During August we’re chatting with some musical folk to find out how their story came to be. The first musical journey we’re exploring is my friend Joanne.

Tell us a little bit about yourself Joanne…

I’m Jo and I’ve known Hannah for many, many years. I’ve always been musical and interested in music. And I’ve spent 20 years as a music teacher.

My grandparents were musical on my dad’s side. And my dad plays the church organ, and so there’s music in the family. I started piano lessons when I was seven because we had a piano in the house – it had been my Great Aunt’s rehearsal piano (she was a concert pianist) and I used to sit and tell stories on the piano. There would be giants on the bottom end of the piano and fairies at the top.

When I told these stories and I would thump away on the bottom and I’d tinkle away at the top. And I think it ended up annoying my Mum and Dad.

I remember we had a yellow book that had music and pictures in it. I used to look at the pictures and tell stories. I pretended to read the music and I think I thought I could actually read it. But obviously I was just making horrible noises. So at seven years old, my mum and dad sent me off for piano lessons, and that’s where it started.

We learned the recorder in primary school where I grew up in Gateshead. We all did. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t until many years later that I was part of the
recorder club at Lindisfarne Middle School in Alnwick that I realised I’d learned to play it wrong.

The proper way of playing is the left hand above the right hand.

But I’d learned to play it the other way around. Because there was a massive group of us all learning at the same time, I suppose the teacher hadn’t noticed and didn’t correct me. And I was quite proficient at it. But I had to completely reteach myself the fingering for that.

So my next instrument was a clarinet. I remember we’d been sorting stuff in the loft and we found a clarinet. My dad used to play it when he was younger. I decided I wanted to learn.

I turned up for my first ever clarinet lesson. The teacher looked at my clarinet – it was a beautiful instrument, but it was old and it probably needed a bit of work. It was a wooden Selma clarinet. My teacher saw it and told me I’d never get a sound out of it. I had to prove him wrong!

I missed out grade one and two and went straight onto grade three. I was still in Middle School but I went up to the High School band. I remember practicing so hard at home because Mrs. Wilcox would randomly pick people to play something. I didn’t want to be the youngest person in the band and not be able to play it. I wanted to know that if she picked on me, I could do it.

She had an alto saxophone in the school, and apparently it was lent to the school by somebody. Mrs Wilcox gave me the saxophone and told me to play it. Apparently someone had lent it to the school but wanted it back if no one was using it. Mrs W didn’t want to give it back so insisted I played it, whether I wanted to or not. And I didn’t want to. But I did.

Fast forward some time and I had got my grade seven on the piano. I was working on my grade eight, but I just lost the will, I didn’t have time. And a similar story with the clarinet. I was actually working on my grade seven when I stopped.

Singing was my next passion. I sang the Alto line because the Soprano line was always too high. Really, I’m a Mezzo Soprano but the Soprano lines were always very high. But also because I found the soprano lines really quite boring. I liked singing the alto line because I liked the fact that it was doing a harmony.

Back to instruments…

So I started with a bog standard tin whistle or penny whistle. It’s very similar to a recorder. It has the six holes down the front. A recorder does have an additional one at the bottom. The recorder also has one on the back, which the penny whistle doesn’t. To play higher, you just have to blow a bit harder. The fingering is more or less the same as the recorder.

I wrote a tune on the tin whistle called Bamburgh Castle, which I wrote for Claire and Francis who own Bamburgh Castle.

We had a, we had a military band come into school and do workshops with us, and then do, do a joint concert with us. It was great. But I always thought that military musicians, were like us in that we had a job. And then on a Tuesday night, we went and played music with our friends. I didn’t realise that it was a job and that it was a role that I could have done. And with hindsight, if I’d known that in high school, maybe that’s the direction I might have gone in.

Ron Creasy, who at the time was the warrant officer in charge of the Fusilier band in Newcastle, said come along and have a play. So I did and I really enjoyed it. I played tenor saxophone and I loved it for the same sort of reason that I loved singing alto, because the tenor saxophone has all the counter melodies. So it’s got all the fun bits to play. I did 10 years as part of the band of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.

So my final instrument that I learned was the Northumbrian small pipes. I remember my Dad was always really interested in learning to play the Northumbrian pipes. And one Christmas my mum bought him a set of pipes and he got lessons with a man called Joe. It was much later that I found out my Dad’s teacher was Joe Hutton.

So my dad learned from one of the best. And I was really interested in learning, but I didn’t really know how to go about it. And then when I was in the TA they had a spare set of pipes. They had a band piper who said he would teach me. And that’s where we started.

So at the moment, it’s the pipes that I play. I don’t really play any of the other instruments anymore. I’d like to get back to it, but at the minute, while the children are young, life is too busy to fit it all in.

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