HISTORY

The Early Years
Born in Sancerre (and baptised with the best dry white wine in the world!) France, in the old province of Berry (of Dukes of Berry fame), cradle of my father's family since the XVIIth Century, my mother's hailing from Vollaure in North-East Auvergne.

Aged 8ish, my grandfather teaches me my first bourrée on the mouth-organ. I found out he had played violin in the village orchestra. He left dance tunebooks and his own compositions, including the wonderful waltz "La Mariolle", later recorded first for my solo CD Cornemusiques (Celtic Music CMCD058), then by Gabriel Yacoub on CD Quatre, and last by The Cock & Bull Band on CD Encore du Vin(gt) (Mrs Casey MCRCD 9993) -obviously a minor hit.
1st violin lessons, discovery of local traditions via my school-teacher who set up a Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in the village. Move to local county town Bourges, 1st recorder classes (discovery of baroque and folk tunes, 1st concerts) and violin at the Ecole de Musique and the Lycée Alain-Fournier (also my future French bagpipes guru Jean Blanchard's haunt), here I befriend a school-mate who plays Berry bagpipes in the local folk dance group "Notre Berry". I learn guitar instead.

1st trip to England (witnessed mods and rockers' battle in Bognor Regis, offered 1st cucumber sandwich, scarred for life!) Wrote 1st French 'chansons', dreaming of stardom.
As part of English studies at Tours University (1967-71), I enquire about joining anarchist party, instead witnessing 1968 riots at first hand at a sit-in sandwich party in front of Tours town hall.
Sat in room with mates memorising all Led Zeppelin 'I' parts, being introduced to weird Jazz (Miles Davis's 'Bitches Brew' and Soft Machine 'Third') and the weirder Prog-Improv. of King Crimson's 'In the Court of...' and Amon Düül's 'Yeti'.
In Bourges, went to the workshops and concerts run by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales de Bourges (GMEB) on contemporary electro-acoustic music (fell in love with Les Percussions de Strasbourg's version of Edgar Varese's "Ionisations", which I will only see them perform 20 years later at Edinburgh Festival, while performing there myself).

The Folk years
Living in Leek, U.K., I attempt to learn Staffordshire dialect, going to my first folk-club, writing more French 'chansons'. I see and bootleg Pink Floyd's Ummagumma last live concert.
Folk course at Leeds University run by Bob Pegg of 70s folk-rock band Mr Fox, inspiration for my forthcoming M.A. First of many visits to the EFDSS's library at Cecil Sharp House, to research M.A dissertation: "The Social Aspects of the Folk Music of England". I see Ashley Hutchings there, and coincidentally watch him with early Steeleye Span concert in north London, concluding that Folk-Rock would save English folk music from extinction!

1st move to Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes. More French 'chansons'.

I help run my 1st folk club, meet Paul 'Silk' Martin and join him in 1st folk band Fillip the Toad, also with future Cock & Bull Band caller Bob Adams, and Hemlock concertina player Bob Shakeshaft. 1st gigs playing bass recorder, 12 string guitar, tin whistle and fiddle, stage nerves meaning that I need to be well oiled before attempting to play anything, with the expected arhythmical consequences. Dave Whetstone joins, 1st mini tour in France.

First full-page newspaper feature in Buckingham Advertiser before move back to Toulouse, France, for National Service.

As well as being a lecturer (highlight: General to 40 pence-a-week-200 Gauloises-a-month hairy folkie: "I'm sorry I'm late, my helicopter was delayed by fog"), I join the Folk Club de Toulouse, 1st solo gigs playing Irish and Breton tunes, 1st folk dance tuitions,1st mini tours with them, including discovering the living music and dance tradition of South-West Auvergne at Samatan.
We go to Brittany and I play fiddle and mandocello for my 1st Breton fest-noz (too much chouchen, the local brew), join French folk band from the Folk Club de Toulouse Cornejidouille, 1st festival performance, with Malicorne on the same bill. Join folk group Mandragore with guitarist Pierre-Marie Blaja and melodeon/piper Jaco Martres who tells me about one of the last surviving bagpipe makers: Joseph Ruols. Ordered cabrette.

The Cock & Bull years pt I
I return to U.K. and rejoin folk band now called Hemlock with Melodeon player Dave Whetstone and singer 'Brad' Bradstock, the embryonic Cock and Bull Band. Cabrette bellows arrive, then full pipes. Fight with instrument for three months, 1st airing in Black Horse Folk Club, Great Linford (the gig was advertised in the same issue of Melody Maker that had Jah Wobble's new P.I.L.group on its front cover! Ominous or what?). First home recordings and first festivals, including Towersey where we're taken on by Steve Heap's Mrs Casey Agency, the start of a long and fruitful collaboration.

In the summer, I finally meet Mr Ruols in Mur-de Barrez, Auvergne, 1st tuition and collecting of cabrette music, the following year, I meet and record Mr Vermerie, last exponent of the pre-1900 cabrette players.

Hemlock plays first of many fine dances as The Hemlock Cock and Bull Band. 1st recording for Mrs Casey Music with Bill Leader engineering and Steve Heap producing. 1 track: 'Buffalo Girls/Donkey Riding' appears later on CD: A Cock and Bull Story (C&B 103).

Busking on Sidmouth festival's promenade leads to official booking and many more major festivals in 1978 and 1st commercially released LP for Topic Records All Buttoned Up which makes the Melody Maker's folk charts and become a favourite with dance clubs due to the sleeve notes with extensive dance instructions.

Following our most successful festival season so far, we venture abroad, personal highlight being fighting through sub-zero temperatures to reach Uppsala in northern Sweden in an unheated customised VW van, and having to sell it back to our agent to get paid for the tour!

The Albion years
We team up with ex-Albion Band caller Eddie Upton, and at our next Sidmouth festival we meet Ashley Hutchings who guests as caller, and hey presto! six months later 3/4 of the band become 1/2 of the latest Albion Band incarnation (Paul Martin, our fouth member playing bass was never likely to join!).
The borders between the two bands become blurred as part of the Cock and Bull Band's live set becomes half of the Albion Dance Band's Shuffle Off album, which features the little-recorded electronic bagpipes!
Dave Whetstone and I aso tour heavily as a duo, and The Cock and Bull Band releases its ground-breaking and controversial 2nd album Eyes Closed and Rocking
During this session, fond memory of John Maxwell resorting to playing his bass drum pedal with his hands due to a technical hitch!
-In turn John, then I, then Dave Whetsone leave the Albion Band.
Highlights of this troubled period:
-busking in Copenhagen centre in freezing November and bringing home more money than during the tour itself.
-the £ 4.95ish cheque (I think guitarist Simon Nicol had his framed!), share of the £1,000 fee from a Continental festival once expenses were deducted -obviously not a very viable financial proposition!
Personal favourite musical memories:
-being told at the start of our first Scandinavian tour that we would have to play 50 miles north of the Arctic circle, then next in the southernmost Norwegian town, a feat impossible to achieve according to the locals (we did it),
-waiting for 5 hours in a German workers' café getting hopelessly drunk with worry and schnapps while part of the band was struggling in a van with failing brakes down multiple Alpine passes,
-witnessing drummer Dave Mattacks producing his usual set using only a snare and a cymbal because his full kit had gone missing.

The Cock & Bull years pt II
Dave Whetsone giving up music altogether for a while, The Cock and Bull Band add keyboard, percussion and sax player Pete Lockwood. John Maxwell leaves soon after, and the band decide to continue as the slimmed down trio Cock and Bull. We scour the festival scene, and with myself as musical director produce the music for five plays for Stantonbury Theatre based on the successful National Theatre productions of Tony Harrisons' Mysteries and Flora Thomson's Lark Rise to Candleford with additional musicians including Maggie Holland from the original London production. Most of the incidental music becomes Cock and Bull's next album Concrete Routes, Sacred Cows, which we take to Edinburgh Festival.

The French years
After a floor spot at a folk club, I am asked to work with one of my 70's musical heroes: Gabriel Yacoub, leader of French Folk-Rock giants Malicorne.
Together wee take an acoustic duo version of Gabriel's CD Bel and my own Cornemusiques on tours (USA, Canada, Belgium, Britain, France).
Highlights: a 26-plane-in-28-days US stint for which I used one customised golfbag to carry 14 instruments (including 4 bagpipes!) and the luggage was only lost and found twice.
-a sleepless night sharing a bed in a cheap airport motel hearing every sound made by the wheezing copulating couple across the corridor!
-adding my bits to a huge 14 CD compilation of French Traditional Songs (Anthologie de la Chanson Populaire Française) masterminded by Gabriel.

At the same time, I start a 200+ show/3 year solo tour of French and Belgian venues of costumed performance Cornemusiques for the Jeunesses Musicales Youth touring schemes, which take me from huge state-of-the-arts theatre venues to village halls, the latter with steps occasionally made up of tables, benches and chairs and stages of ping-pong tables, sometimes on the same day!
-I have to learn -fast- a way of controlling a 1,000 strong audience of screaming kids because the lighting man had plunged the auditorium in the dark during my processional entrance.
-I mostly manage the onstage 8-costume changes, 15-instrument swaps and 7-centuries-of music-in-50 minutes with only the occasional bit falling off.
-I turn the show into English for the Edinburgh Festival to discover on the first night that I am performing in the main cancer patient hospital lecture theatre with the directions to the oncology conference still up! The show is still selected for the Best of the Fringe BBC radio programme.

The Early Music years
I acquire my first Baroque smallpipes and study under flute guru Stephen Preston at the Guildhall School of Music in London. Together we devise a way of transferring his wonderful technique so that I can perform the weirdest version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons for the instrument (which appears some years later on my BBC Radio 4 programme "Cornemusiques", and on Palladian Ensemble recording Les Saisons Amusantes, with guest hurdy-gurdy player Nigel Eaton).
-Due to my poor sightreading I have to memorize whole sonatas in order to perform them in the seminars, but I also meet Matthew Spring and Sara Stowe of early music group Sirinu, and we devise whacky Folk-Early Music groups Les Fêtes Galantes, Folies Bergères, then Commedia d'ell'Arte troupe Chalemie to revive the wonderful drone-based popular dance and theatre music of the XVIIth/XVIIIth Century as featured on our CD Pastorales.
We are taken on two extensive Early Music Network tours, several BBC Radio 3 live recordings, and Sara's series of popular South Bank Dance'n drones Festivals.
The oddest moment:
-being the front of a pantomime horse and performing the perfect Horse's Brawl dance at London South Bank's Purcell Rooms, thus bridging the classical/folk/early music gap in one go.

The Cock & Bull years pt III -Cock and Bull having taken a back seat during the intervening years, clarinet, recorder and piano player Vanda Sainsbury joins the piper-less trio and then the full band as featured in our next 3 CDs, the first being the now classic Prog-Folk of Below the Belt which we take to France's St Chartier Bagpipes Festival, among a host of others: the one occasion when the temperature was so fierce during a performance that I burned myself picking up my next overheating instrument.
-All my musical strands meet when finally BBC Radio 3 commission an expanded version of the Cornemusiques show to include the new Cock and Bull line-up with the addition of Matthew Spring, Sara Stowe, and fellow piper Chris Walshaw. Soon after Matthew commissions me to compose a drone-based piece for his contemporary music show for which I used smallpipes, hurdy-gurdy, harpsichord and soprano over words by Gabriel Yacoub.

The Wobble / improv. years.
-I meet up with computer artist Simon Poulter and we proceed to turn Wittgenstein's 7 abstruse "Tractatus" propositions into an anarchic musical interactive computer/internet project based on modes, moods and drones (see YouTube video).
A promising start before Arts Council funding is pulled due to their collaborative slot being cancelled.

I continue my now life-long love of drone-based improvisations when, after future co-musician Clive Bell remembers my phone number from several years before, I get called to play on Jah Wobble's Celtic Poets CD for 5 minutes under Ronnie Drew's gravelly version of Louis McNeice's poem "Bagpipe Music". 9 hours, many cups of tea and a home stew later I end up hearing more of myself than on most of my previous recordings, get asked to join The Invaders of the Heart and start touring.
Highlight: piping-in the New Year in front of 250,000 fans for Edinburgh's Hogmanay, while standing in a Siberian gale on top of Waverley station.
-Later the studio project Molam Dub sees the band joining forces with ethnic musicians Molam Lao for a string of high profile festivals and the most extraordinary setting for a concert: the Hiroshima bay of the World Festival of Sacred Music
-The band unexpectedly mutates after the Deep Space album project into the most extreme improv. outfit of the same name: set, tune, key, rhythm, nothing is fixed before each show, as featured on the double live CD Largely Live in Hartlepool and Manchester, so even a single glass of wine is not allowed to spoil the concentration during the performances (avoid swigging from open beer cans at breaktimes at all costs!).
-Before and afterwards though, all hell is sometimes let loose as the Boss leaves the woodwind players to open the shows when the football is not over, teases, throws strawberries and apples from the wings, hides between the beds, jumps out of baths or wardrobes at unexpected times, sends me on studio wild goose chases, or worse still, urinates in Coke carton, making a show of pouring its contents out of the window while travelling at speed (with unavoidable blowback) in an unstoppable minibus on a packed U.S. interstate highway!
Most memorable: facing 12,000 baying Red Hot Chilli Peppers' fans in Nîmes Roman arena, swaying like some giant amoebas every time me or co-victim Clive pick up another weird woodwind instrument for another bout of frantic dubby improv: Christians thrown to the lions indeed!

Lastly, another studio project, English Roots Music, turns out to have a life of its own, The English Roots Band soon scouring the country adding dubby improvs to folk classics to the dismay of purists. See Glaz'art Dub Festival 2005 video live in Paris.
The end is nigh when I am denied access to the U.S. because of a visa cock-up, and have to wait for the rest of the band for a week in January in the wettest city in North America.

The Solo Years-While all the above are going on, I use the endless hours of travelling to write many a dance tune (to be published under the title: Dance and Drones Music -see Cock and Bull and Monsieur Pantin CDs), decipher first a French XVIIth Century bagpipes dance manuscript which becomes the Jean de la Mer project, then one of the French folk "bibles": Touraine et Berbillat's 5-tome Chansons Populaires dans le Bas-Berry, a selection of which appears in the forthcoming Parallèles CD.

Random oddest moments:
-having to change into my mediaeval costume in one of Paris's automatic cleaning toilets and waiting for a potential crocodile of French children (my future audience) to pass by and guide me to my test performance because my suitcase had broken open earlier and the venue address floated off in the wind.
-playing for the opening of an exhibition in Lithuania's main art gallery, having on the same day previously witnessed a dancing bear living in the back of a battered Mercedes in the town's main square.

[add articles in "Trad Mag" ,"fRoots" and "Chanter"]