Well, well...and there's a picture of Ioannina in Greece. Nice, eh? (Where did that come from?)

This is where I lived for two years, a long time ago. It's also where I learned to speak Greek. (It's ALSO totally irrelevant to this page which is supposed to be about my music - but rules were made to be broken)...

Anyway, I started playing guitar when I was seven. I got an awful plastic thing for my birthday (at the time of course I thought it was brilliant) and started learning chords. I could never understand why the Beatles songs didn't sound the same when I played them on this plastic guitar with nylon strings!!!

At twelve I got a new guitar - made of wood! - but actually worse than my first guitar - it was so warped you had to re-tune it every time you played a new chord, but I learned anyway.

At school I started a band - DNA - with the unpromising instrumental line-up of; acoustic guitar, (the one I just mentioned) played as a bass; ukelele, as rhythm guitar; and fiddle, as something sounding like a cat being murdered. There may still be tapes in existence of some of the songs we did - for example an excruciatingly bad version of 'Mother Nature's Son'. We practiced a lot but somehow never got round to playing live, which is probably just as well.

DNA more or less split up (that could almost be seen as a biological joke - no? Oh well, never mind) when we all went off to our various universities.

At Birmingham University I was studying Ancient and Modern Greek but we still had time to start up a little acoustic band - two guitars, mandolin and accordion and two-part harmonies. We played a few of the folk clubs round the Uni, on one night earning the gigantic sum of 27 pence each - the big-time was only a step away!