Every Christmas mum & dad would have parties and the usual troupe of friends, neighbours and relatives would gather in our front room to enjoy bottled ale and my mother at the piano singing ‘I belong to Glasgow’ and other requests and I was 
already doing my bit with renditions of ‘Camptown Races’ and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ accompanied by my mother.
I sometimes used to catch the occasional folk music programme on the radio and I can still remember listening to a song called ‘The Wizard of Alderley Edge’ by Pete and Chris Coe, but I still hadn’t really made the connection that the songs I liked singing at home were ‘Folk’ songs. By the time I was 14 I was firm friends with my good chum Andrew Sugden (who incidentally helped me build this website) I once went down to his house and he was sat listening to a Dubliners record belonging to his older brother Richard who was in the Royal Navy, “Ey up Suggie what’s this?” I said as they blasted their way through ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’, “Oh it’s the Dubliners!” he replied, “Play it again! ...and again...and again!” in fact over the next few months I had him play it every time I went to his house.
I was entranced by Barney McKenna’s wonderful Tenor Banjo playing! that was it from then on I sought out every Dubliners record I could find, Saturday’s became a regular treasure hunt around the music shops of Leeds and Bradford to find any record we didn’t already possess. By this time I was already playing in the school Brass Band and Andy was learning to play the Clarinet, I only really joined the school band to please my mother but at least it did give me some musical tuition despite the fact I wasn’t really interested and didn’t practice much.
I did start to wonder if perhaps I did have a flair for music when I found I could always convince our Band teacher that I’d practised the pieces we were set every week when in reality I’d gone through them a couple of times on Friday night and then not bothered for the rest of the week!