COVER STORY Fergus Byrne met Mick Smith in Bridport
’I
© Mick Smith Photograph by Robin Mills
was born in Reigate. My father was an Anglican vicar and Mum was a midwife, then later a health visitor and marriage guidance councillor. We moved quite a lot, probably every six or seven years. My parents had three girls and then I came along, followed sometime later by my younger brother. When I was about two, they moved to Lewisham in Southeast London where I grew up very happy, absolutely loving the diversity of the area and feeling part of “the world”. I enjoyed primary school but when I was about eleven, we moved to Slough. It felt like I had been ripped out of Southeast London and brought to this “other” place. One of the worst things for me was that, without knowing what it was, I took the Eleven-plus and passed! So I ended up going to a grammar school that felt like it was run by a group of teachers that had tried and failed to get work at Eton. Their stock-in-trade was arrogance and humiliation, and I went from getting an A-merit to a D-merit in quite a short time, quickly falling into a habit of just not going into school. To distract myself I began obsessively playing the piano which I had tinkered with since I was young. I had started on guitar, playing things like the Beatles and David Bowie but I realised I was more comfortable playing the piano. I played with my brother who played drums with wooden spoons on an old Tupperware kit. Music became my counterpoint to “education”, funded by a Saturday job as a stockroom boy in Woolworth. Tel. 01308 423031 The Marshwood Vale Magazine June 2022 3
