I was born in 1981 and grew up in Bromley, South-East of London. I went to Roman Catholic school and had a nice and fairly uneventful early childhood, going to school, playing in the street with the neighbors' older kids. I was really into reading and writing and dreamed of being a novelist when I grew up. When I was around 9 or 10 years old, I started to get into music when my Mum bought an upright-piano, which she intended to learn, but never got around to it. I used to try and play and even had 3 or 4 lessons before losing patience in learning scales and playing other people's music and sometime soon after that I became interested in rock music and asked for an electric guitar for my birthday. Maybe it was listening to my parent's record collection that spurred my interest, The Rolling Stones being a particular favourite. Later, I heard Nirvana and through them, stuff like Butthole Surfers, The Jesus Lizard, Husker Du, Sonic Youth and later, punk rock and hardcore music. I played in a couple of punk rock groups when I was 14 or 15 and started hanging out with other kids who liked similar music.
It would have been around that time my Mum and Dad split up and I had troubles at school with my schoolmates and certain teachers: I was underachieving in every subject except English and Art, which I excelled at and my social awkwardness, disinterest in sports and difficulty fitting led to me getting picked on quite badly. Stop me if this is starting to sound familiar... Anyway, I changed schools and things improved a lot, but I guess I never got over it, because by the time I was 16, I dropped out of school completely and never went on to further education. I'd lost faith completely and still hold some cynicism and disdain for the academic system. I spent years, doing very little, living at my parents and playing in bands that broke up after a few shows. I was diagnosed with depression, misdiagnosed I think and prescribed pills which I later took myself off, finding them to do more harm than good, but my mental state could still be described "rocky" at best.
My musical taste diversified - I was about 17 when a friend introduced me to John Fahey's music , with little context, and I went to see him play with Derek Bailey in support at one his last shows before he died, in London at the Queen Elisabeth Hall. I didn't understand completely where he was coming from, knew little about improvisation, of country-blues or folk music or raga. But I was transfixed, how he got that sound out of playing one guitar with his fingers. I heard Philip Glass around that time too and liked that a lot, again with little understanding of classical or contemporary music, let alone minimalism. I started playing piano in a band I helped form, that musically seemed to fall somewhere between Philip Glass and The Bad Seeds, as strange as that might sound, called Miasma and The Carousel of Headless Horses. I eventually left as I didn't want our performances to be theatrical and didn't like the direction it was taking - it was becoming very progressive sounding and I began to notice my predilection towards repetitive musical figures. I've never much been concerned with aesthetics, except for those of the music itself and I just wanted to make music that made me feel something. I also started to notice I was actually kind of a control freak - I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but I was so passive and afraid of confrontation at that time, I rarely spoke up. Playing solo started to seem appealing.
At 20 years old, I started working in a record shop in London, Reckless Records. A number of things were taking place: I wasn't playing in any bands, I started getting into a lot of stuff from working at the record shop (from Asian folk to minimalism to 60's psych) and a lot of it had a real effect on me and my musical development. I started to love drones and repetition more and more. And I was drawn back to the beautiful solitariness and self-sufficiency of Fahey and solo guitar music. I bought a cheap classical guitar and started playing around with open tunings. I also ran a small mail-order distro, selling underground and experimental music: CD-Rs , cassettes and limited runs of vinyl. I got beaten up quite badly once, trying to defend a friend who was being attacked by a group of guys and had my cheekbone fractured, and this coupled with a pretty destructive relationship with the girl I lived with found me staying at home more and practicing a lot, trying to copy other peoples music by ear. I needed to focus on something, to create something for myself, separated from the world outside and in, which truthfully seemed to scare, disappoint and overwhelm me at each turn. I bought a 12-string on a whim, because I loved Robbie Basho's 12-string playing a lot, and found that all these disparate musical ideas I had really lent themselves to the instrument: overtones, drones, cyclical patterns. I got more and more obsessed with composers like Charlemagne Palestine, Steve Reich, Arvo Part etc.
My friend John Hannon, an incredibly talented engineer and inspiring individual, offered to record some of my playing for free and has continued to record my albums ever since. Another friend convinced me to send it out to some labels, so I sent out four copies. I really didn't take the idea of getting my music released or having any kind of musical career seriously. Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel) e-mailed me and said he'd like to release it, which he did, as a CD-R of eighty copies. I continued working at the record shop, but didn't play live, because nobody in London was interested, until 2005, when I went on my first European tour with Josephine Foster. The record shop went bust and I decided I wanted to do nothing else but make the best music I possibly could. I started to tour more, record more and have somehow miraculously and thankfully been able to survive doing so, meeting so many great people along the way and moving from London, to Manchester before settling in Hastings, a stone's throw away from the sea, six years and seven album's later.
Domestic
