Chris Drinan
From learning flute classically at school, an Irish background meant that Chris soon found more of an audience with a reel or a jig. Friends at school, influenced by early Fairport albums, asked him to join Ruthwell, and his band career was launched.
Working in clubs in the Kent and Sussex borderlands came to an end when university life started, and within a month of going to Leicester, Chris was asked to join a ceilidh band called Sunshine. To his amazement, people were prepared to pay to dance to what he played, as well as to listen.
With Sunshine working most weekends in a wide area from Birmingham to Nottingham to Northampton, travelling in a Ford Anglia with instruments piled high on laps, this was the high-life for the country boy.
Back in Sussex after university, Chris worked the folk scene with Codpiece, who also played at mediaeval banquets in Rye. Playing the wandering minstrel around the tables in a fetching tunic and tights, Chris was disappointed if he didn’t get more than one tweak a night.
Another change of life found Chris in Walsall where, after playing solo spots in West Midlands clubs, he was asked in 1983 to join Maurice and the Minors where he played with John Richards for the first time. At the same time he started a five-year spell with The Old Parrot Band in Lincolnshire, regularly commuting to barn dances and ceilidhs at weekends. By now Chris had added tenor sax and 5-string banjo to his instruments.
When Maurice and the Minors folded in 1991, Chris became one of the members of the band that emerged from the split, Three Desperate Men. Chris played with the band, which added members (and shortened its name), becoming a fully blown folk rock band, until 2001. Very popular in pubs and clubs around the West Midlands, Chris was finally in a band that was big, even if only on the Tettenhall Road.
In 2005, after taking a break from the music scene, Chris was persuaded to join the John Richards Band by a phone call taken while painting a ceiling from the top of a stepladder. The colour? Pink, not his choice, but his daughter was very happy! The rest is history the future.