Nick Pynn - Career

Career

His early work includes playing with various bands, recording sessions (including rockabilly legend Ray Campi) and television commercials. In the mid-80s, Pynn studied musical instrument making, producing several instruments he still plays and records with now.

Nick Pynn started his musical career in the mid-80s with the Leigh-on-Sea 'soil music' barn-dance band, The Famous Potatoes. He played fiddle, banjo, mandolin, mandocello and viloa on their albums, The Sound of the Ground, It Was Good for My Old Mother, and Born in a Barn.

Pynn joined Steve Harley in 1990 on acoustic guitar and fiddle, taking the lead guitar role in 1996. The 'Stripped to the Bare Bones' tour of 1998 with Pynn accompanying Harley on mandocello, dulcimer, acoustic guitar and violin was a success; a CD Stripped to the Bare Bones-Live from the Jazz Café, London was released, and the two-man show received a 5 star review at the Edinburgh Festival.

Pynn’s debut solo CD In Mirrored Sky (1995) is a collection of autumnal pieces, and features bass player Herbie Flowers and Adrian Oxaal of James on cello. Flowers introduced Pynn to Richard Durrant, which led to the joint album Nick and Dick (1997). Music from Windows followed in 1999. Its theme is summer, with melodies drifting from open windows in Brighton streets. The album ends with four pieces commissioned for a dance performance: 'Flood'. These two solo albums were re-released in 2007 as a double album.

In 1999, Pynn joined girl band B*Witched for a tour of UK arenas. One of the highlights of the tour was Pynn being hoisted high above the stage in a 'metal cage' for a fiddle solo.

Pynn then started playing with the new acoustic version of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. In 2002, the band opened for Robert Plant's Dreamland tour and double-billed on tour with The Pretty Things. Pynn still plays with Brown as a two man show, and contributes most of the instrumentation and arrangements on their new album The Voice of Love.

In August 2001, Pynn went to Edinburgh with The Life and Death Orchestra for a Festival production of poetry, written by survivors of the Holocaust put to music. During the second half of the month, he joined American Perrier Award winning comedian Rich Hall in his band, Otis Lee Crenshaw and The Black Liars. Pynn also met Jane Bom-Bane, and together they wrote and produced Rotator, a CD of palindromic (forwards and backwards) songs for 2002, and the Fringe show 'Year of the Palindrome'.

Pynn premiered a solo show in 2003 called 'Music from Hotels Rooms, Forests and Submarines'. Using wine glasses, playing cards and live sampling, in addition to his various stringed instruments, his show was well received and was nominated for an award. In May 2004 Pynn's third solo album Afterplanesman was released. In the following year at the Edinburgh Festival, Pynn won a 'Spirit of the Fringe Award' for his music.

The latter part of 2006 saw a successful two-man show tour of Germany, Norway, Michigan and Toronto with Arthur Brown, and shows with comedian Boothby Graffoe. 2007 started with sell-out shows at the Sydney Opera House with The Lost and Found Orchestra (a creation of Stomp) in which Pynn played musical saw, bed bass, bellows organ, bottle bellows, metallophone, traffic-cone berimbau and squonkaphone amongst other instruments. Later that year, Pynn won the 'Star of the Festival Award' in Brighton, and was co-winner of the 'ThreeWeeks Editor's Award' with Jane Bom-Bane. In November he played solo shows in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Pynn regularly performs at the café venue he co-runs with Jane Bom-Bane in Brighton. where an orchestra was recorded 'one at a time' for a new album of original Pynn compositions The Colours of the Night released in October 2009.