Biography

Maurice Baker is a musician, writer and teacher, raised mainly in Surrey, England, and currently living in Newcastle upon Tyne. As a young man he travelled widely around the UK and Europe working in numerous jobs and playing music in clubs, pubs and bars. In the Seventies he switched to making music for children when he became a primary school teacher, also writing and staging drama productions and the like. During the Eighties he collaborated with other performers to form Sunshine Express, a touring music company presenting shows and workshops, in schools and various venues around London and the South of England. He has also developed a number of song/activity books and CDs for young people and written material for BBC education programmes. Over the past few years he has worked in special education, mainly teaching Design Technology and Science, but still involved in children’s music.

Recently, Maurice returned to playing and recording adult material and has won prizes for song writing at the Saltburn Folk Festival (UK 2009) and Woody Fest (USA 2010). At present he may be found doing his musical thing around the North East.

The original idea for ‘The Singer-Songwriter’s Last Stand’ goes back many years and was simply to extend album sleeve notes into some kind of narrative but, due to other commitments, this never happened. Then, following the unexpected meeting with long lost musical legend Arthur Grimsby in Newcastle, 2009, the story became clear – in fact it almost wrote itself. Much of the book draws on personal biography as well as recounting tales of other musicians and songwriters, with an element of fiction to move the action along.

We played many different instruments including guitar, ukelele, banjo, dulcimer, flutes and whistles, keyboards, melodian and all kinds of percussion.

Mostly we played as a duo but were augmented at times with other musicians (I’m first idiot on the left here).