Onwards and upwards

Yes, that's me playing in Plymouth in the late 70s.
In my last post I wrote about my first foray into performance of my music. It didn't go particularly well, but I learnt two very important lessons - be self sufficient (the stage can be a lonely place) and keep going. As I played at more events and my audience began to grow, I became more confident, my song writing improved and I began to perform my songs rather than just survive them. I began to play at youth events across the city and then ventured further, playing a series of barbecue events and barn dances in and around the city. I met with various other young musicians including Noel Richards, who lived just across the border in Wales. We did at least half a dozen concerts together, and I learnt a lot from watching his confident playing style. I also played alongside another Welsh musician by the name of Kevin Gould, who went on to record several albums. We did a student gig in the local teacher training college at the top of the hill, which was well attended. I reminded Kevin of this recently, but sadly he couldn't remember the event!

I teamed up with another young musician for a short while during this period, by the name of Steve Anstey. We both played guitar and sang close harmonies, and it was good to finally be on the stage with someone else to rely on. We performed a few of my own songs, and also covered songs by the likes of Malcolm and Alwyn. Fool's Wisdom and Growing Old were two tracks I remember playing. You can listen to Fool's Wisdom on the link below. We had an original stage name - the Two Steves - which we took all of 30 seconds to dream up.



It wasn't until late 1975, when I had left Hereford and returned to my birthplace of Plymouth, that I began to play regularly. I played in schools, colleges and churches (and a few prisons!) all across the South West of England and further afield, working as a musical evangelist. By then, I had developed a repertoire of self penned songs and covers, and I had also learnt to play harmonica as an accompaniment to my guitar. I also taught myself to play piano, mandolin, flageolet and bass. Who says men can't multitask? It was in Plymouth that I met and began to play, and eventually write and record songs, with another multi-instrumentalist called Roger Lenk - and we soon formed a band called Sonrise. More on that in my next post.

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Onwards and upwards by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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