I must have heard a harpsichord, probably a recording of George Malcolm, or Wanda Landowska. I imagine. When I first asked for music lessons, which at 14 was relatively late, this was the sound I had in mind. The choice was clearly for something which drew me to Bach and Handel rather then Beethoven and Brahms. Before going to Cambridge I taught for a term near Haslemere, so the Dolmetsch family were on the doorstep. At Cambridge the combined influence of Thurston Dart, Raymond Leppard and Mary Potts were very strong, and in my second year David Munrow arrived, and that began a whole era of organising musical experiments, particularly with Pembroke College Music Society. Later some of those exploits became rationalised as the Early Music Consort.

And after Cambridge?

After Cambridge I went to Prague for a year to see what life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain. When I came back, after a little odd-jobbing as a theatre pianist, it dawned on us that we could make the Early Music Consort work as a professional group of five players. I also played for ten years with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Those were the two ensembles which filled my playing life, beside solo recitals and teaching in Cambridge.

What was the repertoire of the Early Music Consort?

It was mostly repertoire from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, though our later recordings also included things like the Purcell birthday odes. From my point of view this was slightly curious as much of the repertoire was pre-keyboard. I played harp, percussion, recorder and crumhorn in small doses, and the organetto-a portable one-handed mediaeval organ. Where there was solo keyboard music it tended to be by the virginalists or the early Italian composers. We were mainly an international touring group, so it wasn’t practical to travel with a harpsichord. One became adept at accommodating whatever keyboard instrument was provided, except on the rare occasions when we travelled with a spinet.

What led you from there to set up The Academy of Ancient Music?

The work of the Early Music Consort had shown that people could play on instruments not normally found in modern orchestras or taught in conservatoires. I knew that other people, such as Catherine Mackintosh and Duncan Druce, were also involved in small ensembles, and there was a flourishing sub-culture of viol players in London, but there were no bigger groups. I was also becoming aware that there were many things I was keen to try, for which the Academy of St Martin-in-the- Fields would not be appropriate. For some Vivaldi recordings with them we had cut back the strings to one player to a part, playing with reduced vibrato, but it was clear that far more historically stylistic work could be done with a small ensemble of period-instrument players.

At first we tried a trio sonata grouping, but the big breakthrough came when Peter Wadland of the L’Oiseau Lyre label (part of Decca) approached us saying that, beside re-issues, he wanted to make some new recordings. He was looking for different groups to represent different periods; Alan Hacker and The Music Party, for example, represented classical and romantic music, and we took on the earlier repertoire. We thought up a name-The Academy of Ancient Music-and set about creating an ensemble of more than one player to a part for our first recording, which was of Arne Overtures. When we gathered in the church in Petersham, with photocopies of the old Walsh parts on the music stands it was the first time that many of these people had played together.

The AAM must have been a very steep learning curve.