About the Author

Luck! Has it played a large part in your life? I began to wonder if my life was being affected by luck or other forces that I did not understand.

Around the turn of the millennium, events outside my control had started to alter everything. Within a year my marriage had ended, I had met Avril and had changed both my location and my occupation. After forty years of making specialist audio equipment, my last email to my colleagues said that, “…as of Christmas 2001, I will be leaving to be pursue a new career as a singer/songwriter”.

Career? Not in the normal sense. I had no choice: I had to write. What would I do with my songs and stories? I was pensioned-off and having far too much fun globetrotting and motor-homing to consider a career. I was a true amateur, driven only by love of my subject. Writing about my discoveries and making the necessary visits to the recording studio took up as much time as I could spare. With such demands on my time, I needed to prioritise.

Call it luck, fate, spirit, whatever, I was beginning to understand that something gives us a nudge towards a decision. First it is a gentle prod or two and, if that doesn’t work, there is a “sledge-hammer hint”.

Then came the first nudge. There it was among my “scrapbook” items, the receipt dated 1957 for my first guitar. Why not celebrate the past fifty years by building a website to house the songs and stories that had suddenly demanded to be written?

Music was a much stronger influence in my family than I ever imagined. Dad had told me that he used to have a dance band in the 1920s but he rarely mentioned it because, so very different from today, popular music and its purveyors were regarded as inferior and slightly dodgy. In fact it was my cousins in Australia who provided the postcard image of the band.

Their family were “£20 Poms” when their father, my Uncle Ernie, and his younger brother, our Uncle Stewart, emigrated to start a farm together. Stewart, sitting at the piano while my Dad poses with his violin, was then a teenager. He was a charming man and a skilled exponent of “stride piano”, but only as a hobby. When he eventually retired, he had become manager of one of the largest sheep stations in Queensland.

Using capital earned with the dance band, my Dad went on to establish Vitavox Acoustics in 1931 which, in one form or another, I served from 1961 to 2001, designing and building rugged microphones and hi-fi and public address loudspeakers for use by rock-bands to the Royal Navy, cinemas to swimming pools, football stadia to factory-floors.

The Young family role as makers for music-makers goes back centuries. The census records Alexander Farquharson Young and his son David conducting a sizeable business as organ-builders in Glamis, Scotland.

Here I am seated beneath a 1932 painting by Bertram Priestman RA – featuring the mysterious wreck that inspired the ballad Kirton Creek

At fourteen, I was fortunate to be sent to Merchant Taylors’ School in Northwood where music of every type was encouraged. An infamous “Old Boy” was the jazz trumpeter Mick Mulligan. Perhaps I followed in his footsteps to play trumpet in the school jazz band. I also played guitar in the skiffle group which introduced me to Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Jesse Fuller and many others. After my schooldays I went for a trumpet audition in a traditional jazz band and was advised to choose between that and the guitar. The pressures of running a business and raising a family saved me from that choice and music making was a rare treat.

Fast-forward to the eve of the millennium when Avril revived my interest in folk music and introduced me to the paradoxically named “contemporary” folk-music scene. In addition to the members’ superb musical talent, the Tudor Folk Club in Chesham hosted the likes of Mike Silver, Huw Williams, Dave Gibb and many others. Avril bought me four hours in a local recording studio for my 60th birthday where we made a CD of which we sold a few copies in aid of Cancer Research UK.

Perhaps the latent jazz-man in me had put a melody to one or two lyrics from other people but this started me writing lyrics. After moving to Diss, we soon found the Waveney Folk Club in Lowestoft and it was there that I heard the Australian, Bernard Carney and it was his range of subject that further inspired me to write my own material.

Diss is such a fascinating town that, without really noticing it, I started to take an interest in local stories, both historic and and in the making. At the nearby village of Shelfanger Avril and I studied a range of spiritual subjects that taught me to respect the old phrase I’ll do it when the spirit moves me. I am compelled to write and sometimes aspects of a historic-fiction story I have written turn out to be facts. Occasionally, ideas that I have imagined for the future do come true. Encouraging as this is, I continue to doubt myself and it sometimes takes a “sledgehammer hint” to help me bring a project to a conclusion. This is the most blatant example that I can recall:-

On Thursday 1st February 2007, Avril was driving me past the BT building at Martlesham Heath, on the A12. I wanted to get some more photos of the Orwell Bridge and the BT tower at Adastral Park for an article on Just the Mile, my song about the redundant telecoms engineer who beats clinical depression, and becomes an AA patrol man.

I took this shot of the tower through the open window of the car as we drove along. We had a shock when we down-loaded the picture to find an AA van, snapped in that split second it was in line with the BT tower.

This photo was taken in September 2007 when Avril and I made our first visit to North Cyprus which inspired the song, Esentepe - a prayer for Cyprus. As you can see, it is beautiful. It is home to an ex-pat community that has inspired a number of songs and a talk named after the weekly English language newspaper, Cyprus Today. We go back every year.