About Me
Hello!
I'm Keith, and I play fuzz banjo while hitting keys of a sampler via a metal arm with a cork on the end of it.
Blowing My Own Trumpet:
Although it's all a very DIY affair, my self-released, no-budget home-recordings have astonishingly received some national airplay - most excitingly on BBC 6Music by
Tom Ravenscroft! Jarvis Cocker!
Stuart Maconie! Gideon Coe!
(as well as being played on some other radio stations no-one's ever heard of)
Further Reading:
Although obsessed with music from a very young age, I only mustered the courage to start writing songs and play live in my mid-thirties after years spent shedding layers of a shyness described by some of my nearest and dearest as "excruciating". This was achieved in no small part by hanging out with shamanic bushcrafters in Sussex woodlands.
Soon after performing live for the first time, I unwittingly became front man and 'leader' of the unleaderable Les Cactus & the Rumpy Pumpkins - probably one of the most shambolic, musically inept groups to (dis)grace a public stage since the punk era.
When the group fizzled out, my solo side experiments became the main creative focus, eventually leading to the peculiar banjo & sampler arrangement I now use.
It's a ludicrous set up, but playing this way has helped me realise the more comfortable I get making a fool of myself in public, the freer I feel to do whatever I want creatively, so it's been surprisingly beneficial.
Even Further Reading:
As a child I spent hours watching over the family record player and broke many a boot-fair bought machine by dribbling into the mechanics.
So enamoured was I by the magic of vinyl that I never left the house without a 7" single tucked under my arm.
My younger self favouring the touch of a record over the hand of a pretty girl
In my early teens I had music lessons with the lead guitarist of 60s underground psychedelic rock band The Open Mind.
(I'm trying to boost my psych credentials here to the sixties music connoisseurs among you. In truth, he'd left those years well behind by then and was mainly influenced by the guitar playing of Segovia and Mark Knopfler. I imagine he'd be appalled at my ham-fisted banjo playing)
I'm currently part of the Les Denis collective - a loose assortment of people who come together once a year to write and record an album's worth of songs over the course of a weekend.
Some of the output's surprisingly good.
Some of it, maybe not so surprising.
I once wrote a monthly music column for the Brighton Fiveways Directory which can still be read
I've also uploaded my old cassette tape recordings of John Peel radio shows.
More about that
And that's your lot.
(Thanks for reading)
