“I spent a year in Copenhagen and met up with a friend, Donal Coghlan, there. We were both in our mid twenties and a little fed-up of the band thing, how the drummer always leaves just as something’s going to happen! We borrowed some money from our parents and set ourselves up so we could write and record as a duo, under the name of Hinterland. The demos came to the attention of Chris Blackwell at Island Records and we got a deal and released a record on Island Records around 1990.
It was around that time I reconnected with another dear friend of mine, engineer/producer Kevin Killen, who I’d worked with at Lombard. He went on to do the Peter Gabriel ‘So’ record, U2 stuff, Kate Bush, Elvis Costello; he’d become this international star producer. He’d mixed the Hinterland record, then he got me involved in a couple of projects in New York as a guitar player. Once the band thing had finished up, as they do – the whole Hinterland thing took 3-4 years to come and go - I moved to New York and started working as a guitar player.
I still found myself writing, and I felt I had my own distinctive way of playing guitar, which had become even more focussed through the necessity of finding yourself and your voice in a place like New York, which is full of fantastic guitar players. And so I had this solo project called Spooky Ghost, which I still do. I play live and do a lot of looping and ambient stuff and I’ve made a couple of records. I needed something where I could play the way I wanted to play, and that’s what Spooky Ghost became.
We’d all come through the 80’s where we’d tried using sequencers and click tracks and it all seemed fun and amazing at the time but then you realise it’s also very confining, whereas I found using some of the new technology, where you can loop stuff live, you could start to create these moments spontaneously, in reaction to what was going on in the room.”