By Steve Perrett

At what age did you know you wanted to be a musician?

I've never thought about that before, but it seems my identity as a musician is a result of drift more than decision. I nurtured many secret dreams and desires in my childhood and the good river serendipity happens somehow to have carried me inexorably towards their vague realisation. Like life, I guess. Without a useful map or career path. Just dreams. And always music in my head.

First big influence happened when I was eleven and accidently heard the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. It was a piano-less quartet. No chord-axe. Just bass and drums, Mulligan on baritone sax, and Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone. But it all made supreme sense to my hungry ears. Even without hearing ‘em played, I knew I could hear all the chords and progressions outlined and suggested by the root in the bass and the contrapuntal intertwining lead voices of the two horns. Just didn't have the language vocabulary to make what they were doing consciously intelligible and communicable. Blast!! But I definitely wanted to be Gerry Mulligan - I guess you could say that's when I first felt a conscious desire to be a musician.

So how did your musical ambitions develop at that time?

I had already started buggering around on a cheap guitar just like every other spotty introvert, picking stuff up from more talented friends and trying to copy what I heard, but continually running into the brick wall of my ignorance and limitations. Problem was, nobody could help me. No-one was able to answer my questions. I could hear the music and wanted to know what was going on but nobody could tell me what those patterns actually were. At this time, remember, there were no structured avenues of gaining a working foundation in any kind of non-classical areas or styles. Cleverer guys than me were scrabbling away working out modern theory and harmony for themselves. But I didn't know any of them at the time.

So I made absolutely no progress for ages. Many years passed before I was able to begin truly being able to make some kind of sense and order out of everything I'd picked up on the way. Any ambitions I may have entertained up ‘til then were stalled indefinitely.

In the interim, throughout all my premature throes of the wild life, I would walk home from Soho in the early dawn singing in the empty streets all the songs and tunes I'd learned from my growing collection of records. That was very important. A walking pulse I now believe is central to the development of a natural feel and time sense. I also built up a pretty large basic repertoire of great songs that my ears knew very well even if I'd never managed to play them. It would be a long time before I found myself in the company of musicians who were hip to all the stuff I had always wanted to sing. But by the time that finally happened I was ready. They were equally ready to respond to my questions. I was a lucky guy.

Where and when did you play your first gig? How was it?

Way before that all took place, though, the first gig I remember was at 12 or 13 years of age in the company of much older boys ambitious to get into my sister's pants and who had jobs and instruments and money and were of an age to get into pubs and have a regular Saturday night gig at The Thatched House on the Essex Road. I was the precocious under-age singer, strumming a guitar, wearing glasses and an excess of Brylcreem. Incipient amateurish pop. They seemed to like it. Must have been the beer.

You were the founder and manager for 'Loose Tubes' can you tell us about that and how this came about?

Not sure how many people here may have heard of them, but Loose Tubes was an internationally successful hooligan twenty-one piece ensemble at the core of the ‘80s UK jazz renaissance. That may sound like quite a distant past but we made enough impact at the time that they are still regularly referenced by music commentators as some kind of critical bench-mark.

We toured extensively, sold a bundle of records, did radio and TV, were the first jazz orchestra to have its own Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall, got loads of great reviews and professional respect, made a lot of of friends around the world, leaving audiences surprised and happy, and all as an essentially cottage-industry operation run from my little apartment in the Irrelevant and Castle.

First started milling about in October ྏ as a weekly workshop rehearsal band that was started by some other geezer entirely with the original intention that it should become some kind of advanced post-graduate educational laboratory institution for jazzers to play the music of various composers brought in from outside. Having answered an ad in Time Out, I was the guy brought in to run it and wore an uncomfortable title that I've always considered vaguely loathsome - “administrator".

Don't know if you understand about rehearsal bands. There's rarely any actual serious paying gigs in the offing. Just a bunch of players who come together (or not) once a week to sit down and run through charts of arrangements so they get a chance to at least make some music instead of merely sitting at home watching the telly or getting pissed-up at the pub. Keeps their reading-chops in order and gives them something to do on a bleak Tuesday night.

Like exercise. Like football training or five-a-side. I mean, if something else more attractive turns up for Tuesday evening it doesn't matter a jot because they can always nip along to Hackney Marshes on a Sunday morning for a kick-about and keep in shape that way. They've all done rehearsal bands before, there's plenty of them about anyway, if that's what they want, and so they don't have to feel any commitment to any of ‘em.

Plus - although this geezer whose idea it was in the first place was a pretty reasonably well established bass-player cum composer who'd come up during the vaguely free/experimental era of the ‘60s UK jazz scene when, as I mentioned before, there had been no real place to gain a proper educational foundation in the music, he clearly generated a disturbing absence of respect for his work and achievements. These young men who began to attend the weekly sessions, some of them recent graduates with degrees from prestigious music institutions, some already with careers started and individual reputations deservedly blooming, felt they knew better, and held both geezer and his music in much low esteem.

They feared they were being assembled primarily to provide a ready platform for his compositions - pieces they didn't particularly like. And they resented the likelihood of becoming CV fodder to justify his impressive steps on a career in formal music education - roles and positions for which they all considered him profoundly unqualified. An emperor bereft of vestments, no less.

Now, while a deal of this may smack broadly of most young men's strutting attitudes, all piss and vinegar, indiscreet, full of themselves, and nasty with testosterone, and while it recognises nothing about where the geezer's achievements rightfully lay within the context of his times, in reality there remained indeed some sad legitimacy to their point of view.

Clearly, this was no great recipe for success!

On the other hand, during those few weeks or months at the beginning, when the more jaded and cynical rehearsal-band veterans had already voted with their feet and after I made a few of my own recommendations about who to call, when the personnel was starting to show some signs of settling down to a crew of potentially more regular fun-lovers, I was able to see that there was a frightening degree of enormous wild burgeoning precocious talent gathered together in one place carrying an excess of unknown but very real potential.

Could that potential live and thrive? Or would it wither away unborn? With a shared vision, a belief in the promise, and some serious commitment to an unknown future, I believed that anything was possible. Still do, But it was a tough decision for me to take on the challenge. I had come back to the UK ambitious but totally out of the loop, frustrated by a lack of personal gig opportunities and the absence of any kind of supportive muso network for me, had taken work as a lifeguard again, just like when I had gone back to school, and moved in with one of my lovely ex-tutors in nice bourgeois Hampstead Garden Rhubarb, where I had been contemplating a career in teaching and, in fact, now stood with my foot on the first rung of a regular career-ladder at a nice college in north London offering regular hours and a regular life with a regular monthly pay-cheque.

However, I also knew that if I didn't take this project on and make it happen, then it plain wouldn't happen at all. Whatever it was. I could see how much work it would take. I knew it would be much more than a normal full-time commitment. Other work I'd taken on my travels, alongside stumbling and obstinate attempts to make music of my own, had bred skills as a pretty slick communicator and problem-solver. It had also allowed me to grow my own well-grounded personal theories and philosophies about education and about socio-political organisation. Management theory, to this day, is some of my favourite bed-time reading. All very zen. Believe me. And knew I had the chops to pull it off.

So I took the road less travelled.

Knowing that it meant blowing that fearful and tempting first-time real chance at the normal and the regular, for all its deceptively seductive and comfortable appeal, knowing that it would mean putting my own personal musical ambitions on temporary hold while I served some other more artistically significant goal, I politely turned down the job-offer and became transpontine, moving across the Thames and down into south London, going symbolically from the Rhubarb to the Irrelevant, onto a small squatted estate of ancient Victorian tenements where a third of the band members were already ensconced. And I threw myself into taking care of every single essential logistical and organisational detail: marketing, promotion, concept design and corporate identity, the mechanics of saying in business, booting the project forward, staunching spirit-leakage, enabling the magic, learning how to read and write contracts, forming a small label, et-bleedin'-cetera.

I did a great job.

After seven years of superhuman effort, it all whimpered to an end. I was worn out and broken but we had done very well. I had also learned a lot more about writing and arranging.