Born early in Lewisham, where I enjoyed a comfy incubator until a visiting boffin suspected that I had a perforated colon and had me whisked to Great Ormond Street Hospital to have some of my guts removed. When I eventually got to go home (Beckenham), it was not as cosy as the incubator.
A violin hung on a picture-hook in the study. Today it is mine (the violin, not the hook). I learnt the piano (from gnomes) and the three Rs (from my mum), and played in the street in a donkey costume. Then I went to Bromley Rd Infant's School. When the headmistress asked who wanted to be a Brownie, I was the only boy with his hand up. I never got to be one, and nowadays the uniform is rubbish. At Worsley Bridge Junior School I rushed through violin exams, did some tapdancing, appeared in a ballet in Penge, and discovered Ovaltine. At Dulwich College I was made to relearn the violin because I had never been taught vibrato. I sang in choirs, fiddled in orchestras and formed bands like 'Satan's Goats' and 'The Purple Groovys' (for which I wrote lots of tunes inspired by Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler, and for which my mum knitted purple hats). Outside school, I played in my brother Roland's bands 'Blood, Blood & Blood', 'Funky Red Bag' (my first paid gig), 'Crazy People Stuff', 'the Freaky Peasants Orchestra' and others. I went straight from school to Nottingham to do a BA in 'Creative Arts'. This entailed drinking in the sunshine, playing with mousetraps and composing outlandish music. I assembled a jazz quintet, The Supreme Pancake. Our only gig was attended by SME drummer John Stevens, who encouraged me to buy a cornet and "just blow the sh*t out of it, Dylan!" So I did. Under the heteronym Geoffrey Sick I played with the A Band and some of its spin-offs, and made numerous home-recordings. In 1997 I returned to London and joined Billy Jenkins's Blues Collective. The following year I assembled Waiting On Dwarfs. The many & varied bands with which I play include "the A Band", 'Bitten By A Monkey', 'the Blues Collective', 'Burch & Bates', 'Cardboard Whale', 'the Flea-Pit Orchestra', 'Folysshe Noyse', 'Ladywoodsman', 'Liquorice Fish', 'Pipe-Rack', 'the Real Lowdown', 'Rude Mechanicals', 'Shelf Unit', and 'Waiting On Dwarfs'.
MyGen
Profile Generator
