I had a rich musical childhood playing every kind of music performing with choirs and orchestras at school in the 1950s and early 1960s. I nearly became a professional oboe player but ended up in London in 1963 studying architecture instead. I really wanted to be a jazz pianist after being introduced in the late 50s early 60s to Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Thelonius Monk etc by my eldest brother. But London was disappointing as the jazz scene was pretty dull and it didn't have much soul to it. In 1961 I went to see the John Coltrane quartet with Eric Dolphy in London. The supporting act was the Dizzy Gillespie big band with Joe Zawinul on piano. Coltrane just played My Favourite Things for 30 minutes. For a 16 year old young white boy from funny old England it was quite an experience. 

But in London whilst still studying I met Benny Carruthers, who starred in a John Casavettes impro film Shadows as the Ray Ban wearing cool young dude caught up in a mixed race drama in Brooklyn. The Deep, who were the Architectural School's own rock group made our first single with him for Parlophone in 1965 with American producer Shel Talmy who had produced all the Who's and Kinks big hits. Bob Dylan (Benny's buddy) had given us a poem called Jack of Diamonds which was the title. He brought along Jimmy Page as a session guitarist. Of course it sank without trace and Benny, who I got on well with, gave up singing and went on to star in The Dirty Dozen. Then I had my own band for a time playing a kind of swinging Hammond Organ rock jazz with Boz Burrell as singer who later played with Bad Company, a huge stadium band in the USA. He died here in Spain a few years ago. We did one gig with the Hollies and the Yardbirds in the same tent at an Oxford University May Ball. The place was thick with English pop groups then. 

1967 I joined (playing keyboards and flute) a working successful UK mod group called the Action. Mostly Motown material tinged by then with LSD. Producer: George Martin (of Beatles fame) and we toured the UK with lots of radio but no TV.
1968-69 The Action became Mighty Baby at the beginning of the flower power period in London. A 5 piece band similar to the Grateful Dead, we were big on the free concert circuits as flower power gripped the UK. We signed with Marshal Chess of Chess Records though we never got to America. 
1969/70 After gigs with the Byrds and Love we decided to be more country oriented and mellow though we were really wild jazz rockers underneath. We made two albums recently re-released on CD. We gigged with just about everyone from Hendrix, Dylan and The Band, the Stones (many concerts), Cream, The Who and many, many more. But we were totally un-commercial and it couldn't last. More like working for a charity but we had big fans like Phil Collins.

I also did a lot of session work on keyboards with many up and coming folk artists wanting electric backing groups. The late John Martyn (Bless the Weather) on Island was one of the better albums I played on. Sandy Denny, Richard and Linda Thompson, Mark Bolan, Stevie Winwood, Rick Gretch, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, 10cc and so on were all people I worked with then. London was a small place in the late 1960s and you tended to know everyone and there weren't many good pianists around.

1970 was a big change year and four of Mighty Baby all ended up in Morocco having signed up, so to speak, with a famous sufi shaykh (Muhammad bin al- Habib) in Meknes near Fez. The world was changing. It broke the band and the one who didn't join the sufis left and started a band called Ace who went to the top of the charts in the US and the UK with...How Long (has this been going on)...actually a great record. The remains of Mighty Baby then made an acoustic meditation record for Chris Blackwell (Island records) as the Habibiyya which was a result of our trips to Morocco. A curious record on A&M but much loved on the west coast in certain circles. Now a hip hop cult record.

From then till now I have worked mostly with very traditional Moroccan Andalusi classical singing and musical groups and produced a couple of albums with them. Apart from doing a few fund raisers I have kept away from performing though I have written and recorded compulsively masses of stuff over the years with a not very good privately released CD in 2004. In 1997 I came out of retirement to do a concert with Cat Stevens in Sarajevo in front of 10,000 after we put out a post Bosnian war charity CD, I Have No Cannons That Roar.