This week I chat to Malcolm who plays the Northumbrian Pipes and runs a business – Northumbrian Pipers – alongside his wife, Susan.

I’m Malcolm and I’m a musician.

My musical journey begins when I lived in Ovingham with my mother and she made me and my brother have piano lessons. I was six at the time. We both hated it. There was no discussion about having piano lessons.

We kept expressing the fact that we hated the lessons because we had no connection to the music we were playing. But our Mum didn’t listen even after we told her loads of times so we got an axe and a hammer. And we took the piano to bits.

The bits that we could break, we broke. The ones that we couldn’t, we didn’t. And we stacked this piano in bits in the front room. My mother went ballistic but it was the end of our piano lessons.

So following on from that, the next connection with music was when I was at junior school in Ovingham. The school did an Easter Passion Play and the whole village was involved in it. And we had all learned the same tunes on the recorder in the term beforehand.

I didn’t do music at Warbottle School, but when I was 14 we moved to Essex and studied music at school. I didn’t have much experience or love of music and I went into music lessons wanting to learn to play the saxophone. I had always loved the sound of the saxophone. The music teacher, Mr. Cole, told me they didn’t have any saxophones in the school so I couldn’t learn. He offered me a flute to play instead.

I shared my flute with a guy called Martin Lamb who was a year younger than me. It wasn’t like a saxophone so it was all wrong for me. Then Martin sat on it and broke it.

That was my experience of music at school. It wasn’t brilliant. I didn’t come away with any kind of knowledge of how we explained the historic development of musical styles or any of that. And then went off to college to study drama and geography. But once a week we would have a music lesson listening to music over a couple of beers and I was encouraged to reflect on the difference between the different styles.

It was a very simple introduction.

Moving forward, my father-in-law he had an album called Folk On Two, which was quite significant because Folk On Two did a Northumbrian album in the 1960s. It was a collection of music and I found this in his collection and played it. And that was the first time I could remember hearing Northumbrian pipes. I found out that I had a friend who had another friend who knew Adrian Scofield. So I went down to see Adrian Scofield in Bolton. I told him I was interested in pipes, and asked if he would teach me. He was very terse during this time and didn’t like to commit to anything.

He wanted to see how I played before he would agree but I didn’t have any pipes of my own and he wasn’t prepared to lend me his. But he strapped his set of pipes to me to see if I could get a sound out of them and I could. I could seal the fingers, seal the thumb, and could just about take one finger off at a time. Adrian was impressed but it soon became apparent that the lessons weren’t going to work for me.

We became friends and I went with him everywhere. He took me out to one night, we went from Burton to Skipton because there was supposed to be a session in a pub, and he thought it would be good for me in the very early days. I played the pipes for 3.5 hours that night. The lessons I had with Adrian weren’t formal. They were based on experience of being with him and seeing other people play. Although I was playing reasonably well, I don’t think I’ve ever been a good piper. And that’s not false modesty. When it comes to music, in order to be good, you need to apply yourself to it. And I have never been good in applying myself to one thing.

In 2005 I met Susan and we just got on so well together. Susan was in Northampton and I was living in Lancashire but we’re both from the North East. We met on the tour, got together on that tour in New Zealand. I eventually proposed on a flight to New Zealand and we got married over there too.

And all the while we were discussing and planning how we could make a Northumbrian Pipe business work. There was nobody else doing anything like it. And it was pretty clear that we wouldn’t be able to make enough for two people. We might make enough for one person, but even that was a bit iffy. So we, we looked at other things we could do in the way of work. And the end result was we formed Northumberland Pipers in 2009.

The first pipe course was held at Whitley Bay. When Covid happened, we immediately set up a Zoom session, although none of us had any experience of Zoom, and we had as many as 50 people at one of them. But it’s been a wonderful way of pivoting and finding new ways to teach the Northumbrian Pipes.