickly as my limited typing skills would let me.

My self-confidence was returning and my year peaked on September the fourth when Halo Jones played the Bull & Gate in north London. I think it was the best gig we ever played and thankfully my friend Bill video'd it. (Twenty years later, Ash married the video with the recording from the sound desk. You can find all the tracks, such as 'No More Mr Nice Guy', on Youtube.) I thought I wanted to record albums and be famous but, actually, that gig was what I'd really wanted all along.

I would never have guessed that evening that seven months later, I'd be moving into a rented flat in Kendal with a colleague of Ric's to whom I was engaged. Meeting Katherine, the sudden burn out of the band, my job moving out to Farnborough, all of these things contributed to a sudden urge to follow Katherine north to Kendal, where she had a new job.

We were married on July 7th 1990 and the following March - twenty-five years ago today, in fact - Charlie was born. (That's her in the photo: we had lunch in Manchester, today.) Out of work, I spent the first ten weeks of her life looking after her as Katherine went back to work, bouncing back from childbirth in a manner that, looking back on it, was quite staggering.

In June, I landed my first contracting job, and my career began in earnest. And just over eighteen months later, Katherine stopped work and had Hannah, our second daughter. In some respects, this was the most stable period of my life, working on IT contracts around the north, while Katherine carried on producing daughters: Izzy at the start of 1995 and Milly at the end of 1996. But another big change was just around the corner.