What is this simple little website all about? Not touting for business. No magnified selfie.

The fact is that, during 50 or more years in the music business, I have gone to the trouble of recording many gigs. For years, I used to lug a ghetto blaster around (as if the drum kit was not enough) to capture the proceedings “for posterior” (as I used to put it) on cassette provided the others agreed (which they did 99% of the time).

Now I want to gradually upload “inheritance tracks” to allow this rare music which only I and a handful of colleagues have hitherto heard TO BE LISTENED TO BY A WIDER AUDIENCE, ANYBODY WHO MIGHT ENJOY IT. There’ll be details and explanatory blurb to accompany. I’m aiming to put up different tracks every week. Hope it’ll work!

Does “Jazz is my religion” sound strange coming from a priest?

Maybe - but it’s true. Jazz has fed my soul throughout my life. I can’t begin to describe the joy and fulfilment it has brought me.

But what I can tell you is the story of how it happened.

It started in school with Louis Armstrong and Glenn Miller. At 13, I discovered the weird thrill of Be-Bop via a little Dizzy Gillespie E.P.

I started playing drums in a school band modelled (very badly) on an Ellington small group. The leader tried and failed to sound like Johnny Hodges…….

At university I got by academically but dreamed most of the time of being a jazz musician. I got to play with big names guesting from London like Joe Harriott, Jimmy Witherspoon, Tony Coe and - who knew where this would lead? - Bobby Wellins.

When I graduated, my dream came true. I was invited at the age of 22 (thanks to bassist Ron Matthewson) to join the top quartet in the country, that of Tubby Hayes. Working with Tubby meant that his rhythm section was chosen to tour in 1969 with Roland Kirk and in 1970 with Stan Getz. Working with Tubby also led me to join Ronnie Scott’s sextet and Humphrey Lyttleton’s band. Stints at Ronnie’s club in the early 70s gave me the chance to accompany the likes of Johnny Griffin, James Moody, Zoot Sims, Sonny Stitt, Art Farmer, Cedar Walton and Blossom Dearie.

When Tubby died, Ronnie disbanded and I got the sack from Humph, I found myself doing commercial pop sessions to earn a living. So I decided to go for a less boring day job and qualified as a solicitor. 

But jazz wouldn’t go away. In 1977, I started playing regularly with my soulmate Bobby Wellins and continued to do so right up to his death in 2016. To borrow Dizzy’s phrase about Bird, Bobby was the other half of my heart-beat. During the 1980s, I was also a member of the Peter King Quintet.

In the early 1990s, I answered an unexpected and challenging call to the priesthood much to the baffled amusement of my friends.

Ah but once again, jazz wouldn’t go away and, since the millennium, I have worked and recorded with Alan Barnes, Simon Spillett and Art Themen among others. I also assemble a piano trio for occasional concerts. For this I have been lucky enough to obtain the services of Liam Noble, Gwilym Simcock, Barry Green and Mark Edwards along the way.

My most recent musical involvement has been with the trio QOW (named after a Dewey Redman composition and pronounced “cow”) featuring the rising tenor saxophone star Riley Stone-Lonergan and Eddie Myer on bass. We are active on the gig and festival circuits and will be recording our second CD in the autumn of 2022.

I’m now in my 77th year but, rejuvenated by a new right hip - a very hip replacement - hope to keep active behind the drums for some time to come...

• As an afterthought, and bearing in mind that I have spent a lot of my time since 1996 in the pulpit as a priest as well as behind the drum kit as a musician, I have added a section to the website where, if anybody ever wanted to, they could read the text of sermons I have preached and am preaching...  An optional extra which atheist jazz aficionados can steer clear of!

Cover Page Photo: David Forman

A selection from Spikes discography: