When I left Leeds University in 1969 I had a degree in English Literature, and training as a folklorist. I'd been lucky enough to do my fieldwork in the Yorkshire Dales, with fiddlers and squeezebox players, and it had given a lot of inspiration to the work that Carole Pegg and I were doing in folk clubs. In 1970, we formed the folk-rock band Mr Fox. We wrote most of the songs, but the line-up was based upon the instrumentation of the Dales village bands: fiddle, melodeon, harmonium, clarinet and cello (plus drums and bass). The two albums we recorded were well-received by the music press; the first, Mr Fox, was Melody Maker Folk Album of the Year. They were raw and full of energy and still stand up well on the Sanctuary CD reissue.

By 1976 I had recorded three more albums, two with Nick Strutt, and the last, Ancient Maps, a solo effort. (Carole and I had also made an LP with Sydney Carter, And now it is So Early, recently reissued by Vinyl Japan). The record company, Transatlantic, changed hands, and I began to look around for ways to diversify. Opportunities started to open up. There were tours of Germany and Holland, and a visit to Sweden. I began to work in schools, and commissions started to come in: scores for BBC Play for Today, and Ken Loach's feature film Black Jack; music for Granada and YTV; a song cycle, Bones, for the Ilkley Literature Festival, later broadcast on Radio 3.

A stint as oral historian at the Arvon Foundation in West Yorkshire (in Lumb Bank, the farmhouse where Ted Hughes lived with Sylvia Plath and subject of some of his earliest published poems) produced the inspiration for The Calderdale Songs, commissioned by the Hebden Bridge Festival in 1979, and finally recorded on the CD The Last Wolf in 1996. Around the same time, I wrote a couple of books, Folk (Wildwood House) - an iconoclastic look at traditional music - and Rites and Riots (Blandford), which took a similarly disruptive view of folk customs.

In 1983 I was appointed Writer in Residence in Cleveland for two years, taking workshops, running a songwriting project for schools, editing two anthologies of writing from the County, and organising the first Cleveland Literature Festival. It was during this time that my song-narrative The Shipbuilder was staged on a beach by Taffy Thomas' Charivari at Whitby Folk Festival for an audience of over 2000 people, and repeated later in Leith.

When my time in Cleveland was over I combined freelance work in education with a three year stint co-ordinating the Legal and General Songsearch songwriting competition. It was a fascinating time, and convinced me that, on the whole, such competitions are very bad idea indeed.

I spent the latter part of the 1980s as one half of The Beasties, working mostly in schools, on what were generally long-term multi-arts projects. It was a great time to be working in education, full of visionaries with budgets that made anything seem possible. And that was it until the end of the decade when the road began to take its toll.

(The photograph is me around 1962 in Pye studios in London. It was taken by Brian Shuel.)