Revisiting my Influences: GUITARS

 

My first guitar, back in early 1972, came from Kays’ Catalogue and was one their basic electric models; rough strings, tinny sound and a whammy bar that put it out of tune every time you used it. I learned to play simple chords on it, using headphones instead of an amplifier.

About a year later I upgraded to a lovely big black Eko Jumbo acoustic that rang like a bell and had me learning quieter more melodic stuff than I’d been attempting before that.

About a year after that I got a Japanese Les Paul copy and an amplifier that saw me back to trying to learn some rockier stuff although I never quite developed the finger speed needed for rock solos. The Eko remained my weapon of choice and I was (very slowly) learning things like Angie and Wild Horses along with Dylan and Donovan things. Played a bit of stuff with friends in garages and bedrooms around this time too… you wouldn’t call us a band, but we had ambitions of becoming one although it never happened. I was also singing in school choirs – in the bass line in The Mikado and in a small group doing medieval madrigals that had us gigging around the local area and giving me a taste for performing in front of crowds.

I got into Scottish folk music for a few years in my late teens / early twenties, wrote some songs, and replaced both the Eko and the Les Paul copy with an Ovation acoustic. This was in 1979, and the fibreglass back things were pretty new at the time (and pretty expensive) but I wanted it, so I got it although it put me in a financial hole that had me selling off books and records in order to eat that term. Around then I also got a mandolin and my folk credentials were cemented with a couple of live gigs that were a lot of fun.

A Washburn 12 string came along about then too. It didn’t come to London with me in ’82 when I left Glasgow, but the Ovation (and the mandolin) did. The Ovation was with me for a long time, in tandem with another Japanese electric, a Fender Squire Strat that I used to bash away at to take out my frustration at the way my life was going in the mid ’80s.

I lost interest for a while in the ’90s… eventually I gave both the Ovation and the Strat away, one to a younger brother in law, one to a nephew.

Then, in the early 2000s, I got the urge again, got a Tanglewood acoustic and an Ozark Dobro… and mostly left them unplayed although I found just about enough time to learn some bottleneck blues techniques on the Dobro. I sold the Tanglewood not long before leaving Scotland to come to Newfoundland in 2007. The Dobro I still have although it has been gathering dust for a while now.

Fast forward … and possibly due to COVID confinement, I got the urge one more time. I bought a lovely wee Fender acoustic, and I’ve been playing every day. I’ve even got some ideas for songs, so the circle is closing, over fifty years in the making.

There’s one song in particular I’m developing, and it’s the one that features in my Sigils and Totems work. It’s called He Sleeps in the Depths and it’s a folky, shouty thing I’m having fun with. I might even get round to doing it on YouTube if you’re unlucky.

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Book Review: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein

By now there are few people who haven't at least heard of LOTR, and most of them have an opinion. There are the fans, almost fanatics, and there are the people who have read fifty pages or so, sometimes five or six times, but just can't get it, and don't understand what the fuss is about. I might have been one of them, if it hadn't been for an accident.

Revisiting my influences: WEIRD SCIENCE

 

The first science fiction I ever encountered was Fireball XL5, one of the early Gerry Anderson productions. I was only about four years old, but I was hooked immediately on spaceships and adventure in the stars.

I grew up during the exciting part of the space race, staying up nights to watch space-walks then moon missions, eyes wide in wonder as Armstrong made his small step.

At the same time Gerry Anderson had continued to thrill me, with Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. The Americans joined in, with Lost in Space then, as color TV reached Scotland, Star Trek hit me full between the eyes.

And then there's Quatermass. Always Quatermass. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT in particular did much to mould my experience in the genre with its glorious melding of science, horror and horrific science. 

Also at the same time, my reading was gathering pace. I'd started on comics early with Batman and Superman. As the '60s drew to a close, Marvel started to take over my reading habits more, and I made forays into reading novels; Clarke and Asimov at first, and most of the Golden-Age works.

By the early Seventies I had graduated to the so-called New Wave, Moorcock, Ellison, Delaney and Zelazny dominating my reading, and they led me on to reading, then writing horror.

Those who know me know that I was once, almost, a scientist. 

Even from an early age it was what I wanted to do. Actually, I wanted to be a spaceman ( the fastest man alive ), but when I started into the studying in the ’70s, I found myself drawn towards biology and chemistry more than to maths and physics. I’ve retained a life-long love of all things pertaining to outer space, but when it came to time to choose a path beyond school, I went with the Biological Sciences and graduated in Botany from Glasgow University, and even made a stab at some real science for a couple of years before I was caught in the IT trap in the early ’80s. and ended up a corporate wage-slave in the City of London.

And there the science ended, for a while.

But in 2007 I escaped the world of corporate IT, came to Newfoundland, and science crept in again, this time in my writing. Scientists began to show up in the likes of THE CREEPING KELP, NIGHT OF THE WENDIGO, THE DUNFIELD TERROR, THE PLASM, FUNGOID and my Professor Challenger pastiches. There have also been a burgeoning number of short stories.

The scientists been getting even louder still recently. Weird Science concepts have been creeping on to my S-Squad series at regular intervals, and I've just delivered a scifi / horror crossover novella, A MURMURATION OF OPAS, to Weird House Press. There will be more.

In my work you’ll find mad scientists, bad scientists, and mad, bad scientists.

This is who I am.

This is what I do.

Revisiting my influences: LONDON

I went to London to seek my fortune back in early 1982. My relationship with the Old Lady proved to be a love affair that I still carry with me even though it lasted less than ten years.

For the first few months I was living and working outside the main city while making forays into the museums, cinemas and pubs of the city center at weekends. But the love only came after I started working in the old city itself. I got a job in a converted warehouse in Devonshire Square near Liverpool Street Railway Station. My desk looked out over Petticoat Lane Market, my lunchtime wanderings took me to the curry cafes of Brick Lane and the bars of Whitechapel in the footsteps of the Ripper. I was supporting computer systems down in the financial sector, and my wanderings down there took me to Bank and Monument, to indoor markets and gorgeous old pubs, to tiny churches and cemeteries hidden away in courtyards, and across the river, to Borough Market and even older pubs, like The George and The Market Porter. If you’re after a true whiff of old London, there’s few finer places to seek it.

A few years later we moved office to Farringdon Road and more old markets, Guardian journalists in the pubs and forays into the area between there and Euston. Then we settled in High Holborn which for me meant Skoob Bookshop, the British Museum and yes, more pubs, in the Victorian splendor of The Princess Louise, the high gothic weirdness of The City of Yorke and many more, including forays down to Fleet Street for some Dickensian musings in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and the Strand for The George and the Coal Hole under The Savoy for some slices of theatrical history, and many other bars, too numerous to mention or too lost to memory in alcoholic poisoning of the brain cells.

For a while London got into my soul. I got able to find my way around from just about anywhere inside the M25, I lived south of the river in Bromley, Beckenham and Ladywell, where I discovered that the flat I’d bought didn’t just have a bogeyman in the stairwell, but that the Old Lady’s Well bubbled up in the cellar, to my eventual enormous financial cost, But at least I got to know the similarly drunken patrons of a variety of night buses after concerts or drinking sessions during my time there.

London is indeed a fine old city. Almost, but not quite, the equal of Edinburgh or Glasgow in my heart. My real love for it came from not just the place, but from the people I met there. I met many Londoners, but I also met people from all over the UK, people from India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Poland, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Greece, Turkey and many other far flung spots. I made great friends and a lot of them are still friends today, more than 35 years on. We spent many happy hours in those aforementioned old bars, telling each other stories. They heard mine, and I heard theirs, and the telling of them bound, and binds us in friendship all across the globe to this day. That’s been better than any fortune to me over the years.

Towards the end of my time in the Old Lady, I met my wife there too, in another of the old bars, and our courtship was spent over beer, film and theatre around Covent Garden and in the West End.

We got married in May 1981, left London and I returned to Scotland but some of the Old Lady came with me, in my friends and, eventually, in my own writing. When I started to drift into writing Victoriana, it was London that called loudest to me, from Baker Street and Cheyne Walk, from Bank to Embankment and yes, from bar to bar.

I’ve written many tales based in the old city, for Carnacki, Challenger, Holmes and a variety of characters of my own. The most recent visits are in my Inspector Lestrade collection from Weird House Press, THE BLACK TEMPLE AND OTHER STORIES.

There will be more.