The Lesession web site - about me, and how to contact me

I started playing tin whistle aged 15 having previously been put off music for a few years by the recorder teacher at school.

I then fell in with the right sort of people and discovered traditional music. After taking my first tentative musical steps on the Leigh-on-Sea and Southend folk scene I was welcomed with open arms as a musician by the Sheffield University Folk Dance Society in 1980, and have barely missed a day's playing since (even if it's only two minutes silently side-playing a whistle).

I play low whistle, fife, concertina, rauschpfeife, flute, and bouzouki, so could be quite a decent one-man band if I only had enough arms and mouths. Bisonoric instruments like anglo concertinas or melodeons, however, render me completely helpless, to the great amusement of bystanders.

I'm currently most often seen out and about with The Powderkegs Border Morris and the ceilidh band Flash In The Pan, and in sessions in the High Peak of Derbyshire. I've played with Stomping Duck, Action Space Mobile, Great Escape Theatre, The Shandanistas, The Theatre Of Fire, Skipjack and the Tuners, Chorlton Green Women's Morris, Gorton Tank, Shake The Dice, The Abram Morris, The Crashing Bourrees, The Massif Village Orchestra, Rumworth Morris, Freaks In The Peaks, Olio, Trebuchet, and no doubt other bands and sides that I've temporarily forgotten, and ran the Manchester French music & dance session Le Grand Session de Manchester.

I'm very partial to English, French and Scandinavian music (the English concertina might have been designed for polskas), Renaissance and baroque music, odds and ends of all sorts of other forms of music ... and I also recently helped pioneer the new musical genre of Bluegrass Rauschpfeife.

In the early days of this site, I (foolishly) had a contact email address freely available on various pages of this website for people to click on and email me.

This email address (abc@lesession.co.uk) now seems to be on every spam email list known to spammers : I got 'get rich quick' schemes, I got fat reduction schemes (despite the fact that if I get any thinner I'll disappear when I turn sideways), I got Viagra sellers, I got pornographers, I even got offers from companies wanting to tell me how to avoid spam, and so on and so forth.

So ...

Any email sent to abc@lesession.co.uk will be bounced. The address is left here to keep the spammers and email harvesters amused.

If however you take that email address, remove the abc, and cunningly replace it with the word contact, I'll get your email.

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