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I play many instruments and have played with quite a few bands over the years, here is a selection below. Most of my energy now goes into singing and playing guitar in my own band (Ed Hudson Band). However I still do some sessions and play with other bands when the opportunity arises.
Electric Guitar: Bad II The Bone, Red Road, Good Company, The Flame Tattoo, Primeval, Freeway.
Acoustic Guitar: Firewater, Acoustica, Red Road.
Drums: Three State Blues, Belfagan, Piece of Mind, Panting Skeletons, Fallen from Grace, General Lee, Fallen Children.
Bass: Smok, Tym Scopes Band.
Mandolin: Firewater, Peace Pipe.
Harmonica: Three State Blues, Firewater.
Fiddle: Peace Pipe.
Vocals: Bad II The Bone, Firewater, Freeway, plus backing vocals with many of the above bands.
I've also done many recording sessions including Celtus and Think Floyd.
The following personal biography is pretty lengthy and boring. The shortened version is this -"after playing in many musical situations since childhood I now play as a professional musician". If you want to know more read on.....
It all started for me when I saw blind man busking folk tunes on a fiddle along Princes Street in Edinburgh-must have been about 1974-75. I was fascinated and my mother had to drag me away, I was eight years old at the time. I declared I wanted to play the fiddle and my parents paid for me to have violin lessons at school. I slowly got to grips with it, torturing my family during holidays with all the scraping and screeching that goes on. I was not very good at reading music then but developed (or maybe had inherited) a good ear. I was also drafted into the school choir, singing hymns and some popular songs. We even performed Handels Messiah at the Usher Hall with full orchestra one Christmas-very exciting at the time. The first concert I attended was also at the Usher Hall. It was The Boys Of The Lough, an Irish/Scottish traditional folk band, lead by fiddle player Ally Bain. The first LP records I bought were also by this band. At age 15 I stopped violin lessons to concentrate on O Levels, by this time I was up to grade 6 and playing classical music in a good school orchestra. However this style of music never made an emotional impact on me in the same way as Folk and later Rock music did.
As I hit my teens rock music started to take over from folk. I was already very familiar with The Beatles through my older brother's records but it was bands like the Stranglers and the Jam that made me want to play in a group. Fiddle playing was out and I needed to find a rock instrument-I chose the drums. There was a slight problem with this as I did not know any one who played drums and had very rarely been in the same room as a drum kit! I bought a pair of sticks and a Buddy Rich snare drum rudiments book and bashed away on a stool for a while. My long suffering parents were not going to buy me a drum kit (who could blame them, the stool was bad enough!). However after much nagging my Dad agreed to lend me the money to buy a Premier snare drum and stand I had found in a music shop. It was £40 and took me the rest of the summer to pay for it, working for my Dad (digging ditches, fencing, cutting grass etc..) It was 1980 and I had a drum! I was on my way.
Of course I soon realised I needed hi-hats, cymbals, toms, and a bass drum. These I gradually acquired with some difficulty (I remember bringing the bass drum, tom and hardware from Glasgow on a train-not easy!)
My brother Lindsay had an electric guitar and we played whatever songs we could work out by bands like Buzzcocks, Stranglers, Clash etc. Soon I was playing with some older kids in school doing similar stuff and getting the hang of playing in a group. They soon decided to drop the punk set and added a keyboard player and some original songs. The band was called ENIGMA and went on to come 3rd in the TSB Rock School Competion regional finals (1983). We did concerts at the school and even travelled to other schools to play gigs (in a transit mini-bus...just like a real band!) The art teacher was behind the wheel and didn't mind us smoking and stopping off at pubs on the way, this was definately my kind of thing. I started learning a bit of guitar around this time, borrowing other peoples until I was able to buy one (a Hondo SG copy). Once I got my own guitar I was playing all the time learning and listening to records. I discovered AC-DC, Deep Purple, Ted Nugent and Free.
When I left school I started work as a van driver in Cumbria and then moved to Carlisle to do a factory job. Music took a back seat for a while, I was into motorbikes now and my time and money went in this direction. Perhaps recognising this my mum bought me a brand new Tama Swingstar drum kit for Christmas (1985). I part exchanged my old premier drums for some good Paiste Cymbals and after making contact with local musicians started up a hard rock band with myself on drums. Soon enough we started gigging West Cumbrian pubs as RIFF RAFF. The band did not last long but with my brother Lindsay now playing Bass we formed BELFAGAN with Neil Robinson (Dobbo) on guitar and vocals. We tried additional guitarists from time to time but the line-up always worked best as a three piece. With our own van and PA system, paid for by gigs, Belfagan toured around the local pubs, venues and motorbike rallys. We even recorded 6 tracks at Omega studios in Brampton (Heavy Traffic). There wasn't much more we could achieve locally and I started to consider moving to London. By now I had bought a good Tokai Les Paul guitar and was playing after work, every day, for hours in the bedroom. We tried a line up of Belfagan with a friend (Brian) on drums and myself on guitar but it didn't last long. In September 1992 I got a place at the Guitar Institute in London after travelling down for an audition/assessment.
Life alone in London digs was very difficult at first but I immersed myself in playing guitar and learning. I was happy that I was doing somthing about realising my ambitions to be a rock musician. When the course was over and most of the money saved from my old printing job in Keswick gone, I went home to Cumbria determined to return to London and make a proper go of finding a band. For a few months I played guitar and wrote some songs with Lindsay's new Cumbrian heavy rock group PRIMEVAL. We did some gigs and it was good experience for me, having done many gigs-but not as a guitar player. Back in London I trailed round auditions trying to find a band. I played gigs and rehearsed with some and then moved on. I drummed about 30 gigs with a working rock band called PANTING SKELETONS and left to join Statesbro Union. This group had great potential but was frequently looking for drummers (I was on guitar) or bass players. While this was ongoing I hooked up with Lou Taylor to form GOOD COMPANY. The material was all Free and Bad Company songs. Lou was an experieced and very talented singer/ frontman and had released records and toured with heavy metal bands like Satan, Blind Fury and Tour de Force. After intensive rehearsal we played our first gig at The Brockley Jack in December 1993. Lou printed invitations, posters and billed the night as a "World Premier"!! It was packed and soon everybody knew about Good Company. The band lasted about a year and half and we had some great times. Lou was always steering the ship and I learned a lot (often what not to do!). A lot of showmanship was involved with backdrops, smoke, lights and hype-it was great, a far cry from the Cumbrian pub scene. We went to the North East, Cumbria, East Anglia, Essex and Kent to do gigs as well as London dates. We wrote a couple of songs but it was hard to include them in what was really a tribute/covers set. I played the Marquee club for the first time and the Wag club in Soho. In all we played about 80 shows.
When Good Company was winding up I was asked to join The FLAME TATTOO for a 21 date UK tour as second guitarist. This was a Corsican/French rock band based in London who we had got to know. They had just recorded a great album, their style was Stones, AC-DC, Aerosmith. With interviews and videos being played on national TV we started rehearsals at the Thomas a' Beckett pub, Old Kent Road. At this time(1995) it had a stage and PA and held weekend gigs. We even did a photo shoot for Kerrang! magazine in the upstairs Boxing gym. The group decided to change musical direction to a more punk style sound and started writing more songs and rearranging the old ones. I felt this was a mistake at the time but went along with it, it wasn't my band after all. It certainly made my job harder, with new songs appearing every week to be learned but it was a great challenge to work with such prolific creative people. We covered over 8000miles in three successive transit vans. The agents who booked the tour had obviously never seen a map of the UK and the guys in the band, being French and Corsican didn't know either. After a few days gigs we would come back to London before setting off again, we couldn't afford Hotels so slept on floors etc. Between van breakdowns (which some of us started to look forward to!) we saw most of England. A week was spent in Scotland staying in a caravan at Loch Lomond while we did the Scottish dates. I was mentally exhausted and pleased when the tour was finished-it was hard work. We played the Marquee in London at the start of the tour and six weeks later at the end, just to make sure! The guys had been hoping their "new direction "would convince the record labels that had come to see us, but no offers were forthcoming. I bailed out to focus on the Statesboro Union group, which by now had bass and drums and was called RED ROAD.
The plan with Red Road was simple. Write some great songs, get a band line up, record them, send them to record labels and managers, get signed-Bingo! As most bands discover it's a bit more tricky than that. We recorded and started to book gigs in London. The band had a great singer- Helen Turner and songwriter/guitarist Iain Black. I joined as lead guitarist alongside Iain and Graham Barnel was on bass, Geoff Braithwaite on drums. Later Mark Coles, from another Cumbrian band (Fallen From Grace) I had briefly played with-by now living in London, joined on bass with new drummer Chris. After some years together gigging and writing we got the attention of Trinifold Management and label. They had some big clients including Page and Plant, Judas Priest and The Who. Unfortunatly after meetings and conversations with them nothing more came of it. We carried on playing in London and travelling to Wales and Cumbria to do gigs. I decided the gigs were too few and far between and did not think we could get any further, so left the group. This was a hard decision to make, these guys were my best friends and the band was always fun to be around. However I wanted to pack in my day time job in London and make a living from doing music full time. This meant playing in bands that made money as well as music - covers bands.
From 1995 I had kept up my drumming, in between Red Road stuff, with a 3 piece rock/blues band called THREE STATE BLUES. We initially played some pub type gigs for money and when we had enough cash we recorded an album of original material called "Emotional Honesty". We recorded this in 2 days - the budget was limited! - and released it on our own label, LOCOMOTO records(1996). Two RED ROAD CDs were also released on this label later. The album got great reviews in magazines like "Blues Matters" and "Blueprint". By 2001 we had started a Tuesday night blues jam residency at the Grey Horse in Kingston. We recorded a second CD in 2003 called "Deep South". Bass player Pete Armatage fronted a CREAM tribute show which was recorded for cd and guitarist Kevin Ingles fronted a ZZ TOP tribute which was filmed for dvd.
After leaving Red Road I looked around for bands and ended up doing some depping gigs for Classic Rock group BAD II THE BONE as lead singer/guitarist. Over the previous few years I had been doing more and more singing with ACOUSTICA (ex Good Company members Al and Ian and Singer Helen Nicholson) , FIREWATER (acoustic duo with Tim Scopes) and FREEWAY (covers band with Kevin and Al) . At the end of 2001 I was asked to join Bad II the Bone full time, sharing lead vocals with then drummer Mick Readings. When Mick left in 2003, I fronted the band from then on with David Cooke on lead guitar and Paul Smith on bass. We had various drummers including Jan Jensen, Adam,Roman, Al, Ian Escario, Andres and even Les Binks (ex Judas Priest) . With this band we played pubs and clubs all over the South East as well as bike rallys and the ocassional function. Along with Firewater, Three State Blues and the odd session gig or recording I was now playing and making a full time living from music. In 2002 I hooked up with Polish guitar player "Smok" to form an original rock band called Piece of Mind. We recorded "Sonic Brew" a 7 track album, released after the bands demise in 2007. We also did acoustic gigs together as Peace Pipe. When Bad II The Bone folded at the end of 2007 I formed a new 3 piece lineup, doing similar material, calling it simply the "ED HUDSON BAND". Pete Armatage is on bass and backing vocals, Kev Parker on drums and myself on lead guitar and vocals. With the opportunity to hand pick the lineup and the set myself, great improvements have been made and I'm really enjoying playing with this band.
In the last couple of years I have rekindled my interest in Irish and Scottish traditional music by taking up fiddle playing again, I've also been playing mandolin. I've learned to read music again and am much better at it this time around! I 've also been studying drums with the great Lloyd Ryan. For some years now I've been teaching guitar and drums, I've had many, many years of experience (rehearsals,gigs and recording) as a player and enjoy imparting some of that to others who are keen to learn.
Apologies to any people or bands I've not mentioned, there are many I know but this biog is already way too long. If you got this far ...well done, maybe we'll meet at a gig before long. (It will take less time than reading this did!) Thanks to everyone who has helped and encouraged me along the way, especially my parents, family and my wife Catherine.
