Steve Shaw

I am an untutored harmonica player who loves Irish traditional music with a touch of Scottish and Northumbrian thrown in. I’m pretty serious about "doing it right" but this music is also my main outlet for having fun. I live in the middle of nowhere about four miles from Bude in Cornwall. I’m English really (hailing from that bit of true Lancashire that is now the Metropolitan-Borough-of-Somewhere-or-Other about eight miles north of Manchester), but all my mum’s side are Irish and my great grandfather had a fist-fight once with Count John McCormack’s dad over the factory foreman’s job. We lost. I’m 61 and enjoy large bone structure and have dodgy joints and I like red wine and Doom Bar and single malts of the heavier, peaty styles (if I tell you that Talisker and Laphroaig are my favourites you’ll get the picture). I was a schoolteacher for 25 years, teaching science tinged with biology. I love diddley in all its pure and non-pure manifestations (though I hate flashy young bucks as personified by Lunasa et al. and have a thing about speed merchants), and only have time for ITM and classical music. I have one hero, Beethoven. Like me, he had tinnitus. Unlike me, he couldn’t do anything about it. I’ve just had a meeting with a genius of an audiologist who has squashed about three-quarters of my noise and enabled me to hear music and conversation properly in noisy pubs for the first time in a decade. If you want to know any more you’ll have to wait ‘til Kirsty interviews me on Desert Island Discs, though I can tell you about me and my tinnitus if you like. I won’t be needing either the Bible or Shakespeare. And tunebooks or bodhrans will not be on the short-list for my luxury item.