Last August Linda and I were at a jazz weekend in Perthshire, where at the end of the course I got the opportunity to stand up on stage and sing a Billie Holliday song with a real live jazz band, with a double bass and stuff.  I was in heaven.  To this day I don't know how I had the nerve to volunteer myself to do this.  Never ever had I done anything like this before, in my wildest dreams.  Well, the adrenaline rush took hours to wear off, and all the way home, motoring down the M90, I began composing "My Fantasy Blues Band", which later became my first song.  Linda said to me "You know, it doesn't have to be a fantasy." An interesting juxtaposition of events, including the Edinburgh Jazz Summer School, and a week-long course in music production at the Academy of Music and Sound, had led up to this moment of epiphany.

So that's how it all began: just a laugh to start with.  Then suddenly, I was drawn into this weird creative vortex,  and on an equinoxial evening I started writing songs in a most prolific manner. Strange, what can happen in a short space of time. I have Linda to thank for all her encouragement and good advice.  The songs seemed to hang together on a theme, so I worked them into a show.

It's a well-known fact that singing is therapeutic.  Having been through some very traumatic times, I was working on rebuilding my life, and was using singing and writing as therapies.  It happened quite naturally that the two became one, and I started to write songs.  The perfect place to try them out was at a Friday night session at the Skylark Cafe in Stockbridge, where I'd been going for a while, playing my fiddle with a lovely bunch of people, fantastic musicians and singers.

Here we are now, a real band doing a real Fringe show.  How did this happen? We're just a bunch of people who play in pub sessions and ceilidh bands.  I have to pinch myself.