I have sung for as long as I can remember. When I was six or seven my sister would play the piano while I sung to my nana. Maybe South Pacific or. I recall, "It's Almost Tomorrow was a favourite. In the sixties I went through all the stages that almost every teenager went through - being in a group - usually a bad one that did a handful of gigs before breaking up and reforming. The folk club was another great outlet so I also went through my Dylan/ Nick Drake phase playing for pints and the occasional meal in Cardiff.
The seventies was my singer/songwriter phase with a small fortune (at the time)spent on a Sony reel to reel recorder. Countless evenings writing and recording songs that only a few would ever hear (which may have been a good thing).
The eighties , the nineties and most of the noughties were the working and family years with evenings frittered doodling at the piano and singing to myself.
In 2007 when I had start to learn tenor sax I headed off to France for a Jazz Summer School where the fantastic Liane Carroll was one of the tutors. By the end of the week I realised that singing was still my first love and when Liane came to The Cinnamon Club that October she invited me up to sing and play I was hooked.
For the last four years I have been trying out different musical genres and line-ups. Sometimes I play on my own sometimes with one person - sax player - Michael Healey- but occasionally with a large group of up to 10.
As a regular at the Cinnamon Club in Bowdon I have had the good fortune to support great names like Liane Carroll, Ian Shaw, Gwyneth Herbert and Barb Jungr and in October 2011 fulfilled an ambition when I headlined my own night with ten other musicians for "Alan Williams and Friends"
My musical taste is varied - I love American Songbook but Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Loudon Wainwright have been round my head for forty years or so. Everyone loves to laugh and I enjoy performing some of the great witty songs of people like Dave Frishberg and Bob Dorough. In about 2006 I had the chance to see the great Blossom Dearie in a small supper club in New York when I both cried and laughed. She was nearly eighty then and was in her last year or two of performing but watching her was like a musical education in an evening
