I could have been a contender

Recently I had the time to pick up my guitar, which is an all too rare occurence these days. When I do so it’s an equally pleasurable and frustrating experience.

I didn’t really start playing the guitar until my early twenties and the ambition was always to play in a band. My early entrance into rock n roll was made with the purchase of a bass guitar for £50 from a mate at work. After this abortive keyboard lessons came and went, before I graduated to the six-string guitar.

One of the main reasons for eventually going to University was partly to get a qualification, but to be honest I thought it would afford me the time to get a band together. The aim was to do a Coldplay who all met at University, and make my millions!!!!

Sadly this wasn’t the case, during my time at University, I was in a number of bands with a few mates, but these bands never made it out of the cold dank rehearsal room we performed at just down the way from our University building.

The main reason for the lack of success was usually the lack of drummer, the lack of songs or the usual cliché of musical differences.

I’m probably overstating this grandly, but after these abortive attempts I decided to go solo. This was certainly the easier option for me to continue my musical endeavours. The problem of a drummer and musical differences were alleviated in an instance.

When I say career. I should state my total career earnings for performing are; £5, a glass of Glenfiddich and all the Caffreys I could drink - when I regularly played at the Wednesday Songwriters’ night at Shenanigans, Bootle

Armed with a number of my own compositions and a couple of covers, I regularly performed in and around Liverpool.

Since 2002, my guitar has been a glorious ornament and has been picked up fleetingly to bash out a riff or two that I can barely remember from years gone by. Every year my list of things to do always includes the bit that says get back into my music and start gigging again.

This summer, I probably came as close as I have done since 2002. During my period off work and when I returned from my holidays, I revisited some of the songs that I had written and previously recorded onto my trusty four-track cassette recorder.

These recordings are ramshackle to say the least – though they do contain some reasonable lyrics that have something redeemable in them, some of the performances though leave a lot to be desired.

Now years later I have a computer with a basic music recording facility, I revisited these songs thinking that technology would help transform these snatches of music into something that I could be proud of. So far, not so good. I think only a handful of these songs are worthy of a wider audience.

It looks like it will be back to the drawing board and I will have to get writing a few more compositions, before I make my great comeback.

Watch this space – though I wouldn’t hold your breath.