I have spent a significant portion of my life playing music. I learnt the recorder in primary school and enjoyed it; I also learnt to read music. At home, my Dad would play his guitars quite frequently, rotating through a collection of skiffle/blues numbers. He'd been part of a skiffle band at one point, and had played a gig or three. I didn't pick up the guitar much then, but I enjoyed his St John Infirmaries and Forever Blowing Bubbleses and whatnot. And I really liked his and Mum's small collection of records: Dylan's Freewheeling, The Beatles "Red Album" collection, a Buddy Holly collection. I got seriously into the Beatles around the age of 10, pulling all the biographies I could find from the local libraries.

I think it was the second year of secondary school I started playing the cello. Unfortunately, it was only a year or so later that I gave it up. Not that I didn't love the instrument, but I was having such a hard time from my peers who had latched on to my "posh" up-country accent (I'd moved to Cornwall from Hertfordshire), and my posh, long name (Alexander David Shadrach Hooper, from which,of course, Shag-rag was easily derived), and my slightly effeminate look and nature.

So I gave up the cello in a pathetic attempt to appear more acceptable to my peers. But I'm digressing. Things did pick up and, I think in the fourth year, I started to play the guitar. My friends, and therefore I, were listening to hard rock and heavy metal at this time: Status Quo, AC/DC, Judas Priest, The Scorpions, Motorhead. Most of it I have no time for these days, except in the most nostalgic of moments. So yes, I started playing the guitar, picking out riffs, going to classical lessons, finding local folk and rock players to teach or just jam with me.

I liked it. A lot. By the time I was 18 I was playing up to 8 hours a day, digging in to my A-level revision time. Well, OK, the 8-hours-a-day probably kicked in after the A-levels, but it was adding to the distraction; that and the adolescent poetry-writing.

So when I failed to get the grades to take me to the university courses I'd been offered places on, it seemed only natural to drop the academic path and pursue the rock and roll dream with my emerging band, Yellow Van.

I'd been playing with a friend, Patrick, for quite some time. We'd play down at the Blue Anchor's folk nights sometimes. I was starting to write songs, so was Patrick. We borrowed a bass player from another band down the folk club, enlisted my brother, who was becoming a really good drummer even then (he was 16 or so), and off we went.

There was quite a good scene in West Cornwall those days and, luckily for us, we rode the wave of it, becoming locally famous. Maybe not too hard in such a small community, but fun! It was kind of falling apart by 1988, though, and so was much of my personal life.

Those events caused me to take flight; I landed in Stowmarket, near Ipswich, as a lodger in the house of a friend of a friend who was . . . a guitarist. What's more he had a band, which had space for another guitarist. So I played with Emily's House for a while; I think we did a handful of gigs before I was accepted into a London-based Irish band off the back of an audition I went to in Brixton. This was The Baby Snakes.