The information on my home page are some of the things that ‘went well’ for me in life, I haven’t talked about all the gigs, bands, tracks, signings, projects, sales, deals, recordings, dealerships, relationships, that didn’t, because if I had, you’d be reading for hours! Some people will assume my personal life’s been plain sailing, but I’ve had ups and downs along the way and although I’ve had a good life in many ways so far, there’s no doubt it’s been a bit dysfunctional at times… partly because of nature, partly because of nurture.
My Personal Journey
In the few years leading up to my birth, my late parents [Syd and Barbara] went through some difficult times after my brother Andrew died in May 1962. 1963 saw my dad hit the bottle and have his first heart attack at the age of 39; and mum suffered a reoccurring bout of manic depression [bipolar disorder] which tormented her through life. By the time I was born in March 1966, my parents were living on the notoriously rough Lupset council estate in Wakefield and life on the estate was tough and school was even tougher.
Life picked up shortly before my seventh birthday, when my parents had to leave Lupset – because of a dispute dad had with a difficult family on the estate – and after a short move locally, my parents became managers of a hotel for the blind in the seaside town of Morecambe. As a family, we moved into the ‘manager’s quarters’ (which were a series of rooms in the damp basement of the hotel) and although I hated that putrid basement, it was like ‘Bel Air’ compared to the difficult conditions of life on Lupset. I’ve fond memories of living in Morecambe in the early 1970’s with mum on the manic side of bipolar, but unfortunately, the hotel had a bar and dad was drinking heavily again which slowly turned him into a drunk… but thankfully a happy drunk, who was always lovely to me.
The 11th of November 1977 changed my childhood forever. Our basement flat was flooded in the infamous Morecambe floods of 1977, my parents were massively under insured and lost nearly everything. I say “nearly everything” because some of my musical instruments by some fortuitous luck had been moved into the upstairs hotel lounge a few days previously and were saved. After the flood, dad rapidly graduated into superstar alcoholic status and mum had a major nervous breakdown. I was 11 years old, times were grim, my parents were in meltdown fighting their own problems and the only positive I could take from the situation was the fact that I was now totally unsupervised and left to my own devices. For the next few years, while dad drank more and mum became sadder, I just immersed myself into practicing my instruments and experimenting with recording equipment which consumed my life for the next few years.
As a child, one of the things my practice regime taught me is that “one of my major strengths is my obsessive commitment to doing something… and one my major weakness is my obsessive commitment to doing something”. Even at this age, I realised that if I started drinking [alcohol] and liked it, I’d end up a drunk. I didn’t want to follow in my dad’s footsteps into superstar alcoholic status, so I’ve never tried alcohol to this day and I’m probably the only alcoholic who’s never actually tasted alcohol. After my dad asked me what I wanted as a present for either a Christmas or birthday when I was coming up to 15, I said that I’d like him to stop drinking as much, and over the next few months, he swapped alcohol for religion – becoming the most committed born again Christian the world’s ever seen – and I don’t know if it was coincidence, but mum’s mental health began to have a much better period of stability after he stopped drinking.
As an early teenager, I always had to go round to friends houses to socialise because they didn’t like coming round to mine because of a combination of the smell of our damp basement, my dads drinking, and my mums silence. But things were looking up as we’d moved out of the damp basement in the hotel (as it had been flooded) and we were living on the top floor of the hotel.
Playing musical instruments, recording and listening to music, gigging, playing chess and rugby were all massive parts of my life and consumed my teenage years. By the time I was fifteen, I’d started going out with my first girlfriend – Sally, a classmate who was bright and quite brilliant at dealing with my dad – but Sally’s mum, who was a games teacher at our school, knew my dad had given up drinking, become a christian, but was unfortunately preaching hellfire and damnation to my friends. So, her mum didn’t like her coming round and like many first school romances, we fizzled out after a year or so. [When I said Sally was bright, I mean uber bright and she went on to be a Director of HR for both Coca-Cola and Apple. It was with great sadness that she passed away in 2023. R.I.P. Sally].
By 1982, I was sixteen and had started dating a lovely girl called Nichola, a bassoonist who I’d met through playing in the Lancashire Schools Symphonic Wind Band. She lived around thirty miles south of Morecambe and after I passed my driving test (a few weeks after turning 17) it made it easier for us to see one another. Nichola and her family were really lovely and visiting them was probably my first experience of what a ‘normal’ family life could be. Nichola loved studying and education generally so it was no surprise that she went on to have a very successful career in education, as a school teacher, university lecturer, and educational consultant.
By the time I went to study music in Huddersfield in the autumn of 1983, Nichola and I had gone our separate ways and I had been doing lots of gigs (which I’d started doing at age of 12) which made me pretty much self-sufficient. Whilst at Huddersfield Technical College’s School of Music [a further education college for 16-18 year olds] I met a girl called Ann-Marie who was a very nice pianist and second study cornet player…. and we began dating. Ann-Marie and I had a great time at college and we married in the November of 1984. Yes, we were both only eighteen and with hindsight we were way too young but by the time I left college, we had a bungalow at 67 Sefton Road in the west-end of Morecambe and although we owned it mortgage-free, Ann-Marie and I struggled to pay the bills. We were the epitome of asset-rich, cash-poor kids and the bungalow, which was a big five bedroomed place, needed a lot of money spending on it and we didn’t have any.
I quickly went back to playing gigs, making recordings for clients and we advertised for music students to start a teaching practice. Our first adverts said “only call between 7pm and 8pm”. The number we used wasn’t ours [this was before we had mobile phones], it was a local public telephone box and Ann-Marie sat outside that there for weeks – on cold dark miserable nights – taking calls from new students to try and build a business and life for ourselves. Although we managed to slowly build things up, our early professional life (whilst still studying for external diplomas) was hard work for us both. I’d have loved a full-time job in music (or anything really), but couldn’t get one, but Ann-Marie managed to get some long shifts – where she wasn’t allowed to sit down – in a Morecambe jewellers shop to make ends meet. I began earning a living doing a diverse range of things and this is what I’ve done ever since.
As a young married couple, Ann-Marie and I always seemed to ‘put the cart before the horse’ which was no ones fault, it was just what we did. We both worked hard from ’84, got involved with some wonderful business people, some great projects, and got ourselves into a great position financially. We moved into a lovely small two bedroom bungalow at 6 Pointer Grove in Halton-on-Lune – a little village up the lune valley – and we pretty much had everything we wanted, drove beautiful cars and had a fabulous lifestyle. In 1991, we had our wonderful little boy Harrison and after another house move in 1993, we ended up living in an idyllic five-bedroomed house at 14 Arrow Lane, also in Halton-on-Lune that my wife designed, and we had built around the corner from where we were already living.
Although we were in a different league financially, to where we’d started ten years earlier, yet again, we put the cart before the horse. We could only just afford the new house and our lifesyle with us both working full-time and after our beautiful daughter Jess was born in 1997, for various reasons, Ann-Marie stopped going out to work full-time and we settled into that rather old fashioned lifestyle of ‘the man goes out to work and the wife is the homemaker’. Although this situation needed to happen for my wife, with hindsight, we should have just sold the big house and downsized in to a nice little three bed-semi.
The financial juggling we had done with two wages coming in became an overpowering, overwhelming, and overfacing burden for me as the sole breadwinner. Although I should have just taken the attitude of “if we lose the house, we lose the house”, I didn’t. I struggled with the pressure and enormity of the consequences of what would happen if I couldn’t put food on the table for my family, keep the massive roof over our heads, maintain the lifestyle we had, whilst still trying to keep the businesses going. I took my responsibility seriously and to keep money coming in, I adopted the work ethic of a workaholic by often doing ninty-hour weeks and always sixty hour weeks. In 1997, I went into desperation mode. I needed more money coming in and felt the only way to do it was to get more plates spinning. Over the next few years, it was just a case of trying to keep everything going and support the lifestyle we had. With hindsight, it was a big mistake and it took its toll on me, but more importantly, it affected my marriage and ultimately, my family.
Looking back, the timeline of the following five years from 1997 to 2002 was ridiculous. In 1997, I co-founded Faith & Hope Records Limited (record label) with my amazing ex-pupil and friend Neil Claxton who is an absolute gentleman and a musical genius! In that year, I also established DMR digital mobile recordings and Mendieta classical guitars. In 1998, I acquired Hotwires sound installation; established Faith & Hype (a press and PR arm of Faith & Hope) and began Art & Science nights which were a series of club nights in Manchester. In 1999, I established Musicom (an import arm) and Four 0 Four media and marketing recordings. In 2000, I threw myself into to my involvement in Monstermob – which went on to float on AIM in 2003 – established Beverley drums and percussion and we started Faith & Hope Songs, a publishing arm. In 2001, I established Levin guitars and basses; Music 4 Worship a places of worship supplier; Arena (mics, stands, etc); and Paris woodwind. In 2002, I took on Collard & Collard pianos and stools.
All this took its toll on me, for years I’d only slept for bewteen three and four hours a night; but on a trip to Asia in the autumn 2002, I was physically and emotionally exhausted and slept for around sixty hours out of seventy-two. Although I was getting involved with new projects and ventures – and becoming more successful in business – the monthly out-going expenditure was still rocketing and spiralling out of control. Not many months after my return from Asia, in 2003 my wife Ann-Marie told me that she wanted to split. I was devastated beyond all belief. The thought of not seeing her and my children as much was a shattering prospect. We told both sets of parents… but it was over ten years later that we finally did split. In those subsequent years after 2003, all I did was work to keep the money coming in for this rather false life I was living, and knew would end at sometime. With hindsight, I wasn’t ‘living’ like I wanted to, I was slowly being removed from family life; but the workload – and worry of losing the family home – meant I was removing myself because I wasn’t there much… but, it wasn’t how I wanted things to be.
Although things were already way out of control financially, a flood in a second house we owned totally shook me again. I can’t remember the exact year it happened, but I remember that due to a technicality with the insurance (we hadn’t been inside the property for over a year), we weren’t insured and even though my cousin Allan Briggs did the work, it still cost tens of thousands to put right. It was the second time that a flood and an insurance problem had effected my family. Knowing the effect it had on my parents in ’77, the only way I could deal with it was to work as hard as I could to keep all those precarious plates spinning.
After 2003, I was desperately trying to give my wife and children what ‘I thought’ they wanted, but I got it all wrong on the personal side of life – which is the only thing that ever mattered to me – but did ok’ish on the business side of life. In the end, it wasn’t enough, the marriage wasn’t to be and after over twenty-five years together, Ann-Marie and I seperated and subsequently divorced. I was a physical mess and mentally exhausted, but I had some lovely times in those twenty-five plus years, have such happy memories, laughed to the point we sounded like muttley, and have two lovely children [Harrison and Jess] who are now both grown up.
Although I look back on those times as the breadwinner with a mixed sense of emotions that range from trauma to melancholy, I now realise that I didn’t have the emotional capability or the explicit knowledge to deal with the situation like I would be able to now. Although the pressure of life and business sank me at the time (with some self-inflicted episodes), it was never about ‘debt’, it was about the constant pressure of having to earn enough to pay for everything and never being ahead of ourselves financially. The positive I take from this period of my life – apart from my wonderful children – is that I somehow managed to always put food on the table for them, managed to give my children a lifestyle that I didn’t have as a child, managed to give them a beautifull home, and didn’t lose the family home… although I was very close a couple of times.
After Ann-Marie and I finally separated, I’d had a decade to prepare for the seperation since we had told our parents in 2003 and whatever was to happen in the next chapter of life, I knew I didn’t want to be in a position of uncertainty again.
Life after over twenty-five years with Ann-Marie was very up and down; I had close friendships with Alice (a ferry terminal manager), Hannelie (a company secretary), and Beccy (a journalist), before settling down in 2018 with Rachel Lucy (a cello teacher and chamber music specialist ) who I had known since 2005.
My son Harrison is an amazing son, man and dad. He and my daughter-in-law Linzi have given me a lovely grandson called Freddie… and I still think about Freddie’s little brother Teddy who we sadly lost. I love my daughter Jess very much and think of her constantly, but sadly she doesn’t want any contact with me and we’ve been estranged since the summer of 2014. The feeling of loss is unbelievable, but I live in hope that one day she’ll get back in touch.
Although my parents had their difficulties, they always tried to do their best for me. Mums bipolar reoccurred when she was in her eighties, to the point she needed to be sectioned twice. Bipolar disorder is cruel, the extremes are wild and the reality of ‘today, is the tomorrow, you worried about yesterday’, can often have no meaning at all. I’m blessed that I have my dad’s happy disposition and feel happy ‘nearly all of the time’. Sadly, dad died in January 2012 (aged 87) and mum died in August 2022 (aged 92).
Although I’ve never drank, I’ve never done drugs, I’ve never smoked or gambled; I have a problem with my eating and weight. After getting up to 24.5 stones, I lost 10.5 stones in a year, but [as of Dec 2024] I’m back to 20.5 stone and everyday feels a battle! In December 2024, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes – which has scared me to death – and I’m going to try and reverse the diabetes and get down below 14 stone by my 60th birthday in March 2026. You can follow my journey at weight loss, fitness and diabetes. This is not an excuse, just an observation, but you can choose not to participate in alcohol, drugs, smoking and gambling, but you have to eat; my problem seems to be over-eating the wrong stuff.
Over the years, I’ve learned some great coping strategies that have got me through life. I’m lucky, whatever’s going on in life, I can get to the point of thinking “things could always be worse”. If something unpleasent happens, I can accept it, be thankful for the nice times, close the chapter, and get on with the next chapter. Looking back on my adolescent years, I could have made some seriously bad choices but music kept me motivated, on track, and out of trouble. At different times of my life, I’ve managed to get through with the help of some incredible people. Ann-Marie – in the early days – had blind faith and trust that I would never lose our home, when I used it as bank security… far too often and I’ve been lucky to also have a great family, amazing colleagues, wise mentors, wonderful friends, supportive stakeholders, and nowadays, my wonderful partner Rachel Lucy. There’s a lovely saying… “the happiest people don’t have the best of things, they just try and make the best of things”… and that’s what I would like to think I’ve done.
If any musicians out there are struggling and want to talk to someone, please don’t suffer alone, contact Music Minds Matter on 0808 802 8008. It doesn’t have to be a major crisis, or about music; their counsellors are there to listen, support and help at any time.