The first years of my life were lived on a small farm in West Cornwall. There were two pianos; one in the house, one in the barn. I remember lying in the grass and hearing the sound of the piano, played by my sister, wafting out from the house. 

I was brought up in a family where making things was a way of life. My father had many jobs; as a farmer he invented and built unique pieces of apparatus – a milking machine, a seed drill, one of the first reinforced concrete barn roofs. As a photographer he was mainly employed to produce work for others, but when he had time he was immensely creative. Sometimes I would spend evenings in the dark room with him. Well before the invention of digital photography or home computing he demonstrated the utility of moving an element in a photo to a new position (in this case St. Michael’s Mount needed moving to the left). But his greatest enthusiasm was as a theatre lighting designer. He lit plays in many venues, though the Minack Theatre was central. Though his four son-et-lumieres are a sort of zenith to this career, I think the system he designed for notating lighting change is equally precious. If nothing else I learnt about the long chain of events that led from conception on paper to realisation in the theatre. How deep and tangled and multi-layered that process was, with one level of systemisation required to support the next level of more (supposedly) creative work.

Though I learned to play the piano from a fairly young age my teenage years saw a not uncommon lurch into the world of rock. The world of classical music never disappeared, but it did take a back seat for a while. For a few years the band became the thing, and though I was never really proficient at any instrument, I spent time as a bass player, a guitarist, a flautist, a keyboard player and a drummer. I wrote hundreds of songs, though, perhaps unusually, they often contained a notated violin or cello line.

Finally, after some delay, I went to the University of Sussex to study music.