I’m one of the old guys. I was there in the 70s, playing in bands around London, doing different things. I had a few lucky breaks too, but I was never able, or willing, to push myself forward in the way you need to.

I’m pretty sure my hearing was already fading before I really got going with the bands at around the age of 16 – I’d had some problems with my ears when I was a kid. My brother, who is not a musician and never even went to gigs, also has a very similar level of deafness so it’s a genetic thing – although I daresay the bands didn’t help! But music was the only thing I wanted to do so I just ignored it.

You’d be amazed how long you can go on like that.

By the time I was 27 I was missing a lot of conversations and starting to avoid some situations. I couldn’t make out much of the dialogue in the cinema or on TV. Just the same though, night after night I was out with a band, gigging, going nowhere and not knowing what to do.

Then at last I went to my GP, who referred me to an audiologist. She said :

- You’ve got the hearing of a 70 year old man
- Whatever it is you’re doing, you’d better stop

So I did. They gave me two hearing aids in a tin box. In a quiet room the aids were great and I was able to hear a lot better, but music sounded terrible and I still couldn’t hear much in the pubs, clubs and bars where so much of my time had been spent. And whenever there were more than two people in a conversation I couldn’t follow it. So I got a ‘proper’ job, sold my gear and turned the page on more than 10 years of real life.

Now you may think that this is a sad story but I liked my ‘proper’ job, at least for the first few years. I got money for it – money and musicians don’t usually spend much time together.

For a long time afterwards I didn’t really listen to music at all. I’m not sure now whether this was an emotional reaction or just because the music sounded unintelligible through the electronics. These days digital aids are better but the big problem is still as it was – when the volume of the world has been turned right up so you can hear the bits you’re missing, some of the bits you’re not missing are amplified too. When I’m trying to listen to someone’s voice, the turning of a newspaper page may be loud enough to drown out what they’re saying. The only way to overcome that is to use other methods – lipreading, for example – which require a lot of work. So conversation becomes a time of intense concentration, and just listening to some music while doing something else is no longer effortless, so you don’t do it.

My hearing went down rapidly through my thirties and for a long time I wondered where it was going to end but then it seemed to stabilise around 1996 and since then it has barely changed.

Being at heart so musical I was never able to detach completely and I think I still had tunes in my head most of the time. One year I bought a guitar. Even now I’ve no idea what I was thinking when I did that – at that time it was already 10 years since I’d touched a guitar. I remember I spent an afternoon with it, appreciating how well I could still play it, and then put it away in the loft. But another 10 years later my daughter got interested in guitar playing and it came out again – and that’s when, in a moment of clarity I realised that I could hear what I was playing – so why put it back in the loft?

Once I’d overcome my own idea that it couldn’t be done I decided to work at it until I found exactly what the limits were. And really I’ve yet to find them.

By early 2006 I was songwriting again and since then I haven’t looked back. Now I’ve got a couple of new friends and musicians and with their help and encouragement I’m back, right where I left off in 1981.

Check out the Music page for links to my songs… Music