...after I was given piano lessons at six years old from scary Mr Jackson who made me cry most times.

My parents both played guitar and piano and me and my sister both remember coming downstairs in the middle of the night to find the front room full of people and some kind of recital going on.

They also sang in amateur opera companies and I was a poor urchin in their week long run of The Masked Ball until I had an allergic reaction to the grease paint, my face swelled up like a melon and I was kept home from school.

Then when I was 14 someone said to me "can you play the guitar?" and after I'd lied and said "yes" I was sent off with a copy of Rhythm and Blues for Electric Bass .

The first proper musician I met was my sister's old boyfriend Pete Boam who was into Mike Oldfield and Genesis. He was very short with extremely long hair, never wore shoes and tried to kill himself all the time. He's probably succeeded by now but he was a right pain in the arse and so at 17 I joined a punk band called Poison Girls.

They were much older than me, in their thirties and forties, and it was the first time I'd seen food like chick peas or lentils or even marijuana and I'd go home on the tube with chronic stomach ache convinced they'd poisoned me

Poison Girls were quite big at the time and we toured all over Europe in a worn out old ambulance that couldn't go over 50mph.

So I trogged along through the years doing some good music, some rubbish music and doing stupid jobs like working at Anthony Green's Garden Products where I had to assemble doggy loos or press the personalised names onto doggy cushions or print "shalom" or " bugger off" onto personalised welcome mats.

I had my brakes along the way and by 1998 I was usually always on about 3 of the top ten albums at any one time, but my face didn't really fit on that scene and I was always much more into the original bands that I was in which is where I met Andy who was booked to do a session with us after our full time drummer left.

Me and Andy worked together quite a lot after that as a rhythm section calling ourselves "The Bargain Brothers" and putting down the maddest bass and drum takes on peoples tracks and they'd look both shocked and confused but would ring us up 2 years later saying they never got the songs to sound better.

Meeting Mark Pritchard was a turning point for me and I'm pleased to say I've been on a number of his tracks for about the last three years and everytime I play for him I learn loads.

I've been in The Bays about 18 months now and It just gets more intense and much more fun.