My daughter Bethany mumbojumboed it out of thin air when she was about 4 years old.

I love playiing live but loathe playing to backing tracks so no Bop Hill hasnt done the live thing. I am however just putting together a seven piece acoustic band which will be playing my stuff as well as a whole heap of other original tunes.

Liberation.

I love creating music without a deadline, without a fat cat with a big cigar leaning over my shoulder telling me where to put the notes, without a clothes stylist telling me what to wear. Life is too short to be arsing about with record contracts.

I've been messing around with recording music since i was at school. Originally using a battered cassette machine i assembled weird sound collage affairs. I would bash around on a treated piano (treated being half baked John Cage ideas like dangling cutlery over the strings etc) then weaken the battery power source so that the recorder would run really slow enabling a kind of double tracking to be achieved. The results were crap but fun to make.
Cassette four tracks then came on the scene, then minidisc and now I do all my stuff on a Zoom HD16 digital recording machine, no computers.

Brian Eno, Tom Petty, Bill Nelson, Hadouk Trio, Field Music, Nick Drake, Gong.

Looking out of my bedroom window at the fishing lake behind our house surrounded by trees.

Ill use anything.