Music wasn’t a career I had planned. It was more of a hobby that started to elbow its way into my life more and more until I quit doing proper jobs.

In my late teens I hitch-hiked to France with a guitar and a notion of artistic and romantic revelations. I met a homeless alcoholic outside the Pompidou Centre and for a 50/50 split he would go round with a hat whilst I played and sung. He threw me onto packed Metro carriages with no option but to start playing Simon & Garfunkel songs in front of bored commuters, whilst he danced up and down the carriage collecting centimes.

A few years later I hitch-hiked across America. Again this sounds romantic, but as most Americans will tell you it’s really very stupid and dangerous, which is why nobody does it anymore. When me and my travelling companion got to L.A. we got jobs as rickshaw drivers picking up and driving tourists and drunk students around the Hollywood area. The rickshaws were all pedal-power and there’s a lot of hills in Hollywood.

A brief mention for the romantic summer I spent working in a fish factory in Hull.

I worked in bookshops for years, first in Leicester, then in Glasgow. I liked working in bookshops, but like most booksellers I preferred it when there weren’t many customers. I often made compilations to play in the shop, and then got really sick of the music I had put together as no-one ever got round to changing the tape. A similar thing happens in theatre projects – you hear the same bit of music so many times during rehearsals that you never want to hear it again. In Glasgow I was a children’s book specialist which I enjoyed. It was a really big dynamic department and I’d occasionally be required to dress in an enormous character costume.

For a short time in Glasgow I was a flower delivery driver. I drove a pink van. Some of the stuff was dull corporate locations that wanted expensive displays in big vases, and some of it was more personal and special. Weddings and funerals too. Every once in a while if the person wasn’t at home I’d ask the neighbour to look after the flowers – the look on their faces when I told them they weren’t the intended recipient… Once I delivered them to someone on Kirsty Wark’s street. She saw me and shouted “Are they for me?” and I had to shout “No” back. I never got to appear on Newsnight Review.

After deciding to try and make a go of music, I searched for interesting people to send CDs to. One of them was filmmaker Matt Hulse, who got in touch and we’ve been friends ever since. In a way this was my first job in the creative industries. He used some of my music for a short film he was working on – and then that led to another filmmaker Zam Salim getting in touch, and so on… I’ve worked with them both a lot over the years. My band The One Ensemble made the music for Matt’s extraordinary film Dummy Jim.

Tectonics Glasgow takes place from 1-3 May 2015 at City Halls, Glasgow. Tickets are available from www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso and on 0141 353 8000. For more about Tectonics on Central Station, go here. Daniel Padden’s Glass Hundreds has been specially written for the Old Fruitmarket and is performed as part of the Closing Concert at 9pm on Sunday 3 May.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Tectonics is a Music Festival curated by Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell, proudly presented by BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. It takes place at City Halls, Glasgow from 1-3 May.

Breaking down orchestral traditions, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra principal guest conductor Ilan Volkov launched the Tectonics concept in Iceland in 2012. Co-curator for Tectonics Glasgow is the producer Alasdair Campbell who said: “Artists are given the freedom to experiment and truly push themselves creating an incredibly inspiring festival.”

Performers Peter Brötzmann, Éliane Radigue, Heather Leigh, Justin K Broadrick, Attila Csihar, Daniel Padden, Joel Stern, Mariam Rezai, Goodiepal

Harpist Rhodri Davies

The three-day festival of experimental orchestral performances features several world premieres including three BBC commissions from composers Peter Ablinger, Joanna Bailie and Paul Newland. This year’s line-up also includes the critically-acclaimed saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, harpist Rhodri Davies and Hungarian black-metal vocalist Attila Csihar.

The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and members of the BBC SSO kick off the weekend with a piece created specifically for the Old Fruitmarket by turntablist Mariam Rezaei and local musician Daniel Padden has also written a work specially for the venue. Élaine Radigue, a pioneer of electronic music, is a focus of this year’s programme and she has created several new acoustic works especially for the festival.

Performances will be recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio3.

For a full schedule of events and to buy tickets for Tectonics Glasgow, please visit here.

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Find more events in our weekly bulletin here.

The Tectonics festival returns to Glasgow this May, exploring what happens when different musical genres rub up against each other. Embracing experimental, rock and orchestral music, this year’s festival has expanded to three days.

The line-up sees Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore share the spotlight with contemporary classical music pioneers such as Christian Wolff and Takehisa Kosugi, vocal ensemble EXAUDI, Icelandic composer collective S.L.Á.T.U.R., Scottish jazz iconoclast Bill Wells, and a mixture of local and international performers. There’s a visual art element too as Sarah Kenchington will install ‘mechanical instruments’ in the City Halls Recital Room which can be played by members of the public throughout the weekend.

Taking place at the City Halls and Old Fruitmarket, Tectonics Glasgow opens with an evening of short performances at St Andrew’s in the Square, celebrated for its intimate space and unique acoustics. Co–curator Alasdair Campbell, who also brought you the Counterflows festival, describes the Friday opener as being “like the festival in microcosm, with lots of local acts mixing with some international names. The performances are short – but will explore as broad a series of sound-worlds that you’re likely to hear anywhere.”

Here’s some highlights that you shouldn’t miss:

Richard Youngs

‘Past Fragments of Distant Confrontation’:
Richard Youngs and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
11 May | Old Fruitmarket
Commissioned by the BBC SSO, Richard Youngs’s world premiere brings punk sub genre D-beat into the orchestral sphere. Written specifically for the Old Fruitmarket, it features Youngs on electric guitar as the audience is surrounded on all sides by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on the venue’s balcony. Youngs also sings solo on Tectonics Glasgow’s opening night.

Takehisa Kosugi

Thurston Moore and Takehisa Kosugi
9 May | St Andrew’s in the Square
This concert sees former Sonic Youth frontman re-team with Japanese experimental pioneer Takehisa Kosugi, a partnership first heard on Sonic Youth’s album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century. Moore also collaborates with noise-maker Dylan Noukis as part of the Saturday night Old Fruitmarket gig and Kosugi performs solo on the Sunday night.

EXAUDI by Daniel Pufe

EXAUDI
11 May | City Halls
The UK’s leading vocal ensemble will redefine any preconceptions you have about choral music. Vocal performances are big this year at Tectonics and this concert features a variety of works by American and UK composers, from the delicate, to the gutsy, to the non-verbal, and Christian Wolff’s beautiful settings of the poet John Ashberry.

Wolff/Behrman
10 May | City Halls
Christian Wolff is one of the great pioneers of American music, who took many of John Cage’s ideas of indeterminacy and experimentalism and made them his own. For this concert he’s performing one of his most famous early pieces For One, Two or Three People with Kosugi (see above) and another great US pioneer David Behrman, whose new work How We Got Here opens Day 2 of Tectonics

Tectonics Glasgow runs 9 – 11 May. Visit the Tectonics website for more details.

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