Don Hooley is...er...several years old, and one of the things he does is to sing & play guitar (or should that count as two things?).
He performs solo in flamenco/folk-rock/singer-songwriter mode, provides half of the cult jazz instrumental duo "The 4 Innumerates" (guitar & sax) and leads a rock/soul band specialising in 60's, 70's & 80's covers in anything from a trio to a 12-piece.
He's been gigging, writing & recording since the 1960's with many British musicians and, along the way, an American and four Cubans. He was, in fact, travelling and performing in Cuba two years before Ry Cooder went there to help found the Buena Vista Social Club.
His forte, and passion, is improvisation with musos who know their way around. Most of the electric guitar solos you can hear on the tracks in his songlist were made up on the spot!
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Don Hooley Bio
Don Hooley was born in London in 1950 and, at about the age of seven, was given a 1920s banjo by his grandmother. This was dutifully ignored and disappeared to wherever 1920s banjos go almost immediately.
It was not until 1963 that, succumbing to an intense attack of Beatlemania, he finally managed to persuade his parents to buy him a five pound acoustic guitar from Woolworths.
He formed his first band at school, The Trolls, with Barry and Danny Martin, Tiny Wreatham and Jim White on drums. Jim was responsible for introducing Don to the sounds of a very strange band indeed named The Pink Floyd, as they were then called.
In the late sixties he played with The Potential Blues and The Ivory Bath Band before forming local legend, Dithers with Julian Thorne, Gary Spitz and either Ken Richards or Dave Ramsey, depending upon who was being the least pushy (drummers can be like that). It was at Julian's flat that Don first heard the works of one of his many influences, Frank Zappa.
Later Don played with a variety of musicians (many of them still alive), some of whom can be heard on his debut studio album, "RUNNING WATER TRIBUTES & BLUES". It contains some of his best compositions, as well as a handful of cleverly-arranged covers, and provides a brilliant example of the diversity of both himself and contemporary music styles in general.