I started playing in bands when I was I quit school when I was 18, around the same time I formed Raging Speedhorn. We played our first show in our home town, Corby, England in August 99 and our final show in Yamaguchi, Japan in November So I went back to school and got a degree in behavioural science, majoring in psychology.
Now I'm a social worker helping people living in active addiction, which is one of the best jobs I've ever had, and will soon be releasing my first book about music, not my job. I spend most of my money on books and records and my free time hanging out with my daughter and my wife Jenny don't know who she was named after but it was a very popular name in Sweden in the Seventies , going to gigs, reading, drinking caffiene, drinking craft beer and watching football and working on trying not to care about it.
I was thirteen years old when I got my first guitar. It was a period in This Shit Just Writes Itself Tuesday, July 24, Tuska Fest, Helsinki. I haven't been to Finland for a long time. Actually that's not true, I passed through Helsinki airport on the way to Thailand a couple of years ago.
We spent four hours here on our way out and about twenty minutes on the way back. Neither of those occasions were particularly fun. Hanging out at an airport is quite a boring way to spend four hours. On the way back, we'd been forced to run from one plane to the other and is if that wasn't stressful enough, I'd ran in to a bald giant of a border cop, he looked like Zangief the Street Fighter character, and he seemed to be angry at the world and wanted to take it out on me.
As he held me up at the passport queue he made it abundantly clear he didn't give a fuck if I made my flight or not. The last time I was on Finnish soil proper though was actually the first time too. The first show we'd ever played outside of the UK with Speedhorn was in Helsinki, in We'd driven all the way from the UK, a journey which took two days. By the time we got to the venue we were all a little dazed since the last leg of that journey was spent on the overnight ferry crossing from Stockholm.
