Probably my worst career move was to settle in the Heritage City of Bath. Beautiful though the city is, in almost 40 years I have sold hardly more than a handful of my innovative furniture designs locally! My dream that the best of old and new can co-exist is yet to be acknowledged methinks! How I survived I don't know as much of my life was spent working alone in a basement workshop without any natural light. Curiously I produced some of my most innovative work in an environment stuck in an Eighteenth Century time warp.
Verging on the edge of solitary insanity (selling work through galleries and not necessarily meeting the client) I eventually came up for air and emerged in recent years on the streets of Bath as a busker, transforming myself from being an invisible middle-aged guy in a town where locals are not inheritantly friendly, to being engaged almost daily by strangers from all the corners of the globe who would throw a smile or thank me for my music. A total contrast to my first career.
The first time I busked with my guitar I earned 20p and rather like the early rejection of my furniture designs, I perservered, steadily increasing my guitar repertoire, trying out different songs and slowly slowly improving my act. Rubbing shoulders next to homeless buskers and making friends with people who later died from alcoholism and drugs, the experience is levelling and one acknowledges a rare democratic freedom of playing music, uninvited, to a transient international audience in the centre of one of England's major tourist cities. It took several years to learn my apprenticeship on the street and even when I forgot my chords it didn't really matter as it is not like a paid gig. In fact on occasion I would deliberately play the wrong chords (doing a Les Dawson) to get attention. Few would know I was banned as a youth from playing the guitar as my father said it was an inferior instrument (because of the frets on the fingerboard). I learned the cello instead and then years later taught myself the guitar.
Jez Broun busking with Slovak violonists Eva and Marie
On the streets busking I have met virtuoso musicians from all over the world and got to play with a few, including playing 'Nuages' with Johnny Hepbir! There is nothing more satisfying than to play 'The Girl from Ipanema' and have people of ages ranging from five to eighty dancing in the street to my music, a far cry from the somewhat stiff introverted snobbery of the designer furniture field.
Music is a fantastic gift that transcends barriers of race, class or age. I am indeed very fortunate that I can play by ear. Today I worked out the chords for 'Summer of Love', played by an awesome young guitarist called Alex Hutchings. Oh if only I could play lead guitar like him but I take a deep breath and remind myself to be myself and just enjoy my quirky blend of latin, gypsy jazz and Shadows music and be thankful it turns people's heads. Music is the greatest therapy of all and I have only just got started.
One of four oak benches commissioned for the Roman Baths in 1980
a desk made from the historic stage floor timbers of the Theatre Royal Bath in 1985
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