... is the owner / engineer & producer at tollboothmusic.

a veteran guitar player of some 25 years (though he admits to being a 'little' older than that), paul has always steered clear of the conventional and become an explorer of the extreme capabilities of the guitar and its technology.

having spent years ignoring the pleas a former Ascent bass player Emma Bray to 'make it sound like a guitar for once in your life' p-a-d quickly forged a reputation on the festival circuit for innovative sound creation.

moving to guitar synthesis in 1992 radically changed the sound and canvas of Eve & The Garden after their hiatus at the end of the days of Ascent. a long time advocate of the e-bow infinite sustain system, paul has now moved body & soul into recording technology and the possibilities of amp modelling & mangling. with new album projects, paul is also exploring the use of guitar and synthesis with the type of filtering and sound creation more commonly found in more dance and ambient orientated music.

most recently, paul has been developing a brand new signature baritone guitar with the impossibly talented luthier Ben Crowe of Crimson Guitars.  the guitar - to be called 'the serving brother' in honour of paul's dad who served in the St John for over 7 decades and passed away last year - will be an amalgamation of everything that pal has looked for in a guitar over the years...

"synth access was a must, and next was polyphonic sustain, so the natural choice was Fernandes Sustainer on-board, but Ben and I are doing something a little tricksy with the Wizard pickups for that so we get a more rolled tone out of the Sustainer.  Ben is a beautiful artist to watch work and he has never done anything less than wholly impress me with his vision, talent and attitude to guitar-crafting.  all the wacky electrics are being knitted into a 6-string baritone (A-A tuning) with lots of vacuous tone chambers in the body to give that sustain and life you get with semi-acs but without the howls!  the body shape was mine until Ben got hold of it and put this beautiful heel curve in the body - it just looks beautiful" 

ben tries to comprehend the babblings of a mad axe designer

the original drawings for the guitar from the fevered p-a-d imagination

ben's frankly astonishing rendition of the above.  soon to be finished and strung!

"ben's a great guy both to work with and know as a friend and so i'd gone down to one design session with the thought of offering to help out at a couple of guitar shows he had coming up - i was thinking tuning, case lugging, coffee scrounging etc, but was frankly staggered when he asked me if i'd demo some of his guitars at the shows as well - it's great fun, ben's guitars are the ultimate guitarist's sweetieshop and it's a huge priviledge to just be able to have a choice of 20 or so guitars to just noodle around on all day - it's no hardship having to tell people how cool they are and how they could have their own built for less than the price of some mass produced import nonsense."

paul is currently working at tollbooth with a number of other artists, including helen turner, matt dixey, spyhop, miles cain, & enygmartyr.  paul has produced miles cain's solo debut album 'different destinations, matt dixey's first 5 track demo 'out of the night-time'', spyhop's new e.p. and frantically mixing & mastering tracks for his new solo album 'strange tale''.

"i really appreciate the freedom of the project studio approach.  there's no big scary red light; no bored engineer with his or her 'when we had the stereophonics in here..' attitude; no 'we do it this way; approach.  it's all about the artist, and helping them uncover their ideas.  all bets are off, anything is attemptable.  i like to be involved and am always happy to throw suggestions in, but i'm also more than happy watching and listening to the sheer wealth of talent and creativity stretching its wings and recording the fruits of it.  and contrary to popular belief, i don't end up playing on everybody's stuff - it just sounds that way.."

1999 finally saw p-a-d get round to recording some of the tracks that had remained tucked away on 4-track recorder for nearly ten years. installing the roland virtual studios at tollbooth marked the turning point for the material, and p-a-d became able to give life to the breadth of sound he'd been hearing in his head.

a long and very silly recording session with helen turner sparked the creation of the thread for his debut solo album 'Postcards From Aunt Cordelia'.

"Looking at the mayhem that was the studio one day started me musing on the chaos theory. butterflies and tidal waves are all very well for extreme analogies, but i think that so many of the things that we do or experience and consider inconsequential, actually have more far-reaching effects than we imagine. this can be a really positive thing, the smallest smile, the briefest kind word might change someone's day irrevocably. we only ever think of chaos in a negative way."

"having found a perfectly acceptable way of looking at this subject, i just felt compelled to obscure it all again in another analogy. then helen turner was level checking one night and slipped into this amazing little old lady / mrs merton voice and for some reason i just turned round and asked 'cordelia' to pipe down. and so she was born. a couple of glasses of cabernet later, and h had put down the introduction for p-f-a-c."

"cordelia has a knack of being at crucial points in history and tipping folk over the edge from letting things ride to becoming landmarks in time. she was the woman who prompted abe lincoln to sum up edward everitt's 3 hour speech to the troops at gettysburg which bored them all senseless, and in 3 minutes, lincoln went down in history forever. she cracked the smile for da vinci that turned him from mad inventor to immortal artist."

'postcards from aunt cordelia' also includes some pieces written for the 712th collective film, 'the killing zone' and a number of other pieces inspired by e&tg's work with the street children charity, Casa Alianza.

p-f-a-c is now available through tollboothshop.

in june 2006, p-a-d released the PfAC follow-up album "strange tale".  drawing from a wider inspirational canvas, strange tale draws parallels between the seemingly wild and wonderful fortean events that pepper world events, never quite reaching prominence and acceptance, with the very personal events that happen in our own lives.  

the strange tale microsite is up and running and details are being added all the time.  strange tale was released on june 24th 2006.

p-a-d also provides live sound support for the Dearne Playhouse and has recently provided sound reproduction, technical support and editing services for the such shows as:

The King & I, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Sparkies, Cinderella, Vacant Possession, The Show Must Go On, Kim Frost Dance School, Debbie Clayton Dance School, Coppelia, The Billie Holiday Story, The Strauss Experience, Chris Caress Hypnotic Show, When The Lights Go On Again, Viva Variety, Fame, Echoes, South Yorkshire WI, JuniStars, Julie Bergin Dance School, 

p-a-d has also provided musical services to the scout association and has just written a new camp song for the Leicestershire Scout Association Centenary Camp celebrations called 'Get Ready, Be Prepared' - an interactive project involving getting four subcamps to write lyrics ahead of the camp to be recorded during the 4day event and a number of found percussion workshops to provide an instrumental break in the middle of the song, again to be recorded on the tollboothmobile during the weekend.

p-a-d also provides audio training courses on 'theatre sound' to Barnsley Neighbourhood Learning Net and recently wrote and ran a day-long interactive educational day for National Science Week called 'The Science of Sound' which again culminated in an interactive found percussion workshop recording session and subsequent delivery of a finished rack to the school.

p-a-d is always keen to discuss more unusual musical collaborative ideas and audio projects - email us for more details:

padATtollboothmusic.com