Edward Tudor Pole

I was told I had to write a biog. for this first ever, official, from the horse’s mouth, Ed Tudor Pole (aka Ten Pole Tudor) website and I’m honored to have the help to so do on this alien modern format. (Every time I switch on the computer I still feel as though I’m in an episode of Doctor Who!).

Keith Richards recently owned up to to not using a computer which is a truly privileged position in which to be; but Rome wasn’t built in a day

When I started typing the list of events of repeatedly told stories and all the things Tenpole has done, I was becoming bored at the rate of about 78 m.p.h. and was reminded of the Anti-Nowhere League song lyric… ‘I’ve been here,
I’ve been there, I’ve been every- f***ing-where, so what?! so what?! so what, so what, you boring little c***!’…Quite so.

To list all the wrong turns and misdirection’s, although many of them were amusing enough at the time, was dull and depressing.
The list doesn’t tell the story at all and is packed with red herrings so I shall attempt to tell it in another way by starting it on the football pitch at King Edward’s school, Witley, a co-ed boarding school subsidized by the Bridewell institute, City of London.

From the goal-mouth I looked out across the swathe of green, imagining it full of people being rocked and rolled as far as the eye could see. Shouts from my team mates interrupted the reverie when I failed even to see the ball, let alone attempt to save the goal. The dream was born.

In my last term there, aged 16, I played the guitar at a sort of arts variety show they held, and performed a song I’d written about ‘Clarke’s smile’
(‘which stretches all the way from here to Australia’) – Clark being some kid in my term; it went down a storm! Had a standing ovation and my first encore.

There was the lesson for my life, if I had been alert to the sign.

In the fifth form I was definitely the school guitar hero and formed a band even though I had no knowledge of key or anything but I was going for it with every ounce of heart and soul having to compensate for lack of anything other than free-form bonkers, which is what a lot of the groups of that time’s (early 70s) solos sounded like to my ears.
All flash no substance, but I took great pleasure at my taste of being school guitar- hero.

Shortly thereafter was expelled the day before I was due to leave anyway, after our first ever gig, as ‘Denniss and the Lapels’, was turned off after about seven minutes at the leaver‘s dance.
I started a riot and was on the 8.30 train back to London the next morning.
They liked the solo show but weren’t prepared to tolerate the band.

Over the past six years as I’ve been touring up and down the fair land,
working on the one-man show format and becoming better at it, I can’t help thinking that it’s what I should have been pursuing since that first gig at school.
It‘s been a very meandering route to find the right road and I do have learning difficulties in certain areas, which rather than being a euphemism for being thick as a plank is plain truth; sometimes it takes a while for a man to discover what he’s been sent to do in his mortal stint on earth.
Life is a journey, not a race or a destination.

Now we’ll skip the list of all the things Mr. Tenpole has done, (blah-blah,
blah blah), cut to the chase, and fast forward 37 years to the Glasgow ABC
on 27th February 2010 AD.

Having been bag-piped on to the huge stage by Craig MacFarlane, there was
Mr. Tenpole, playing his guitar to 1000 Glaswegians and going down as well as he did at school, still armed with nothing other than songs, voice, a guitar, no effects, and the crowd. It was real fun and Mr. Tenpole is happy.
 
I returned to solo performance in late 2003 having shed the last
‘Tenpole Tudor’ line-up two years earlier, a particularly un-cohesive unit which felt like dragging a boulder up hill.
The best thing about that group was the fabulous electric-guitar playing of
Mr. Darrell Bath.

Much later, deep in the doldrums I watched a video of a solo gig in Sunderland from 1995(where Jimmy Nail’s band joined Tenpole at the end) and was impressed, ‘I can do that’ thought I, and rang Big Steve to ask for a spot at his Sunday music afternoon in a Camden.
The dear chap said yes and it went v well; the place was rockin’, so I decided to pursue that. At last I was able to read the signs properly.

Why we’re bothering to set up a website is because after 6 years constantly and steadfastly playing, Ten Pole Tudor is giving you the whole world on 6-strings with a unique guitar style honed over 40 years which on a good night when there’s a big crowd, …(it is after officially called Ed Tudor Pole’s electric one-man Rock & Roll stadium show, which isn’t meant to be a joke, a bit of community singing is good for the soul) …. can rock the house.

It’s a Rock & Roll, country, dub-step type thing.

So dear reader, I am simply a bystander amazed at what comes out of my battered guitar sometimes; a third party becomes involved, and I haven’t worked out what it is exactly but when at a show we are all united and
having real fun who cares?

See you at the next show…. xxx

...For The Sex Pistols connection see Historty part 2...