When I was fourteen, I was very shy, painfully shy, for reasons that I can tell about another time.
I found it hard to speak when anyone was near me and even in the family home I had a long period of not saying very much, though I did write a lot. I wrote letters to an old school friend who had moved to America and she wrote to me. Sometimes I wrote 4 or 5 letters a day.
I admired my older brother and his friends and knew that these friends were the people that I wanted to be with. Jazz was the thing in those days, although there was rhythm and blues and bluebeat which was later to turn into ska and rocksteady and later still, reggae. When I was eleven years old I put some money on the Grand National and took home both first place with a horse called Team Spirit and fourth with Nicholas Silver. I spent the money, an absolute fortune, on records - blues and soul although the word soul hadn't really been minted yet as far as I knew. It was tamla motown and chess, otis redding, sam cooke and the lovely, lovely Marvin Gaye. I still feel that singing was never the same again after Marvin Gaye - or after Billie Holiday or Bob Dylan for that matter, the way the guitar was never the same after Hendrix.

As I gradually tried to silently infiltrate my way into this group of my brother's much older male friends, I got to hear snippets of music and ideas of music, but in those days the concept of cool and uncool were the current values more than anything else. There was a pub down the road from my house, the railway hotel, that had a jazz and blues club called Klook's Kleek on the second floor once a week and I took great pains to appear older than my tender age in order to go there. Being a pub the age limit was 18, but I was never asked how old I was. I don't remember much about any of the other guests, I think I was so terrified I probably never looked at any of them. I saw so many great musicians there, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone walker, Alexis Korner, Zoot Money and loads more. The most memorable was a little lady called Sugar-Pie Desanto, famous for Soulful Dress, a wonderful song. She appeared in a tight black top and a shiny, red, pencil- slim skirt with a slit up to the thigh and while she sang the grittiest of songs in the throatiest of voices, which was astounding enough, she did free somersaults in the air at the same time! Sometimes I wonder if this is a fantasy or if I have expanded her act with time and constructive memory, but I have the song on a cd and it is still terrific. I did manage to string along with the boys to see Thelonious Monk at the Albert Hall and that has managed to remain in my sieve memory.

During this time, I met a an american friend of friends who had come to London with his family and who was a complete expert in jazz. He was only 19 and he wrote for some american jazz magazine and he had the most amazing collection of jazz record imaginable. It lined his room - meter after meter of vinyl. His name was Dave Rosenthal and he was on heroin as were others of the group. Dave was known to be rather stingy and difficult socially at that age, but he was very nice to me and I used to go round to visit him and he would play me records. He must have given me a real jazz educaton because somehow I seem to know about 60s jazz for free, it got into my blood without ever having to make any kind of effort to find things out. Dave used to live on something that was called Individual fruit pies made by Lyons. I don't think that they exist any more. You got them with different fruit fillings and they were ok but really really sweet. Dave had a pile of these in his room - perhaps ten or more, always piled up in a column in their little individual boxes ready for when he needed to eat. I made the grave mistake of asking him for one once and he got really pissed off so Iknew never to ask again.

One day, he pulled out a record with a blue and black cover and said - this is new, you've got to hear this. It was Ghosts by Albert Ayler and I fell in love with it immediately. It became a seminal piece of music for me (as for so many others) and I asked my parents for it as my christmas present that year. I loved that record so much and I also knew I was part of some secret society of Albert Ayler fans; not only part of, but probably the youngest member.

Many years later, playing in a band, I was always trying to get us to play Ghosts in reggae beat, but the others weren't part of the Albert Ayler society so it never came off. One evening when we had played at a one day festival, the last band played their last number at four in the morning and I was one of the last people around to listen. They played Ghosts in reggae beat and I tried to get the leader to marry me but sadly, he didn't notice. By then I had lost the record; I had lived with a bass player called Nicky for a year and when he left he took it with him and sometimes I wonder if he still has it.

Ayler died so young, drowning in the water around Manhattan but I think the saxophone was never the same after Albert Ayler.