In My Life …

I’ve been working on a solo album of songs and it’s just been released. Martin Simpson and Andy Seward produced it and Andy engineered and recorded it at his studio.

This album has been a long time coming, I recorded demo versions of some of the songs in my own studio in 2002 and then I didn’t know what to do with them.

I had a selection of songs that I’d written but no money to make the album, so I shelved it. I tried to have a normal, quiet life and see what life was like on the other side of the monitor speakers. Things were good until I had an encounter with the gutter press… It was very damaging what they did and I let it hurt me. They told me I wasn’t entitled to privacy.

So, I decided that I had to go back to my music.

I started doing some gigs and then I had a problem with a tendon in my left hand and I had to stop gigging. I thought that my career was over and it was hard to accept, I’ve always been able to make a living playing music and I’d ever thought what it would be like if I couldn’t do it anymore. I cancelled all my gigs in the UK and the USA and just kept my fiddle teaching going and a few gigs with my dance band. I shelved my trio and rested my hand. I had 3 cortisone injections and they didn’t work and so the next step was surgery.

I really didn’t want an operation so I rested my hand as much as I could and stopped taking calcium supplements, which kept my nails tough for my guitar playing. After a while, things started to get better.