1. Any trad musicians/listeners out there who have come from a punk background? Punk was my musical epiphany - the late 1970s Northern Ireland punk scene was a glimmer of hope at a time and place when life seemed very bleak and - face it! - very scary./

2. As a teenager with "issues" - some generic adolescent crap, some pretty common to those of us growing up in an atmosphere of constant violence, some personal to my own life circumstances - punk rock didn't just speak to me. It ROARED at me./

3. A friend booked The Outcasts - a bastion of the Belfast punk circle - to play at Derrytrasna Community Centre. He roped myself and a mate into helping out on the night in return for which we got free admission and a couple of tins of warm lager./

4. But, hey, when you're 14 or 15 a couple of tins of lager is pretty decent wages! That was a revelation... The energy, the volume, the attitude. All very compelling to someone who was confused, angry, aimless, misunderstood. The band on stage felt like "my people"./

5. And backstage they were - hmm, how to put it? - "just like us". No airs and graces. Just older teenagers really... with the same sort of relationship to the world as ourselves. Already - after one gig - I could feel some sort of a calling. I was ready to commit.../

6. Let's fast forward through the next bit. Years of immersing myself in music, tracing the roots of punk, developing my own definition of punk. From being initially very blinkered, I could see some sort of punk ethos in all sorts of music./

7. Johnny Cash, Townes Van Zandt, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Bruce's Nebraska album... And then I rediscovered trad. It was always there in the background but didn't seem relevant to me at all. /

8. And then one indolent summer I was sucked into a circle of trad musicians while licking my wounds in Achill after a series of mishaps back in London. Breakdown of a long-term relationship, got made redundant, yadda yadda.../

9. It was 4 or 5 weeks of much-needed solitude during the day and pints and tunes every night. As I got to know the players, as I started to be come more immersed in the tunes themselves, I started to feel that same sense of excitement I felt when I first discovered punk./

10. Back in London my first mission was to buy a tenor banjo and try to learn to play it. Jesus, it was HAAAARD. I knew 3 chords on the guitar (as Mark Perry famously said "Now form a band"). But playing the tunes was something else.../

11. But I stuck with it and the rest is history. Well. My personal history, anyway. Regrets? Maybe just the one. That I didn't have lessons when I first bought that first, cheap banjo./

12. It might have sped up the learning process and might have stopped me picking up bad habits which are hard to shift now. But that's by the by. The music has been a salvation during the current pandemic lockdown./

13. It's given me a sense of purpose and kept me busy. I've been able to grow my tune learning resource at quite a rate and I've made many contacts throughout the world. I like to think that there's something of a punk spirit at the heart of my website./

14. That Mark Perry quote again. "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band." My website is saying, "This is a tune. This is another. This is a third. Now form a set..." Thanks for reading. http://TheIrishMandolin.com