My first job was working for Britain’s largest motor Museum, the Montagu Motor Museum, restoring veteran and vintage transport in all its many forms. We also had a racing program there which took me to France, Italy and Germany while I was still a teenager. This whetted my appetite for travel and imbued me with a wanderlust that never left me. I liked everything about being in different places. I loved the food, the countryside, the different architecture in the towns and, maybe above all, the music.The first time I visited France on Museum business we stayed in Paris and I went along with the workshop foreman to a small bar somewhere in Monmartre and saw Edith Piaf. I was absolutely spellbound by that powerful but vulnerable sad voice. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before and nobody back home on our radio stations had ever played a sound anything remotely like that.
She was accompanied by a moustachioed, black bereted, accordion player with a typical blue and white, horizontal striped, wool knit top and some sort of a labourer’s cravat tied casually around his neck. I couldn’t stand accordions; they were what old people listened to. But here, in this dimly lit smoky setting, with Piaf’s nasally Gallic wailings, a shiver went up and down my spine that was semi orgasmic. That was the precursor to an interest in music that I know will never leave me until my dying day.
Email Pete: wapenshaw@hotmail.com
Phone Pete:
Australia: 0435 600 429
Thailand: 0855 721 452
