I’ve always been a songwriter. And a guitarist. Somewhere, there’s a photograph of me, aged about ten, holding a tennis racket like it was a guitar. The first single I bought was ‘Wonderful Land’  by The Shadows. But it was when I heard She Loves You by The Beatles on the radio that something really clicked. The switch had been flipped.

My first real guitar was a Tatra Classic. I learned how to play songs by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen and before long I was playing in bands, writing songs and finding out that making music with other people was where it was at.

As I grew older, my musical interests diversified. I became drawn to the songs and guitar playing of people like Roy Harper, Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake. I learned to fingerpick, wrote songs for the girls I fell in love with, and sang for sunsets while travelling.

Parents were strict in those days and they had mapped out a career for me (or so they thought). So I ended up going to university but instead of studying I played in bands, performing in pubs, bars at parties and dances. I wrote constantly.

After university, I formed a band and we made recordings. We seemed to be attracting some interest but then punk arrived. The musical landscape changed (I know, it had to), and the market for people like me seemed to vanish overnight.

So I got a proper job. I got married, had children, and spent the next thirty-five years doing what people do: working, raising a family, and getting on with life. Music never disappeared, though. I carried on writing songs, and my growing collection of guitars and other instruments became an essential part of me, even when they weren’t getting quite the attention they deserved.

Then, after all those years, I found I had the time and a way back to writing and recording.

The songs I’ve written cover any number of genres from acoustic, to rock, to jazz, to country and I hope I’ll get around to recording them all, eventually. But I’ve started with an album of acoustic songs, a picture of my life as it seems to be right now.

I’ve called it The Beads of My Tears. It’s my first proper album. Recorded at StudiOwz in West Wales, it brings together songs which describe the experiences, the joys, the disappointments and the uncertainties that have shaped my life.

It wasn’t really planned, but the arc of the album explores themes of love, loss, memory, the passing of time and the idea of home. It’s kind of what I was subconsciously intending…