Brendan Michael Perry was born in Whitechapel, London on June 30th 1959 to Anne O’Reilly, from Cavan, Ireland and Michael Perry, from London, England. The eldest of three children, he was raised in a working class suburb in east London.
“One of my earliest musical recollections was of a music box.The kind that young girls would store their jewellery in. It had a small ballerina that turned with the mechanism as it played. The hypnotic spell of the musical round has stayed with me ever since. Like the sound of the ice cream van that used to come to our street every Sunday afternoon, the music box has become fixed in my subconscious and often manifests itself in my music in some shape or form.”
“Every morning at primary school we would sing religious hymns at assembly. It was basically a form of religious conversion through mantra but something to which I looked forward to. Despite the stuffy Victorian atmosphere and the Christian dogma, many of the hymns had beautiful melodies…”
Apart from ‘Three Blind Mice’ performed on a school recorder and a short spell in the school choir he received no formal musical education and by the age of fourteen began to teach himself to play the guitar. He is to this day essentially still a self-taught musician preferring to work with a hands on approach towards music, employing his ear in preference to a written score.
In 1973 his parents decided to emigrate, taking him and his younger brother and sister to Auckland, New Zealand where he attended a catholic Marist missionary brothers school in Ponsonby. It was here that Brendan received his real musical education despite the fact that music was not officially part of St. Pauls curriculum.
“I remember playing acoustic guitar with the Maori and Polynesian fellas at school. We would get together during breaks from lessons to share riffs that we had learnt from records. Sometimes there would be a circle of up to eight guys jamming away to Hey Joe or some other standard and played with that distinctive ‘jingajik a jingajik’ Polynesian rhythm. Up until then I was what you would describe as a ‘bedroom guitarist’, that is someone whose sole audience usually comprised four walls and a bed. So the school sessions were a great source of inspiration for me both on a musical and social level.”
“I auditioned for a couple of local bands when I was about 17 but was rejected because my technique was just not up to scratch. You have to remember this was the era of the 20-minute guitar solo where self-indulgence had become the order of the day and many potential artists simply did not make it beyond their bedroom doors because they felt technically inadequate in such a musical climate. Rock music had somehow become over-complicated and slick by the middle of the seventies.”
“I had practically given up any aspiration of ever becoming a musician when I met John and Des from The Scavengers at an after-gig party. They told me that they were looking for a new bass player to replace Marlon Hart and although I had never played bass before I knew they were not exactly looking for the next Jaco Pastorius so I agreed to give it a shot. Without even having an audition I found myself performing, well, miming actually, on New Zealand’s ‘Top of the Pops’, called ‘Ready to Roll,’ to two songs the band had laid down the week before. The following week I watched the broadcast of the show with my family and without actually ever having played a note on a bass guitar found myself in the rather odd situation of being a minor musical celebrity!” devamı
http://www.brendan-perry.com/
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