Mark Tolle

If there's someone who's been both to blame for my worst, and to thank for my finest, this is he - Mark Tolle.

We go back a way, indeed to my very very first 'on stage with guitar' things before the songwriting came about, when I jumped up on stage to play a Housemartins song with a cabaret trio in my home village of Tintwistle. A rather bored looking, straight faced bald bass player gave me the look, you know the one, the 'get on with it, I want my Chicken Madras'.

The man who handed me his guitar and stepped aside for this big chance to shine, was a chap called Barry Higham, who had a young kid son called Paul who later in life became a superb musician and guitarist in his own right. This was Saturday night at Tintwistle Working Mens Club, which for the record, later became the recording studio where Tolle produced recordings for The Stone Roses' 2nd Coming album.

I don't know how it came about, but after a few outings of drunken attempts to participate in this, Tolle asked me to join his other band, as a keyboard player. The general gist of this: I could strum a couple of guitar chords and do the one finger thing on a keyboard, which seeing as Tolle was one of the very first to use midi and sequencing in a live band back then, meant my most meaningful task was humping the gear in and out of a cellar on gig nights.

Tolle taught me, for the sake of playing in the band, how to play bar chords. He ran our band of no hope cabaret buskers in a laid back manner that combined somehow with my excitable enthusiasm, and it still makes me smile to this day. And there are two almost legendary gigs I remember ...

We were known back then as 'The Others Made Me Do It' - we'd named ourselves on the reasons why and the inspirations that lead us to join this band - and one Christmas Eve at that very same Tintwistle club, Tolle turned up extremely drunk and out of the game. The rest of us had to somehow set the pa up, work out the sequencing, count in the songs, and remind each other what to play. I'll always remember the concert secretary Bob Thompson at the half way point asking "are you enjoying yourselves lads?". We replied in the affirmative, to which he stated "good, because no-one else is!"

I guess the final straw came at one of those big cabaret clubs in Manchester. We played a charity event, one of those corporate things where they pat everyone on the back, put a few quid in charity, and it's all really only part of a men in suits campaign to make their own money. We weren't paid, but were given a free bar tab. They wish they'd paid us. A six piece band, two roadies, sound engineer, girl friends etc.

It truly was the final curtain ... after a dodgy first set, the dance floor was full thanks to the DJ and we were introduced for our second set. There were a couple of boos, barely a trickle of applause which I think maybe I imagined, then as we started playing, the curtain stayed closed for what seemed an eternity. When it did eventually open, we found the dancefloor empty, and a room that looked plain ugly, the disco lights as charming as a dirty puddle, as robotic and shallow as a broken heart left to die.

After I moved on to college and into creative endeavours, Tolle, a friend of mine called Marc Richards and myself then set up a business plan to open a recording studio. As it goes, we didn't raise the money, so I moved onto promoting at The Witchwood, Marc moved into Manchester somewhere, and Tolle eventually got his dream come true, funding to set up a studio with a chap called Bob Price, ex-Bass player with some famous 60's band.

It was there in Tolle's studio at that very same Tintwistle Working Mens Club, that I recorded my first casette of songs, called 'Dancing With Two Left Feet'. It was a fab experience, and one which set me on the way. Indeed, it amazes me that some people still have copies of this collection of songs ...

Tolle upgraded and moved his studio to Glossop and it was there that I met Buzz Hawkins, who shared the studio space and years later produced my 3rd album 'Brilliant Words'.

A few years later Tolle arrived at The Witchwood, playing bass with Smile Like Fools, a brilliant band fronted by two acoustic guitars and a fiddle, a massive musical influence of mine fronted by Steve Wilson, whose recordings Tolle also produced. After the demise of the Fools, Steve formed another brilliant and influential band called Wilson with Paul Higham on guitar, and they got a deal and MTV play, audio recordings produced in-studio by Mark Tolle.

We had never really kept in touch until by chance in 2003, I was set to record a live gig back in Glossop, and short of a recording engineer, I searched the contacts book, found Tolle and he stepped in, aided by his multimedia business partner, Paul Higham. They not only recorded it to multi-track and filmed the show, they then worked wonders with the recordings and footage back in the studio.

This work was the reason why we now have 'Global', probably one of my finest moments ...