Aged 21, he became a professional musician. With the rich repertoire of songs he had amassed, he and five friends spent the first summer busking his way around the bars of Spain's Mediterranean coast and on to Morocco via Gibraltar. It was then that he found he had a talent for songwriting. Back in England in 1972 he recorded his first album for Bill Leader, The Valley of Tees, which established him as a singer-songwriter. His witty patter was often longer than the amount of time singing.
