Early Years

Many of the images in this part of the site are taken from a previous website run by H&F Recordings

My first interest was in writing plays, and not music at all. That came a little later when I started strumming a few chords on a guitar and became rather fixated on learning instrumentals by The Shadows. In time, this evolved into a dual enthusiasm for composing my own instrumentals and recording them on a Revox track to track tape recorder.

I still have the recordings of those rather primitive pieces.

A chance opportunity to compose music for an amateur production of ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ was to start a collaboration with John Ferdinando which would result in a limited issue of five different LP’s. These five albums found their way to the collectors’ market where the originals can fetch jaw-droppingly large amounts of money. Here’s an example. If you scroll down to number 182, you will see that our third album, Fly Away, is changing hands at an astonishing £900. I should add that John and I don’t see a penny of this!

For many years, various bootleg versions of the albums have cropped up all over the internet; indeed all over the world. In the meantime John and I remained out of the loop. But recently one highly respected record company, Cherry Red Records, decided to take the matter in hand, and present all five albums as a compilation.

In tandem with the five albums, John and I formed our own amateur dramatic theatre company called ‘Whizz’. Our shows were mostly performed in the newly refurbished Ditchling Village Hall, where the original Alice had been staged.

For a long time, Whizz had its own website. I’ve re-assembled a lot of the photos and set pieces from that site into a sort of homage to Whizz. I think it is clear just how much fun this was. In a similar way to H&F’s unfettered studio productions, this was allowed to just fall into place without anybody looking over our shoulders. Just the sheer enjoyment of creating something original on stage.

Whizz Theatre Company

Music and songs were also composed and recorded for these shows, and in time we assembled a ‘best of’ compilation, featuring the most popular numbers from all five shows. This never made it to an LP but we did issue a cassette. Rather than allow these pieces to disappear without trace, we have made them available on several platforms, including iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. Search for ‘Whizz Theatre Company’ if you dare!