My brother Andy was cooler than I was.

He realised that listening to The Ramones was a far more credible option in the long term than starting out a musical education with ABBA. In all fairness though it didn't take me long to register that The Sex Pistols and The Stranglers were really where it was at.

Growing up I had realised the cultural necessity, of having a pet band that could fly the flag for how I saw myself. All the other kids had it sorted out and I felt I should get my act together… Like I said, ABBA and their perfect pop song 'Mumma Mia' became my starting point. I recall some disco tune, 'Play That Funky Music White Boy' also having a strange calling in it for me...

One afternoon though, I was hanging out at Jorge's place. Jorge was my best friend and his family was very cool. He was the youngest, with lots of older brothers and sisters and a huge collective album collection...

I found a Sex Pistols record, 'Never Mind The Bollocks'. At my age growing up in the lush middle class Sydney suburb of St.Ives, this was akin to experiencing your first porno mag. On that otherwise boring standard issue afternoon when I should've been at home doing my homework, my life took a radical left turn. I was transfixed and could not be moved from that old turntable as it belted out what amounted to the first communication I had ever received that made any sense. There was also The Stranglers album, 'No More Heroes', which had equally the same effect. I remember another friend, Felix, was there at the time. Felix was a guitarist and was into 'SuperTramp', which may explain why he wasn't into what I was listening to at all. Both he and Jorge, proceeded to lecture me upon the fact that Punk – in their opinion - wasn't exactly good music. I sat there nodding in feigned submission just so they would shut up and let me listen.

Last year - November 2006 - I had the most intriguing experience while I was on tour in one of my favorite areas of Germany called Frankische Schweiz (i.e.. Frankonian Switzerland - just north of Nuremburg) in a town called Ebermannstadt...

I woke from a dream where Christy Moore was singing a gorgeous song to a bunch of broken old men in a pub who were all in full flight singing along with tears in their eyes. I just happened to be walking past the pub and walked in....It was the last song in his set...

It then dawned on me that it wasn't a Christy Moore song and so I started writing...It was finished and down on paper pretty soon after... It's about going to a place called Clonard...I had no idea where that name came from and the next day did a search on the net to find out it was a famous Irish Monastic School from about 520AD that was home to 12 Irish saints. In its heyday at least 3000 students were there at a time and flocked to the place from all over Europe...

I had set the intention at the start of my tour to write, find or discover the last song for my new album 'Circle Dance'. I've often had that distinct feeling that a power somehow greater than me was often the author of my songs and but this is the first time a complete tune has arrived on my doorstep fully formed....

I confess to being one of the later.

When I was a kid, nothing interested me more than the prospect of digging things up in the backyard. It was the fragments of quartz crystals that first caught my imagination, glittering beneath the relentless Australian sunshine, in the golden sand that was referred to as top soil. Before, that is, people like my mother sought to transform the creative possibilities of this land by building compost piles. But that's another story...

Apparently, according to my mother, I enjoyed burying her treasures, or in other words her jewellery, so that I could set about finding the stuff again… This in itself may be the sole explanation for all that has followed…