1. Richard’s first ever public singing performance was at the Bunjies folk cellar, London, on 7 July 1997. As one of the ‘floor spot’ performers, he sang two of his songs: ‘The Five O’Clock Song’ and ‘Repeat After Me’. The front row consisted of four blind people who all tapped their feet enthusiastically throughout Richard’s performance. He says this made him feel he was doing something right and helped him to overcome his nerves.

2. Richard was drunk when he bought ‘Amber’, his Lowden acoustic guitar. After an office Christmas lunch in 1994, Richard received a call from his bank telling him that his overdraft limit had been increased by £1,000. He immediately took the Tube into central London and emerged from Hank’s on Denmark Street with a guitar case in hand and all of his new overdraft facility spent. He reckons he finished paying off the overdraft in 1999.

3. Amber was once played by one of Richard’s favourite performers, Nick Harper. Nick was in the audience at Bunjies to see a friend of his play. When urged to join his friend for a few songs, Nick asked if anyone would lend him a guitar and Richard obliged. Nick, who coincidentally also plays a Lowden guitar, is a frighteningly good guitar player. Richard says that at least Amber was played properly once.

4. Richard writes down the details of every live singing performance he does. He makes a note of the date, venue and songs played in a battered old note book. There have so far been about 300 performances, with some songs played just once (such as the Beatles’ “All My Loving” in May 1998) and some played dozens of times (including his own songs like “50 Weeks”). This tendency to write down details of gigs in no way means that Richard is a geek: in fact, he is an extremely cool dude.

5. The first song Richard ever wrote was ‘Saturday Watford’. Written in the late 1980s, nearly ten years before Richard started singing, the song dealt with tricky issues such as finding a seat on the 142 bus. The song has never been performed in public.

6. The smallest audience Richard has ever played to consisted of three people. It happened on 2 November 1998 at CB’s 313 Gallery, New York City. One of the three audience members was Richard’s girlfriend of the time. The other two were a member of the band on before Richard and his girlfriend. Richard recorded the performance, which he thinks is one of the best he has ever given.

7. Richard has sometimes performed under the pseudonym ‘Claude Domino’. This was between 2001 and 2004 when he played as one half of a duo playing blues covers in and around Peterborough. Richard left the duo to concentrate on his own music.

8. Despite the lyrical content of most of his songs, Richard does not actually hate women. “Some of them are OK,” he says.

9. Richard is a keen darts player (who almost always beats his brother, John, at their regular Friday night matches) but he has only ever scored a maximum 180 on two occasions. Unfortunately, the first of these was when he was practising alone. (Richard draws parallels between this and his music: “I sing best late at night, while alone in the house.”) But on Saturday 20 March 2004 he scored his first witnessed 180 during a six-sets-to-four victory over John.

10. Richard has written over 100 songs, but has only ever written two poems. One was ‘My Fantasy’ which he later developed into the song of the same name. The other was ‘The Kitchen’ which you can read here:

My grandad would always tell the same stories
every time we went to see him,
in the heat of the kitchen where he spent most of his time,
not wanting to spend on heating the front room
which in any case was kept for special occasions.

Nan would ‘tut, tut’ to herself when she heard him telling us
what we’d all heard a dozen times before,
but I couldn’t hear them too often.
I loved his stories of a life working with horses,
buying and selling bikes,
then motorbikes,
then cars.
And how little he earned,
and how far he walked on his wedding day,
of when They came for his dad in the Great War,
and of my uncle’s still-born twin
and my mum and my nan nearly drowning in a dike.  

And when he died
even my nan seemed to miss his stories,
because she took to her bed for a while.
I think partly it was because it was better than the kitchen
that seemed empty without him.
And relatives I didn’t recognise stood in the front room with plates of sausage rolls,
the women with sherry and the men with cans of beer,
laughing like only old people seem to after funerals.
(I suppose they are used to them.)