Biography

The photograph shown here is titled West Cliffe, Seaford, Sussex.

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EARLY YEARS

This is the house that became Ashampstead School in the year 1945. I joined the school in September 1952. The establishment was co-educational. Pupils were 4 to 11 years old and divided into three groups: Kindergarten, 4 - 6, Transition 7 - 8, and Preparatory 9 – 11. All pupils were taught to sing whether they were capable or not. All pupils would have to sing a song in front of the whole school at least once a year. Those with the least musicality would receive rapturous applause. This quirky school's ethos was all-round personal development including movement studies, breathing exercises, music, dancing, drama, art, Latin, Coin-Greek , French, and a strange out-door game called Kick-the-Can. All of the teaching staff were female, with the exception of Miss Beale who was a member of Lords Cricket Club. Ashampstead school meals were scrummy. The school closed in 1961.

It was around 1958 I became interested in the guitar. We had a piano at home so my father decided I did not need a guitar, well, not in 1958. So I built my first instrument with an Elastoplast tin and a stick of kindling wood. It had no frets and the tuning of its one and only string was performed by the tourniquet method. This contraption resembled a miniature blue banjo, with one red string. Why the string was red I cannot remember. Some weeks after its completion my cousin and I decided we could get a better musical timbre from a tennis racket. We had two tennis rackets so we formed a duo. Several weeks after my cousin returned to his school I found a new and larger tin which had been home to the industrial variety of Sellotape. This became a new guitar, instrument mark 2. I experimented with two strings this time but the tennis racket still sounded marginally better.

LATER YEARS

The photograph shown here is of our school choir and choir master Mr. Barker.

Having failed the eleven-plus common entrance exams with distinction I went up to Seaford Secondary Modern School where I excelled at almost everything that was unimportant. My first recollection was being drafted into the school choir. My second memory was of being rejected as a potential rugger man because I was too thin so I became the skeleton in the biology room, the xylophone in the school orchestra and took to cross country running with all the other light-weights.

It was Christmas 1960 when, after incessant petitioning to my parents, the craving for a real guitar was satisfied with an instrument that had been named “Five Minute Wonder” by my father. This was a fixed-bridge steel-strung Rosetti acoustic with a rather modern sunburst finnish and mock mother-of-pearl plectrum guard. It was all a chap could wish for and with the help of the First Steps tutor book it wasn't long before my fingers were bleeding sore. About this time our music and choir master, Mr. Barker, prematurely died of a children-related disease called stress. His replacement, Mr. Alan Hinton was much more go-ahead. It was he who started the school's brass band in which I was saddled with the double B flat tuba, more correctly named as the upright bombardon. It was he who also introduced the £ 3.00 Russian-made Classical guitar. He politely asked me not to get involved with the guitar classes at this early stage because, unlike myself, he had not worked through to the end of the First Steps book. I noticed his book was a little different to my own being named First Steps in Classical Guitar. I noted the differences between his book and mine and decided (wrongly) that the differences did not apply to me. You're only young once. There was a positive side to this in that it marked me out as an individual, if only to be so individual that all I was doing was imitating the likes of Lonnie Donegan and my namesake Elton Hayes.

In 1963 I acquired a mandolin and with the help of another tutor book began a journey with that instrument which, like the guitar, is still in progress to this day. The other positive venture was Alan Hinton's suggestion that I form the schools first pop group in which he became the manager and one of the other schoolmasters became our roadie with his newly acquired second-hand ambulance. The good times had started. Then some chums asked me to give them guitar lessons and I became a teacher overnight.

PROGRESS : THE ROAD TO COMPOSER

After leaving school I joined a group called the Teen Team who performed a wide range of covers, anything from R & B to musical comedy. As part time musicians we had a remarkable following and performed three times a week on average over a period of three and a half years, mostly in East Sussex. We had a residency venue at the Lamb Inn in Lewes for most of that time. The Lamb was tenanted by a lovely couple called Max and Marge and as the Inn was next door to the Lewes Town Hall we often played both venues on the same day. One Christmas Eve we had four gigs in the space of 14 hours. We disbanded because our lead singer and bass player joined the police, our rhythm guitarist went to work as an engineer on ocean-going ships and our drummer became wed so had domestic matters on his mind. I had exams looming and needed the time to swat.

MEET THE TEEN TEAM

I maintained my interest in music and teaching guitar and played occasional gigs as a locum in a variety of bands. A classical guitarist by the name of Mike Harwood moved into the neighbourhood and when the exams were over I received the rudiments of solo playing from him and continued to do so until he left Seaford for pastures new. I happened by chance to meet a wizard of the guitar, Eddy Symons, playing a mostly Flamenco repertoire in a café/bar in Brighton and asked him to give me tuition. His playing and teaching were second to none and he steered me on a course of advanced classical technique and eventually introduced me to the mysteries and interpretation of Flamenco.

It wasn't long before I found work playing solo guitar in various establishments, mostly restaurants and hotels. The Classical guitar was in the ascendancy promoted by the popularity of such luminaries as Julian Bream and John Williams. For my own amusement and for the benefit of my students I arranged music for the guitar and mandolin. For the guitar it was mostly twentieth century popular tunes (some sixty pieces in all) and for the mandolin and the larger octave mandolin it was popular and modern classics (another sixty).

In 1980 the Seaford Guitar Circle was founded as a club for players and dilettantes of our chosen instrument. It was here that I met the professional guitarist, Joseph (Joe) Behrmann, and we formed as a duo called CLASSICAL GAS. Our repertoire was mostly popular and Latin music arranged by ourselves and performed with a classical technique. Arranging for two guitars opens the door to wider possibilities. We would play selections from the Shadows, Django Reinhardt, Anton Carlos Jobim, The Beatles, Niccolò Paganini and Aram Khachaturian, all in the same programme; sometimes with the interpolation of unusual sundry instruments such as bicycle-bell and metal ashtray.

Joe and I enlisted the help of Eddy Symons to form a trio which eventually became known as ZARABANDA. Under Eddy's leadership we explored the Spanish and Latin American repertoire and introduced pure Flamenco into our concerts with dancers et al. We also became a quartet with Jenny Symons playing percussion. I began to write light material for the ensemble and when the group disbanded I continued my interest in composition.

MEET ZARABANDA

My early inventions were light miniatures and studies for the solo guitar but as time passed I began to fall under the spell of Maurice Ravel. His solo piano works were complicated virtuoso masterpieces with distinctly impressionistic dimensions. I was also influenced by other composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonin Dvorak, Claude Debussy and Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Ravel's main influence on my music was in form rather than content in that the largesse of piano music is not suited to the solo guitar.

You may explore my musical output, click here to take you to the MUSIC IN PRINT page. There are also two CDs with selections of my work recorded at the PHAROS studio in Seaford, 2009 : just click here to take you to PHAROS CDs. For teaching and other matters please click on CONTACT US.

Seaford guitar teacher

"Secret wisdom is discovered in art" Maureen Kilgour MBPs SB.A.Dip., founder of re-patterning psychology.

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