NORTH WALES CONNECTION

EARLY LIFE, BACKGROUND & ROOTS IN NORTH WALES (1979-2000):

He was born in Chester, England & grew up in North Wales just over the English-Welsh border. Sam was born to English parents with English, Welsh, and Irish heritage. At the age of six, Sam moved from Connah’s Quay to the village of Hawarden, a change he describes as going from working class to lower-middle class overnight. After moving his mothers worked for many years & in several job roles for the Gladstone family (descendants of Prime Minister William Gladstone). During that time, Sam was exposed to the historic books that filled the shelves of the Gladstone family’s castle. He credits this unique environment with shaping his distinctive handwriting style and his early appreciation for the finer things in life. Sam’s regular visits to Hawarden Castle were cut short after a paranormal experience that frightened him. 

SCHOOL DUOS & BANDS (1992-1996):

In the 1990s, he played in school-performance duos Sam & Andy (1992–1993) and Sam & Tim (1994), where he began composing and co-writing original instrumental music. He was in bands like The Siege (1994), a grunge group that briefly featured footballer Michael Owen as a backing vocalist, and whose members were suspended from school for possession of the drug marijuana. Later, The Garden Gnomes (1994) and Nurosis (1996) both completed albums. These last two were integral to Sam’s development as a singer, songwriter, and co-leader. He was often seen as the driving force in these early groups, helping shape his evolution as a solo artist.

SAM & TIM / THE GARDEN GNOMES (1994):

Tim Jones was probably what you would call my best friend and we had both taken violin lessons together at Rector Drew Primary School in Hawarden. During this time we had taken to the stage as either ‘Tim & Sam”’ or ‘Sam & Tim’ and performed a kind of ‘piss take’ version of one of our pieces from lessons called ‘Foxtrot’ with me on a snare drum doing a sort of break beat, that’s about as much as I remember. Anyway fast forward to high school, me taking up guitar, puberty, much longer hair (& being half a foot taller than all my friends) and Sam and Tim was reborn. We’d fallen out, changed and reunited with a shared interest of music. Tim was from a rather middle class Christian family. He had two older sisters, a piano, classical guitars and most importantly a brilliant separate tape deck that could produce pretty good quality two track live recordings. I’d had over a year of playing with other friends who played guitar and was also doing ‘The Siege’ (a grunge band) me and Tim produced several albums on cassette tape in his living room. We really experimented with everything we had around us, we took guitars into the garden and recorded outside to change the sound. Tim played harmonica, sang and played piano. We used a metronome as percussion & it was all very light hearted but also quite creative. We’d hand make album covers for our two copies! Tim moved from Overles Drive (where I also lived) to a much bigger and much more middle class house on The Highway in Hawarden opposite Gladstone Playing Fields where we continued to record. We did this really experimental album called ‘Magical Music’, our old school friend Johnny Roberts joined in on a little multilayered masterpiece we did during these sessions, a recording of the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ and The Garden Gnomes were born! We did a demo album then began recording our ‘They’re All Right Said Fred’ album rerecording many of the tracks from our demo. There was one song which survived from the original demo which we copied and put on the end of the album called ‘Beans and Beer’ with Tim returning to violin.

What was so interesting about The Garden Gnomes was that we all wrote songs, we all wrote music, we wrote music together, we all sang and we switched instruments. I was primarily the guitar player and Johnny was primarily the keyboard player but I often played drum pads. Tim would switch from guitar to other instruments as did I with things like the recorder. This was when I began to sing. Tim would go to church on Sundays, we were in school Monday to Fridays so the album was recorded on Saturdays over several weeks or even months during the summer of 1994. Not only did we make several albums worth of recordings we also produced three music videos each containing many live performed tracks.

THE FIRST ‘RENAISSANCE’ YEAR (1994):

As you have probably noticed apart from the 12 days at the end of December my age matches the year meaning that in 1994 I was 14 years old. I had been growing my hair which was under shaved and down to my chin all the way round parted in the middle everyone was doing their best Moody Cobain face at the time and the banana vinyl bootlegs were rife my sister’s boyfriend at the time Ed lent me the now very valuable debut Nirvana single Love Buzz and introduced me to the stairs Mexican R&B album. I remembered the day my dad handed me the newspaper with the words your hero is dead in April of 19 of this year this was everyone’s hero my age unless you were a jock and the first time I’d strayed from the 60s bands to listen to a new modern band as a teenager. I could divide this year into two because this was when I discovered the Sex Pistols and my love of all things Jimi Hendrix and psychedelic was beginning to take a back seat I’d visited George Harrison’s Harry Krishna Temple in Hertfordshire at the beginning of the year on a school trip and sampled some real vegetarian food I’d been vegetarian since the age of 10 shortly after my sister had switched. I bought some beads and a sandalwood choker from the temple and wore them out and about with my stripy Nepali and hippie outfits I take the bus into Chester and see all the rich kid types hanging around the rows talking about music and stuff and this is where the shop was where I bought my clothes called rainforest. There were also other shops where you could buy similar clothes around that time in Chester. The HMV Record store provided me with CDs and anything with a good cover was enough to make me take it home.             

THE COLLEGE YEARS (1996-2000):