“The pivotal turning point came when I had only been playing a couple of weeks, I’d heard Danny Thompson was playing in Manchester at Band on the Wall with his own band called ‘Whatever’ so called because they played everything from jigs and reels to free jazz and wanted to avoid catagorization. So I went to meet him and I thought, if I go early, I might get a bit of time with him. So I stood in the doorway waiting in the rain with my plywood bass in hand. The band rocked up late, it had John Etheridge from Soft Machine on guitar, Paul Dunmall who is a free jazz saxophonist from London and a guy playing the Northumbrian pipes. I was very green to it all back then and didn’t really know what I was doing at all, but Danny was very generous to me. He invited me in, sat me on the front row and when they’d finished sound checking, he invited me up on the stage and let me play his bass. He stayed with me for ages talking whilst the others went off to get food and he was just remarkably encouraging to me. It really did change my life completely. I told him I didn’t know what I was doing, I had just bought a bass and was completely in love with it. He told me to just go for it and not worry about categories of music, he told me “people say there’s good and bad music but that’s rubbish, there is only music, you either like it or you don’t. If you like it, engage with it, if you don’t, then leave it alone.”
I rose from the floor about two or three feet at that point and haven’t come down since. People say don’t meet your heroes but that was an example of the complete opposite. Something I’ll never forget is the one piece of advice he gave me, he said: “Stay on the bus”.
I had about 5 years after that trying my hardest to get my playing together, scuffling around playing many gigs in pubs to one man, a dog and an empty crisp packet. I eventually started to do functions, a variety of jazz bands and gigs like that. I didn’t want to just play jazz though, I wanted to play all kinds of music, but jazz seemed to have the widest vocabulary and seemed like the gateway to playing everything else skills wise.