Activiteiten PFFN: Biografie Julie Gunn

Julie Gunn zal op de Pink Floyd dag 2015 enkele nummers van haar nieuwe CD "The Patchwork Green" live spelen, samen met Absolutely Floyd. Wie is Julie Gunn? Hier onder haar biografie, in het Engels, door haar zelf geschreven.

Julie Gunn – A Brief Biography

I originally started singing and whistling properly at the age of 3 and later, I also sang in a school choir and played the harmonica and dulcimer briefly. My father taught me the C chord on his guitar, but I never picked up the guitar properly until later.

It was not until I started to listen to Pink Floyd, that I was tired of wishing I could play guitar, so one day, I called up my school guitarist friend and asked him if he could give me guitar lessons. He came over to my house armed with an acoustic; which he later gave to me. I found the guitar very easy to learn, probably due to years of singing. Within 3 weeks of playing guitar, I learned to play Pink Floyd’s ‘Mother’ almost instantly. I was delighted and that was such a huge milestone and incentive for me to carry on playing the guitar. I then went out and bought various song books of Pink Floyd’s albums and started to learn the rhythm work in some of their songs. But it was the ‘Atom Heart Mother’ album that really taught me almost everything I know on the guitar. And I learned to play along by ear. I learned how to play lead guitar by copying the cello part in the ‘Atom Heart Mother Suite’ note for note. And David Gilmour’s self-penned song, ‘Fat Old Sun’ was one of the songs that taught me how to write songs.

Within a year of playing guitar, I joined a band. We were called the ‘Loose Connections’ and we were a prog/space rock sort of band. We used to play a progession of chords over and over again. I could never get them to change the progressions into a chorus and I played some blues with them on the drums during a rehearsal once. We then merged with another band and I played Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’. I was happy in that I finally got the band to change the chords. I attempted the ‘Time’ lead solo too and also ad-libbed with my vocals. All good fun. The Loose Connections then disbanded and I joined a drummer and bassist where we played more prog/space rock and introduced some Rolling Stones songs.

One day, I was listening to some classical music and this is how I wrote my first song. It was like a verse and a chorus all wrapped up into one. I called the song ‘It’s Only Love’ and it was so complete at only a minute long. I took a basic sound engineering course and the next thing you know, I was recording with the engineer; my very first song. At this time, I added and extra verse, middle 8 and guitar solo to it. So that made the length at approximately three minutes fifteen seconds. In the meantime, I joined another band as the lead guitarist called ‘Psikix’ . We played classic rock like Bad Company tunes and Jimi Hendrix. We did one stage performance in front a small audience in the youth club and then disbanded.

After seeing Pink Floyd during 1988 at Wembley Stadium for two nights and again at Docklands Arena in 1989, I had big dreams at the time of making a living out of music. So I moved to London. It was only for 6 days, however, as it turned out to be a small disaster. So, I moved back to Oxfordshire and tried a different route. I sent demo tapes of my song ‘It’s Only Love’ to various record companies and promotional companies. At the time, I agreed to a deal of appearing on a promotional CD with other aspiring artists. CDs were still a realitively new format to send demos on back then in 1989. I went into a professional recording studio in Tottenham Hale and recorded ‘It’s Only Love’ professionally. My song was the 12th Track on the Syncronise Music promotional CD; and this particular CD was volume 4 under Universal Record Corporation Limited. Part of the deal was for the company to distribute 250 CDs to various record companies. In the interim and on waiting on any feedback the the promotional CD, I moved to Birmingham.

After settling into my new surroundings in Birmingham, I joined a band which was named ‘Gem’. In this band, we did all original songs with a rock flavour. I was the backing singer and lead guitarist in this band. We did three gigs. The first gig being at the Golden Cross in Redditch. During this time, I wrote ‘Spread Our Wings’ which is my tribute song to David Gilmour and is my answer to ‘Learning to Fly’ by Pink Floyd. The chorus of the aforementioned song is also a nod to Richard Bach’s fabulous story called ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. After about a year we disbanded and I joined another band in which we played funk/soul/reggae. We were called ‘Such and Such’ and it was a fun band and I played lead guitar in that band. We did about 8 gigs in Birmingham. We went into studio and recorded three original songs. I left in the end as I think I was too rocky for them. I later joined a comedy folk band called ‘The Simpletons’. We played songs by The Rutles, Blur, The Monkeys, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, some orginal songs by the lead singer and some of my songs. I was lead guitarist and backing vocalist in that band too. By this time, I decided enough was enough and took a break from music for a while, for various reasons.

In 2007, I entered a competition via the David Gilmour website and submitted a cover song of ‘Arnold Layne’. The object of the competition was that all musicians were to submit their version of ‘Arnold Layne’ and attach it to their ‘Myspace’ page and have people vote for their song. The people with the most votes, the top three cover songs, would then be submitted to David Gilmour and he would choose his overall favourite. Incidentally, out of about 300 entries, the highest my vote got to was number 28. I was pleased with that result.

After my father passed away, I then decided to go back into the professional recording studio and record my debut album ‘The Patchwork Green’. I also wrote a song called ‘Temple of the Gods’ which is a tribute song to Pink Floyd playing in the ampitheatre at Pompeii. The lyrics were actually inspired by my friend, Shawn Leventhal, who was going to visit the actual ruins and ampitheatre in Pompeii, Italy at the time. It started my creative thoughts, in that, I was trying to imagine what it would be like to visit the famous ampitheatre in which Pink Floyd stood. In the classical sense too, I tried to liken Pink Floyd to the ancient Roman Gods as well. A year later, my friend, Theo Beckers visited Pompeii and it’s famous amphitheatre, taking my song with him upon his entry. This was a dream come true.



And the rest is history!

Julie Gunn, januari 2015

Noot: Haar CD "The Patchwork Green" zal ook te koop zijn tijdens de Pink Floyd dag. Een review van deze CD, gemaakt door Stefan kan hier gevonden worden.