July 2026
In 1969 I was 16 years old and I loved rock/pop/progressive music (or whatever you want to call it). With friends I would regularly go to Newcastle City Hall, Redcar Jazz Club etc. to see the up and coming acts of the time - Pink Floyd, Traffic, The Nice, Jethro Tull, The Strawbs, Yes, King Crimson, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Incredible String Band etc. My magazine of choice was Beat Instrumental. Saturday mornings often involved a walk into town (Middlesbrough) and included a visit to Alan Fearnley's record shop on Linthorpe Road. I was a happy chap.
I think it was probably about this time that I acquired a guitar and started trying to play it. The first hurdle was trying to tune it - I didn't have a 'good ear', I suppose. And pitch pipes weren't easy. However, I persisted and started to learn the basic chords. By the time I was 19 or 20 I was making some progress and it was probably about that time that I bought my Yamaha FG200 from Harker and Haworth in Morecambe. Unfortunately, I wasn't very good at working out the chords for the songs I liked. So I started writing my own songs that were a bit like the songs that I liked.
I was probably about 21 when I started playing and writing songs with Bob Clark. Bob was a tall American chap who had done Arabic with Martin. He was about 10 years older than me and lived in Micklethwaite, Bingley with his wife, Sue. Bob had a Martin D28. He played well - and he could sing harmonies and clever stuff like that. I still didn't have a 'good ear'. Over a few years we wrote a few nice songs and recorded them on his 4 track reel to reel tape recorder. Somewhere there is a green cassette with those songs. It all stopped when I got married in 1977 and moved to Lancaster.
In Lancaster Michele and I played with Tony Ryden. Tony worked at Heysham High School with Michele. He was a very good guitarist. A 'highlight' of this period was performing on Lancaster Moor Hospital radio. Lancaster Moor was the local psychiatric hospital. What the patients mad of it, we'll never know. We also played at the Folk Club at Yorkshire House pub in Lancaster. Because Tony was a much better guitarist than me, I bought an Eko acoustic bass and proceeded to be not very good on that as well.
Also during this period (1977-1984) Michele and I began playing and singing with Alan Armstrong. Alan was a colleague at St Cuthbert Mayne High School in Preston. Over the years we had a great time and held a number of 'Folk Nights' for the school students, which proved very popular.
In the mid 1990s I started writing and playing with Richard Varey, a great songwriter and guitar player. Richard was totally inspiring. He taught me the importance of lyrics. He taught me that there are no rules. He also made me feel like I could play the guitar. For the next 25 years or so Richard and I met on Thursday evenings. We drank, wrote, played and drank. And we had a good time. I also bought a Yamaha MD4 - a 4 track minidisc recorder. Then recording on a PC became possible. Phil Boocock built me a fast PC and I bought Cubase. Evenings were spent in the attic alone with my guitar, PC and Cubase - we were very happy together too.
Recordings of our songs can be found on Soundcloud.com and Audio.com. A free account has a limited amount of storage and comes with advertising. I have a number of free accounts and use 3 of them for our songs. The best way of playing the song recordings is probably to use the playlists embedded in this website - I think this may avoid the advertising.
The Playlist
This is the original Soundcloud account that I used. At the time I had a website 'www.recordiola.com' - hence soundcloud.com/recordiola. The recordings are of variable quality and were made from the mid 1990's to 2025.
The original soundcloud site has 42 songs (mp3s) and is here: soundcloud.com/recordiola
The original soundcloud playlist i.e. 'The Playlist' is here: soundcloud.com/recordiola/sets/playlist
Remasters Playlist
Many of the songs on 'The Playlist' had only been saved in MP3 format, so I recently attempted to remaster all of the songs. I loaded the best audio format of the songs that I had into Logic Pro and then 'mastered' them. This was done with the help of the Logic Pro Mastering Assistant, together with a few tweaks of my own. The 'Remasters Playlist' has most of the resulting tracks.
Remastered tracks from the original playlist: soundcloud.com/jalodrome
Remasters playlist: soundcloud.com/jalodrome/sets/jalodrome-remasters-playlist
Jalodrome Music
From 2026 onwards, new recordings will be kept on the Jalodrome Music Soundcloud account.
Jalodrome Music is here: soundcloud.com/jalodrome-music
Jalodrome Music Playlist: soundcloud.com/jalodrome-music/sets/jalodrome-music-playlist
Audio.com
I've also put the recordings on Audio.com
Jalodrome on Audio.com is here: audio.com/jalodrome
Jalodrome Playlists (or Collections) on Audio.com are here: audio.com/jalodrome/collections
