Born in Lewisham Hospital, where I enjoyed a comfy incubator until a visiting boffin suspected that I had a perforated colon and had me whisked to Great Ormond Street Hospital to have a chunk removed. When I eventually got to go home (Beckenham), it was not as cosy as the incubator.
A violin hung on a picture hook in the study, and I coveted it. Today it is mine. I learnt the piano (from gnomes) and the three Rs (from my mum), and played in the street in a donkey costume.
Then I went to Bromley Rd Infant's School. When the headmistress asked who wanted to be a Brownie, I was the only boy with his hand up. I never got to be one, and nowadays the uniform is rubbish.
At Worsley Bridge Junior School I raced through violin exams, took up tapdancing, and appeared in a ballet (as the sole survivor of the Mary Rose, covered in real seaweed).
At Dulwich College I was made to relearn the violin because I had never been taught vibrato. I sang in choirs, fiddled in orchestras and formed bands like Satan's Goats (in which I played alto sax and piano, with Andrew Wong on drums) and The Purple Groovys [sic] for which I wrote A LOT of tunes inspired by Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler (and for which my mum knitted purple hats). Outside school, I played in my brother Roland's bands, including Blood, Blood & Blood; Funky Red Bag (my first paid gig); Crazy People Stuff; the Freaky Peasants Orchestra...
On leaving school, I went straight to Nottingham and got a BA in 'Creative Arts' by playing with mousetraps and composing outlandish music. I assembled a jazz quintet, The Supreme Pancake. After our only gig, John Stevens encouraged me to buy a trumpet and "just blow the sh*t out of it, Dylan!" So I did. As Geoffrey Sick I played with the A Band and some of its spin-offs, and made numerous home-recordings.
In 1997 I returned to London to help Django to paint a house red, and joined Billy Jenkins's Blues Collective. The following year I put together the group of my dreams, Waiting On Dwarfs.
The many & varied bands with which I play include "the A Band", anemenyamenome, Art-Bat, Bitten By A Monkey, the Blues Collective, Builders Crack, Burch & Bates, Drop Scones, the Flea-Pit Orchestra, Folysshe Noyse, Hare Ramsden, Hebetation, Moldvarp, Oakham WartHog, Pipe-Rack, the Real Lowdown, Rude Mechanicals, Shelf Unit, Songs of Praise, and Waiting On Dwarfs.
