I enjoyed playing it at home but didn’t have the courage to get up and perform songs, apart from with family and friends.
This continued till 1998 or 99, when I started going to Wrexham Folk Club again and also went to one of the first nights of The Blue Lantern Open Mic at Central Station, Wrexham. It was then that I decided that it was either now or never to force myself to get up and perform. I was dreadfully nervous about it but I got up and had a go. I was that nervous I actually saw grey but I got through it with a string of mistakes.
The night was run by two young musicians – Neal Thompson and Laura Dickenson, who were both only 21. They were so supportive and I was very happy to be guided and encouraged by these “experts” of well under half my age. Music, I was now finding, has no age barriers. This is something I have always found refreshing.
The Blue Lantern became a Launchpad for many local musicians and it has been wonderful to watch so many progress to considerable success.
Neal worked for Central Station for some years and used to book acts for their regular concerts, including Kate Rushby and Athlete. Following that he set up Focus Wales, with fellow musician Andy Jones. The Focus Wales Music Festival in Wrexham has become an award-winning international event, with acts from all over the world, including Canada and South Korea.
This year’s festival, last week, was the 15th and had over 250 acts, performing in venues across Wrexham, including pubs, clubs, Ty Pawb, The University and a marquee on Llwyn Isaf, behind the Guildhall.
With the confidence I had gained from playing at The Blue Lantern, I finally plucked up the courage to play at Wrexham Folk Club’s singers’ nights. I have fought nerves ever since but I do enjoy the challenge. Again, I got a lot of support at the club, notably from Ian Chesterman, encouraging me to keep writing songs.
I have been something of a sporadic songwriter but I believe it can be better to write a few songs and hone them over time than to churn out a song a week and not “bed them in”. I wrote a few songs at the start of The Blue Lantern and then more up to 2020. Since then I have enjoyed performing them, but I am waiting for the next ones. I can’t sit down to write a song – they have to come to me.
A great thing about songwriting, as with any writing, once a work is published it is there forever and can’t be taken away.
By 2017, I had enough songs to complete an album and recorded “The Potter’s Wheel” album with Nino Errico at AMP Studio in Wrexham. They were straightforward acoustic recording and were completed in two sessions, which also included extra songs that didn’t make the album. The album was released in 2019.
I published the album online via Tunecore and, although it will never make any money, it is satisfying to have done it. Since then I have recorded and released more songs myself, having given myself a crash course in simple recording at home and again releasing them via Tunecore, who distribute them to all online music platforms, including Spotify and YouTube.
People often ask how I got the name “Pete Spesh”. It is actually down to Laura, who was running the Blue Lantern Open Mic when I arrived with my Seagull guitar with a cheap across-the-sound hole pickup. Instead of plugging in a jack-plug, it had a wire with a 3.5mm plug. As she added me to the list of players she put a note “Pete Special Wire”. From then on she introduced me as “Pete Specialwire”. I later wanted a stage name so that I could split my social media to a personal profile and a performer profile and decided to shorten the name to “Pete Spesh”.
Wrexham Folk & Acoustic Club
Since 2011 I have recorded most of the club evenings on my Olympus LS-11 recorder and I have cases of CDs, plus audio files. I just do it for fun and most don’t get heard but I do let people have recordings of their performances if they wish. I used to take the CDs to Ian but I don’t know if he ever listened to them!
As a compulsive taker of photographs, I also have a huge stock of pictures of club nights.
As I was running a web design and hosting business, I was in a good position to register a domain name for the club and design, manage and host a website. Later, when social media became so important, I also created a Facebook page and YouTube account for the club. This has certainly helped to maintain numbers at club events.
Songwriting
Most of my songs are about aspects of life, often from the perspective of getting away from it all to escape from reality. My wife and I have had at least one holiday in Greece for the past 46 years so, inevitably, Greece and its islands have been an inspiration. This Island, My Boat is Drifting, Sea of Clouds, The Lucky Few, Stacking Pebbles, Gazing Out to Sea and The Busker were all written on Greek Islands.
Relentless Rain was written after being woken up in the middle of the night by rain lashing against the window and knowing that people who had been flooded out of their homes months before were likely to be having the trauma of it repeated. I thought “Oh, that relentless rain” and as soon as I got up I wrote the whole song in one go, in about five minutes. The tune followed quickly as soon as I got hold of the guitar.
Fate was written after a friend told me that he had come across a house fire as he was walking into town to an open mic night. He was walking along a quiet street of terraced houses when he heard knocking. When he looked, there was smoke coming out of a window and someone was trapped in the hall and couldn’t open the door. There was no one else around but my friend managed to barge the door open and rescue the man, who was unhurt. The song picks up on the fact that had no one been in the street it could have been a very different story. We can lose control of our lives very quickly and then rely on others to assist.
I have released one protest song “Now Your War is Over”. If the cap fits…!
My Lockdown song “Musical Chairs” was released in 2021 and asks how we would be when things returned to “normal”.
“Liberty” was written from a poem by Tim Harris, who asked me if I could make it into a song. I made slight changes to the lyrics to make it flow better and it was well received.
Influences
Apart from earlier songs from The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Donovan and many others, the strongest influences are from when I first got a real interest in songs accompanied by acoustic guitar in the early ’70s, such as James Taylor, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Harvey Andrews and Allan Taylor, who played at Wrexham Folk Club and I recorded on a cassette recorder.
Since I got back into playing I have picked up songs by many others, including some that I have heard live at local clubs, notably Kieran Halpin. I love his songwriting and he has been a big influence.
The songs I always go back to though and are always well received when I play them, even to young audiences, are those for the early 70s such as James Taylor’s Fire & Rain, Neil Young’s, Heart of Gold and Cat Stevens’ “Father & Son”. Also, older songs from Paul Simon such as Kathy’s Song and America.
