From a very early age, I would watch my dad entertaining people at parties and gigs with his outgoing shows consisting of songs by the likes of neil young, the byrds, Jackson browne and Bruce Springsteen, amongst other timeless legends. I would stand there and observe every detail of the music, as everybody danced, clapped out of time, sang along to the choruses of these classics. Nothing else seemed to matter when everyone was joining in…….I could see that it brought people together.
I bought my first guitar at the age of seven, after winning some money on the premium bonds. It was a Spanish guitar. I started taking classical lessons and practising everyday. It wasn’t long before I was being asked to perform in front of friends at school.
Shortly after this I moved on to the electric guitar…I started jamming the neil young songs with my dad, and then playing with other like minded musicians from school. We’d play covers of old rock classics, purple haze, born to be wild, sunshine of your love were the norm. Most of the time they never had any vocals! We would play the school assembly’s first thing in the morning!( which didn’t go down well with most of the teachers) And we would put on lunchtime concerts in the school hall. Occasionally we would play at youth clubs or somebody’s house party.By the time I’d got to sixteen I had started to write songs of my own, and had started to play these with two childhood friends who had also been writing their own material. They were Dom Flook and Chris Thomas. We called the band ‘The Saturnines’. Over the next four years we spent a lot of time recording and playing gigs in and around Bristol. However we didn’t release any material…It was whilst playing with the Saturnines that my song writing changed direction, whereas before I had been writing mainly for the guitar which worked great. I started to feel I had more to give musically and vocally.Although we tried a few of my new songs with the Saturnines, It wasn’t long before I realised they weren’t going to work, the band was set in its ways, we had become used to the way things worked, with Dom taking the lead vocals (which worked well anyway), while I covered the guitars, and Chris the drums. The question was where next?At around this same time, I bumped into ‘Simon’, who told me that he was working on tracks for an E.P. We decided to meet up and have a session, to see if anything could come out of it.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect, we had had a jam session about two years previously with a few other live musicians, including another old school friend ‘Ashley’, but nothing had come of it. However when I heard what he was working on now, I thought, ‘Yes, this is different ’. It was like nothing I’d really heard before.We met up again, and this time put some guitar down on one of the tracks adding a vocal line.. It sounded great, the mixture of the two completely different styles of music from completely different backgrounds had given birth to a unique style of its own. The ‘Flyfishing’ E.P. was released, and got single of the week in ‘Melody Maker’. We continued to work together bringing together our ideas and songs that had been building up in each of us. Shortly after, I left the Saturnines.Monk and Canatella became more than just a project I was working on. It became a way of life. From the early songs ‘I can water my plants’ and ‘This time it’s different’ about everyday life and ways to deal with it. Through to ‘Slagger’ and ‘Chilli Bomb’, still about everyday life, but describing how to escape it!When we took the songs out live, it all seemed to fall in to place, we were able to release the true energy of the songs and the feelings that created them, with a restless, unpredictable craziness that could leave people either with a better understanding of the emotions that went into creating the music, or completely shocked and lost for words!After our second album ‘Do community service…’ I left the group, I had drifted off in another direction as the energy and enthusiasm I once had for it, was gone. A combination of excesses and personality clashes (mainly with myself) were the primary reason behind this.It’s taken, going back to the original core of what it was about in the first place, to rekindle that energy and passion that I once had for our music. The two of us making songs for the love of it, this time with Ashley involved as well. Once again, writing songs from the heart about life and our experiences of it…..
