I play guitar and piano. I’ve played in bands since I was 16. I began as a bass player in an anarcho-punk band in Middlesbrough, moving on to Manchester to play with the poet Mikey Sivori in the Giro Poets where I played electric guitar and worked with Lemn Sissay and others. In the early 90’s I played guitar for The Joes, a grunge band in Seattle, then by the late 90’s I was based in London writing and playing with the French art-house pop band, Mademoiselle. After several years playing piano in various Moscow bars, I returned to Teesside as the resident jazz player at Teesside’s Electric Kool aid Cabaret. I’ve worked with many different poets over the years always hoping for those sublime moments when the work transcends the space. My desert island discs would include Tom Waits, Zemfira, Thelonious Monk, early AC/DC and the Velvet Underground.
What Between Stations means to me
A British Musician's View
To work on a piece which involves a journey along the Tees and a journey to Russia appeals to me a great deal as I grew up and work in Teesside and one of my most important journeys, if not the most important, was to Moscow where I lived for 4 years and met my wife. Our house is immersed in Russian culture and language as my children are bilingual and the piece got me thinking about my own relationship with both Teesside and Russia. When I first read ‘Between Stations’ I immediately recalled the hours I spent on the overnight trains in Russia, particularly the dining carriage. Having travelled with Andy, Kalle and Esa in the UK, Finland and Estonia, I feel a sense of the experience described in Between Stations. I’ve also worked with Masi Hukari previously in Finland and it never felt like work, always a pleasure. You know, sometimes the most important statements are the most obvious. We are all between stations. We have a point of departure, a point of maximum entropy. From this we spend our time, unravelling lines, discerning moments, finding symmetries that float like the holy ghost. Andy’s work serves as a reminder that this is it, that the stations are unknowable, that we have always been on that train, trying to fathom the destination.