I was born at Bourne, a house in the Somerset countryside, with farm animals for neighbours, in 1961. A blissful early childhood was largely untouched by the outside world until a copy of Sgt Pepper appeared. I played it once, then incessantly, following the lyrics on the back cover while the miraculous sounds emerged from the front of our Bush record player. Over the weeks I learned such words as ‘kaleidoscope’, ‘scrimp’ and ‘flirt’, and that ‘buy’, ‘by’ and ‘bye’ could all be used to make the same sound but had different meanings. And that some teachers weren’t cool. And that I was only very small and we were all one and life would go on within us and without us. And that you could fill a hall with holes and that the sky could be the colour of marmalade. By the end of that summer of ‘67 I was in love with both reading and music and had been introduced to the concepts of wordplay, anti-authoritarianism, Indian philosophy and surrealism.
While I continued to educate myself through books, records and TV, my official education proceeded alongside, at establishments such as Fairfield and Northaw (both sadly now defunct), and Sherborne (regrettably still in existence), with less tangible results. After several excursions down dead-end streets in London, I washed up at the Hounslow Informer (not an arm of MI5 but a newspaper), then Capital Radio (presenter of sports bulletins on the ‘sensational’ Tony Blackburn’s morning show), Screensport (skiing correspondent) and finally Sky (football reporter, initially) at the dawn of the new Premier League in 1992. I remained at Sky, in various guises, for the next 25 years.
Towards the end of my time there I joined forces with a friend and his production company Special Treats and together we made some music documentaries. Three films followed, on 10cc, UB40 and XTC. As U2 were busy and ABC and the B52s no longer extant, we were forced to move on to bands with actual words for names: Fairport Convention and the Kinks. We also did a history of music festivals. These documentaries were broadcast on the BBC and Sky Arts in the UK, Showtime in the US and elsewhere around the world. The ones about XTC and UB40 both won awards in the US, which was nice.
My first book, I’m Into Something Good, written in collaboration with its subject, the pop and sports impresario Harvey Lisberg, was published by Omnibus Press in 2023. My second, The Last Carnival, about the first cricket tour I covered for Sky – England in the West Indies 1993-94 - will be published by Bloomsbury in 2027. You can, if you wish, read more about all of the above by clicking on the relevant tabs.
