I was born in Dublin, Ireland. Music has always been my biggest passion. My earliest memories are of my sisters, my mum and I sitting around a turf fire in Green Street, Dublin, singing Irish ballads and American pop songs. My mum could raise the hair on the back of your neck when she sang and often took us to the local pub on Green Street where everybody sang. I learned very early that the human singing voice has great power. I also learned that there were people that did it better than me. This really upset me, but I kept on trying anyway. In school I became famous for my willingness to give voice at the drop of a hat. It never really bothered me that I didn't know the all words.

My mum and dad split up when I was around five. I was a pretty wild kid and I'm sure I shortened my mum's life considerably. At the age of eight with failing health, poverty and five crazy kids, my mum gave us all up to the care of the state. We were interred in separate orphanages on opposite sides of Dublin. My institution was called Artane Christian Brothers School. My latest CD, "800 Voices", documents my 8 years in the "care" of the Irish Christian Brothers in what has become known as one of the cruelest orphanages in Ireland. Actually at that time in 1955 this institution was crossing over from being a really tough borstal, or correctional school, to a full blown orphanage. So, half the boys there were delinquents of one kind or another. I myself was no angel but these kids had plenty to teach me!! There were 800 of us aged eight to sixteen. Thieves, tinkers, bullies and blackguards. All screaming and fighting from dawn 'til dusk. One hundred and fifty to a dormitory. Twenty to a table in the huge dining hall. Thirty or so Christian Brothers (monks), neurotic and celibate(?), most of them resentful and vindictive and more than willing to beat you within an inch of your life for a wrong look or imagined slight. This was to be my home for the next eight years. Pretty grim stuff!! But music was to be my saving grace.

Ireland in the fifties and early sixties had many Dixieland jazz bands touring the dance halls and one day when the school band performed in Ballybunion, County Kerry, Paddy Kearns, the band leader of "The Boyne Valley Stompers", heard me play and offered me a job when I left school. Soon I was playing "Won't you come home Bill Bailey" and "When the Saints go marching in" as loud as my sixteen year old lungs would let me. I would sometimes go and sit in with a jam session in one of Dublin's fine old pubs pretending to like the Guinness I was drinking, trying not to look nervous and copying the look of boredom on my fellow musicians faces. It was then that I learned that there was more to trombone playing than loudness. "Is Danny still knocking down double decker buses with that horn?" my friends would ask! I had a lot of urchin confidence but no finesse. My whole personality was based on my musicianship, while my natural identity, so damaged by my orphanage experience, was left buried and angry, flaring up at the slightest provocation.

I moved in and out of what you might call minor league showbands for about a year or so. Then I was approached by a band with the very forgettable name "The Air Chords". Despite the name these lads could play. Better still, they could sing too. The Air Chords were the first band to let me sing. First it was just "Ooohs" and "Aaahs" like the Temptations but soon I was singing harmonies. We could sing exactly like the Beatles. In fact we copied the sound of every English hit in the charts. I could sound like Paul McCarthney. Someone else had Lennon down and another did Mick Jagger and so on. This band had the dubious distinction of releasing the first original record by an Irish Show band. it was a song I wrote called "A knock on the door". It sold fifteen copies. But this was the most fun I'd ever had in my life and it didn't matter that we never slept, spent most of our time in smoky vans and cold dance halls and lived on sausages and chips. I was a pop star!! In time I made a bit of a name for myself as someone who was a serious musician and I was headhunted from one band to another every couple of years.

Almost since leaving the orphanage in 1963 I'd spent my life in "digs" -a boarding house- with the very fine Travers family near the Dublin docks in Eastwall. For the princely sum of five pounds a week, Ma Travers fed and roomed me for nearly ten years without raising her prices. She was a true saint and I can't think what my life would've been like without her warmth and support. I kept in touch with her until her death a few years ago. See picture of meself in her backyard above.

Round about 1972 I started to take notice of a vague dissatisfaction that I'd been ignoring for some time. My life in Artane School was beginning to catch up with with me. My body was also starting to protest the dysfunctional way that I breathed, sang and blew my horn. I was also starting not to like myself. Being brought up in an orphanage from 8 to 16 I'd picked up some habits that were no longer serving me. I had a short fuse, a long face, and hundred emotions I'd never faced or even knew about. I wasn't what you would call an easy going fella! Of course I couldn't articulate all of this like I do now. All I knew was that there was something very wrong inside. The emptiness I'd been running from since aged 8 was starting to make itself the main event! I'd been introduced to philosophy by Bertrand Russell when I was around nineteen. His outlook made me doubt or question the existence of god. I was a devout child while in the orphanage. God was all I had then! But as I read more and more I became separated from the simple faith I'd so relied on in my youth.

When in hospital from a soccer injury I signed myself in as an "agnostic". While I was sleeping , recovering from my head injury, I was awakened by the shrill scream "Where's that bloody agnostic from Eastwall?" One of the good Catholic Sisters had read my signing - in form and was rushing to save my soul. I pretended to be asleep but she shook me anyway. Needless to say she couldn't save my soul and neither could rock 'n' roll or Bertrand Russell for that matter. He'd taught me how to doubt but doubt doesn't sit well in the human heart. I needed something a little less cynical. Knowing I needed help I started to read everything I could get my hands on regarding matters of the mind, spirit and soul. The more I read the more empty I became until I came across a book called "The Autobiography of a Yogi" by Yogananda. This introduced me to the possibility of finding peace within through meditation. I slowly began to rediscover the simple peace and joy that had eluded me all my life. To the dismay of my friends I left Ireland and the lucrative Irish Showband scene to cast my fate to the winds and pursue matters of the heart and spirit. This entailed playing in bands in England, Europe and America and generally having a blast.

As far back as I can remember I loved to make up little songs and wrote for many of the Irish Showbands. When I moved to England I had a publishing deal with Big Secret Music where I was commisioned to compose what I thought might be top 40 hits for the likes of Kenny Rogers, Whitney Houston, Tom Jones, Ray Charles ......in fact anybody who didn't write their own material. Even though I never had any luck, this was great fun and really hellped me hone my writing chops under the "honest ears" of my publishers Guy Fletcher and Doug Flett. But the songs, for the most part were a tad hollow and insincere. I didn't know I had a huge part of myself wrapped up tryng to be hip whenin fact I was as far from hip as Elmer Fudd. One day when I came home late from a gig, tired and lonely and fed up gigging as a one man band. My wife Liz was asleep and I unpacked my gigiging keyboard, plugged it in and started to fool around with some chords and melodies that were deeply sad and desolate. Out came the words, all in one block, of the first verse of my new CD's title song "800 Voices";

"800 Voices echo, cross the gray playground
Shouts of fights and god knows what, I still can hear that sound
With their hobnail boots and rough tweeds , angry seas of brown and green
The toughest god forsaken bunch that I had ever seen"

I was astounded at, what was for me, rare rawness of the lyrics and the sadness of the melody. Used to writing songs with the charts in mind I was completely taken aback.