Biography
Chris was born in Jarrow, Co. Durham in 1960. His father and uncle were both accomplished singers and graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music, but Chris is, to the best of his knowledge, the first in the family to take up traditional music.
He was given his first set of pipes on his fifteenth birthday, and began to teach himself by emulating classic recordings of pipers Tom Clough, Billy Pigg and Joe Hutton. Ten months later he won the Northumbrian Pipers' Society Junior Competition, and within three years had won every major Open competition. His affinity with the music of Tom Clough developed and he became recognised as a standard-bearer for the generations-old tradition of close-fingered piping.
His university days saw Chris exiled in Liverpool, where the thriving Irish music scene broadened his musical horizons, and in the early 1980s he began playing warpipes with the Liverpool Irish Centre Pipe Band. Their approach to piping was later to stand him in good stead as a Border piper!
In 1987 he met Tom Clough's son, "Young Tom", the last of five generations of pipers in the Clough family. He was honoured when Tom told him "Me father would have liked you"!
Chris returned to Tyneside in the late 1980s and re-established himself in the local music scene. He took up Scottish small pipes in 1990. In 1993 he was invited to teach at the North American Northumbrian Pipers Convention, and has since been a regular visitor to the USA and Canada in addition to working in the UK and mainland Europe. He joined the Border Directors Ceilidh Band to cover maternity leave and is still there sixteen years later!
He has appeared on a number of recordings of Northumbrian music, and his first solo CD "Time Out of Mind" was described as "unsurpassed in the history of recorded Northumbrian piping".
Chris now lives in the Northumbrian village of Ovingham.