My name is Pete Gallagher. I am a musician.
I am 51 years old (don’t laugh) and predictably starting to grey around the edges. The edges are where the holes are, mostly. With hair sprouting from the ears you know you have new problems.Well I love a challenge, so there, ner….oww
I was born on Friday 13th September, 1957 in the littlest bedroom of a council house in Peel Hall in Wythenshawe, Manchester during the longest thunderstorms ever recorded. In spite of the areas elevated position the flooding was extensive. My father, Bill, was a spark with the Army and he brought sand bags in an attempt to stem the deluge. I survived.
As an infant I attended St. Elizabeths Primary school where I was taught the recorder and the cello, and I sat with the school orchestra, legs akimbo, giggling like an idiot and missing double maths for a good number of years (I still don’t get algebra, other than it’s got the word “bra” in it). They also taught us how to sing properly and joy of joys, they took us to see the Halle at the Free Trade Hall every other week.
At the tender age of 14 I fell in love with Sandra Monk at school and her identical twin sister ( you never knew which one you were kissing!) liked the Beatles, and my sister Anne also liked the Beetles, Ringo in particular. Now he played the drums but I didn’t care for them because he sat at the back and got the mickey taken out of him a lot. My favorite was George Harrison. Good guitar player and a moustache.
My friend Shaun Carter and I would spend most evenings after school playing guitars in his mothers kitchen learning the songs he wrote and listening to the Groundhogs and Johnny Winter and Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t start writing until much later. With Mark Caffrey on bass and Chris Flynn on drums we became S.F.W., and for six or seven years we rocked our way around the pubs of Manchester and Lancashire. Punk rock came along and the pubs started closing the doors to bands for fear of damage and sadly, the members went their separate ways.
I wrote tunes and formed and joined several bands through the years.
Chassis featured the prodigious talents of the Brutan brothers, Martin and Noel, both guitarists, with Ged Docherty on drums (he went on to produce Paul Young, I believe) a guy called Dave on bass and me at the side just piddling about;
Marketing Board with The Mandala Bands bassist Jim McDonald, Rod Grecko on drums, a guy called Mark on guitar and a another bloke called Chris on vocals who had a spotty girlfriend with large breasts which was why the playing was crap, obviously!
The Pioneer Truth Doctors with the amazing “Wilf” Beech on bass and Glyn Woods on drums, a three piece with fantastic promise but far too much stimulant for their own good;
Select Committee with John Price on bass, Clive Scott on drums and my good friend and landlord for a time Nigel Prymak on keyboards;
The Men of 992 with Arnie Furniss on bass, “Sbiltz” on guitar, Nick Berry on drums, Dave Moss on soprano sax and various guests, the music like Captain Beefheart, strange, psychedelic and humorous rantings; Cobalt whose members names I sadly forget but was the incarnation of my brother Joe who knew a drummer and a bassist who needed to keep their hand in (we made an enormous noise for a year above a linoleum shop in Ashton-U-Lyne but never gigged);
The Fat Spiders Lunch with “Mad Mark” Young yelling and making us all laugh too much, Gary Abell on bass and Julien whose surname escapes me on drums who were furiously quick and attempted stardom by recording an album, but the producer was an idiot and the band fell apart.
And so to the current incarnation that is The Casual Ties, a semi-covers band with 992’s Arnie “Blast” Furnis on bass, The Best Band’s Steve Ernshaw on guitar and various drummers including 10CC’s Paul Burgess, The Unbelievers Dave Gibson, Backwater Blues Band’s Bob Oates and of course Nick Berry from time to time. This band have seen nearly 25 years of continuous action and what’s more they look out for each other. Which is very cool.
Along side the rock music, I was developing skills in recording technology and with the development of both sequencing and sampling came the opportunity to write for orchestra, which I did. For lots of years. In 1994 I finished the 1st symphony, “Colossus”, and immediately began writing two more, “The Question” and “The Lovers”.
The first was simply a collection of guitar riffs and in it’s way makes a decent enough showing I think, but let down by my lack of understanding compositional structure and instrumental and orchestral limits, so the second and third symphonies were a result of more careful study and they were both conceptual, that is, pieces whose titles inspired the music directly. I then took rest, and after a year began the fourth symphony, “The Prison”, which took another year to complete.
As I had a little studio in the basement of our first house in Stockport, Cheshire, I gave some time to other people who needed to make a racket. The artist, choreographer and engineer Graham Bowers made some very strange things indeed and taught me some important lessons. I improved beyond my reason, and I needed to, believe me! The one man band and songmaster Pete Farrow made a couple of notable recordings, and Barry Lord, the famous front man with The Atlanta Roots Blues Band ended up recording a solo album with me. I took the studio out and recorded several bands who went on to play at lots of venues as a result.
All in all it’s been a very musical life one way or another, and I’ve been happy for all of it so far.
I am not married but Diane has been my loving wife for twenty odd years. She’s amazing with pasta and wallpaper and animals and me. Which is good because I take a bit of looking after. OK, I can put a shelf up and build the odd cupboard. Well it’s nothing compared to Diane's skills. I work for a railway company as a clerk in Manchester and do shift work, of course. It pays the bills. I’m not a train spotter. I just order people about.
Onward then into another shift, another weekend and another gig…
There it is.
Be cool.
Peace.
Pete. xx |
