About.
As far as I can recall, I have written songs. I write guitar songs- raw acoustic pop, ... maybe. I don't really know, and I don't get excited about what the tag is. I just like a song for whatever it is. I have written many songs over the years and been to recording studios to do some of them. But this clutch of songs is just recorded simply, on one track, so the sound is very like I were playing in your living room. This Wix site allows me to get you connected to my recordings on Bandcamp. I was not allowed a guitar by my mother in the heady time of 1963 when the Beatles came to play in our city. She didn't want an 'Elvis Presley in the house' So, she bought a piano for me, but all I could do was be fascinated with the high, middle and lowest keys. I didn't understand the black keys. I never got my feet to the pedals. All my friends had guitars and were in bands. They came and went - many on stage at the bible dance scene that swept our city with rock bands playing all the cover hits. Some stayed, some got famous. Before this era, I had found out that I could write a tune to some old records of my brothers; I invented a singing melody to the orchestral music and recorded this on dads reel to reel tape recorder. Then I graduated to singing along with Beatle tracks and other songs on the top twenty that ended up as 45's in our house. I was recording them, often with a friend, and we did the harmonies, high or low. All I had was a bongo which I could play well and liked: and a mouth organ that I could not play.
Some time in 1966 I acquired a guitar from my sister in-law who had been involved in the Bob Dylan protest song stuff. She showed me how to tune the guitar and that was it. I took it home. And I invented three chords and wrote a song. They were actual chords but I didn't know that- they just sounded right. I was always borrowing some one else's guitar or going to someone's place to play. It was not until I began working that I bought a mates guitar with a ban the bomb sign on it. He was a Donovan fan and could play all his stuff, but I just wrote my own songs. That was all I wanted to do. I finally bought a new guitar- a Zenith twelve string. I recorded an original album on my cassette recorder which had stereo tracks. I was given more independence and my own bedroom- which was large, so I could get mates over to play songs and record them. But when I purchased my own home, I managed the track recording between my stereo recorder and a mono recorder so I could over-dub. Many of those songs are still on the cassette tapes which I have been able to digitize. Some are worthy of recording again such as 'All In Your Smile' and 'First World War' and 'In My Dream'. I went through a time when my son and a few of his mates took my songs to go busking. They'd come over and make me go through them, learn them, and go off busking. That was kind of nice.
