The first
recording I ever did (albeit at the most basic level) was in 1970. The previous
year I'd bought a (then new to the market) Alba personal cassette recorder with
the sole intention of taping Bob Dylan's first concert for three years at the Isle Of Wight Festival. As for the
Dave Keats recordings, that period of my life is pretty well documented, even
though other people seem to have most of the tapes these days.
Probably one of
my more direct influences at the time was a guy called Lyndon
Pullin. He was a blues singer/songwriter who hung out
at the same haunts as myself, despite the fact that by
that time we were both beginning to branch out in different directions. The now
sadly late Lyndon and I spent hours together writing new material and driving
his father crazy while we were running through the initial arrangements of our
latest musical offerings in his kitchen. Just about all of these sessions were
kept for posterity and despite their almost unbearable quality they're still a
good testament of where my influences lay at that point in time.
A further
insight into my musical tastes of that period are to be found in the hands of
two friends called John and Tina. Weekends were spent at their caravan after
drunken nights at the local pub with Lyndon Pullin,
John and Tina, and a whole bunch of other people who played some instrument or
another. And with us being the pub's entertainment for the night, as the
evening grew older, the drinks flowed faster, the singing got louder, and John
taped it all, including the extended jam sessions back at the caravan which
always carried on well into the early hours of the next morning.
Except for a few
one off occasions it wasn't until 1995 that I produced any more recorded work.
Of course I'd still been writing songs over the previous twenty years which had
taken my tally to a thousand or more compositions, and I'd written three books,
The Other Side Of Kwai, Comeback, and
South Across The Border),
but for the better part, the only recordings from this period were audience
tapes of live gigs.
In 1995, after
having given copies of Comeback and Kwai to friends
as Christmas presents the two previous years, I went back to my roots and
produced twenty copies of
Shaenea
for the same reason. I was by this time beginning to fulfil my ambition of
having real recording facilities, with access to
MIDI backing,
and in brief, being in the position to turn out professional quality demo's at
the tip of a hat. Shaenea was recorded in the middle
of this transition period. The vocals were done on an old Tascam
Portastudio and the backing was completely generated
on my computer.