Gypsy King

When I went off to art college in Carlisle, an old tutor of mine told me that he'd done his national service in Norway and Cumbria. And that of the two places, Carlisle was by far the coldest. In fact, he claimed his rifle had frozen to his glove when on guard duty at the city's castle. Despite my initial scoffing, within months I was a believer. I was living in the Worst House In Cumbria (as we called it) having fled the nutjob of a landlady that the college's accommodation officer found me when I arrived. The Worst House In Cumbria was a small Victorian terrace near the Infirmary. Three of us lived there, but we only had two chairs. The bathroom 'window' was a fertilser bag. And it was cold that winter. So very, very cold. I came down one morning to find a good half inch of ice on the water in the sink. I always slept fully clothed, with all my other clothes on top of the duvet, and on top of that all the curtains that I found in a wardrobe. The place was so grim I would only return there to sleep, like some Dickensian urchin.

Fortunately, we had a warm and cosy sanctuary - our friends Joey and Nic's gaff a warming cycle ride away. Here there was central heating, hot soup and an ever-boiling kettle. And always on the stereo was this bloke (here with the equally incredible violin-ery of Stephane Grapelli), Django Reinhardt. His playing is even more impressive when you realise that only two of his fret fingers worked, the others being ruined in the fire that killed his first wife. He'd have been a hundred years old this month.

Man Of Steel

My slightly dodgy hearing can be traced back to the 15th of November 1989, the night I saw the Happy Mondays at Bradford Queens Hall. The group were in all their baggydelic pomp and on the threshold of international fame. A couple of years later I was at art college in Carlisle and saw this guy, Bob Brozman, play in the café of the city museum. Brozman is the best guitarist you've perhaps never heard of. On a good day (and his days are always good) he can make Pete Townsend look like he's just picked up Bert Weedon's Play In A Day. Brozman's the acknowledged maestro of the National Steel Guitar, the beautiful instruments often associated with 1920s Blues players. Nationals were popular with Bluesmen in the pre-amplifier days because they were three or four times louder than wooden guitars, and your playing could be heard over the hubbub of the average Juke Joint. Brozman started to collect these guitars when he was about 13 and Nationals were deeply unfashionable, available from pawnbrokers for a couple of dollars. He now has one of the largest collections in the world. That evening in Carlisle was electrifying, with Brozman doing a set that encompassed everything from Gyspy Swing to Bottleneck Blues, lap steel and Hawaiian. He even serenaded us all out of the candlelit building with his ukelele. I've seen a lot of bands since, but along with the Mondays this was best gig i've ever been to, made even more memorable by the fact that It was the night I met Mrs Ten-Inch Wheels.