It’s actually a little more complicated than that.

OK, so fill me in with the details.

My father, who had played in the Guard’s Band, started teaching me the trumpet at the age of eleven. I became particularly interested in the high trumpet parts in Bach and Handel and got my first D trumpet when I was about fifteen—quite early. It also went into E flat, which was nice because it meant I was able to play the Haydn concerto. Then when I was seventeen I went to work in a hospital twelve hours a week to earn the money to buy a piccolo D flat, after which I played B Minor Masses and such like all round Gloucestershire, where I come from. Through my then-girlfriend’s father I got to know Anthony Baines, who of course did so much research on early wind instruments. He owned a couple of original natural slide trumpets and he invited me to play in something called the Regency Band, which used to dress up in Regency gear and play at functions. He also invited me to his home and showed me some cornetti and recorders, one of which even had keys—all sorts of strange and wonderful things. All this interested me greatly and, just for fun, I started to play the recorder. As a result, I joined a group called the Western Medieval Consort, which included a number of rather strange people, but at those concerts I met with my first medieval music and was completely and utterly captivated by it. I just had to go for it. I went to the Guildhall School of Music, studying both modern and baroque trumpet, but at the same time moonlighting over to the Royal Academy, where David Munrow was giving classes. Then came the fatal night at the end of my first year at the Guildhall when I got beaten up on the Underground. It was a big story that made me famous! But it was a terrible thing, because I was kicked in the mouth and couldn’t play the trumpet from then on. It was an enormous psychological blow, because all I had ever wanted to do was play the trumpet. I was playing with people like Don Smithers in Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London and that was unquestionably the direction in which I was going. And suddenly I couldn’t.

Then came the fatal night at the end of my first year at the Guildhall when I got beaten up on the Underground. It was a big story that made me famous! But it was a terrible thing, because I was kicked in the mouth and couldn’t play the trumpet from then on. It was an enormous psychological blow, because all I had ever wanted to do was play the trumpet. And suddenly I couldn’t

So you were literally forced into making a change of direction?

Yes. I already had a group of friends at the Guildhall with whom I was dabbling in old music, but like Munrow just raiding all the anthologies and not doing anything in the way of real research. Fortunately, I was allowed to stay on at the Guildhall, where I started sitting in on lectures on medieval music and taking my little group more seriously. Then I met Andrea von Ramm and of course became influenced by Thomas Binkley’s rather more in-depth approach to medieval music.

That suggests that Binkley perhaps had a greater influence on you than Munrow.

Munrow, I think, was an influence in being highly sensible to recognizing what an audience for early music would respond to—building programmes around something that people could latch on to. Binkley was a different kind of influence in that he approached the music in a more detailed, less superficial way. If David was going to do a song of fifteen verses, he’d chose four and score every one differently, whereas Binkley would do all fifteen...

…And with a more restrained approach.