I can’t say I always wanted to be a musician. People often assume that if you’ve spent decades making music, you must have dreamed of being a musician since you were a child. I didn’t. In fact, I had absolutely no interest in music whatsoever.
What fascinated me was engineering – I was the kid taking apart old tape recorders, televisions and anything electronic I could get my hands on, just to see how they worked. Looking back, that’s probably why I ended up becoming a music producer and building a recording studio. It wasn’t the music that grabbed me first, t was the technology to record and play it.
At school, music lessons did nothing for me. Whenever someone tried to teach me an instrument, I simply wasn’t interested. My reports were the sort that politely said, “Tried, but must try harder – C”. I was about twelve or thirteen and visiting a friend who had been learning bass guitar. He had every Beatles album on cassette, along with a Monkees album. He put on Pleasant Valley Sunday and picked up his rather clunky old bass guitar and then he started playing along with the recording.
Here was someone I knew recreating the bassline from a song I’d heard, and quite liked, on television. It completely fascinated me. Suddenly, music wasn’t just something you listened to, it was something you could make yourself. I looked at his guitar with its six strings, then I looked at his bass with only four. Four seemed much easier, so I thought, “That’s the instrument for me.”
Even then, I wasn’t dreaming of becoming a rock star – that idea never entered my head. What interested me was that learning an instrument would fit perfectly alongside recording equipment, microphones, tape machines and everything else I already loved. Music simply became another form of engineering.
Both Julie and I are fascinated by genealogy, and as far as I can tell there aren’t any musicians in my family history. Music wasn’t part of my upbringing. There wasn’t a family band or a house filled with instruments and what music was played was not appealing to me at all. My path into music wasn’t inherited – it was started by a single bassline.
Looking back now, it’s amazing how one small moment can quietly change the direction of your life. If my friend hadn’t learned to play Pleasant Valley Sunday on his bass then perhaps I would have followed a completely different path.
We all assume life’s big moments will arrive with fireworks and fanfare however, often they don’t. That one moment set me on a journey that eventually led to recording studios, producing music, and becoming one half of OLDER. Not because I wanted to be famous, not because I wanted to be a musician but because I was found a passion that I still follow over 40 years later.
