Life and Work
Normally painting in oils, Alan Tunbridge has also designed a great number of book dust-jacket illustrations, mainly in Scraperboard.
He is particularly noted for his songwriting. Many of his songs have been recorded by his friend Wizz Jones, the noted folk and Country blues singer and guitarist. With Jones, Tunbridge ran the ground-breaking MOJO Folk club at the King's Arms pub in Putney, South London in the early 1960s. Often he wrote the words spontaneously to Wizz Jones' chord sequences. His songs are also in the repertoires of Ralph McTell, John Renbourn, Maggie Holland and others. McTell was inspired by Tunbridge's lyrics of the evocative "National Seven" to tread the road which bears this name down to the south of France. The title of Bert Jansch's biography 'Dazzling Stranger' originated from the title of a Tunbridge song.
Alan Tunbridge spent a number of years studying the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff (the Fourth Way) with J.G. Bennett at Coombe Springs, and later spent time with the Sufi teacher Idries Shah.
Alan now lives in Sydney, and no longer writes songs. From 1999 to 2009 he focussed on using his writing and design skills to help develop the Schizophrenia Research Institute in Australia, of which he was a founding Director. This commitment was undertaken because his eldest son became affected by the illness. He retired from this role in 2009 to pursue his painting activities.
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