The nursery schools of Rayleigh, Essex had never seen the like. Most four-year-olds would turn up, stick some plasticine up their nose, piss in the sandpit and fill four hours happily smacking a plastic truck with a squeaky hammer. But not Mr & Mrs Bishop’s little boy Matt – when he wasn’t sat in a corner writing T-Rex style songs on the electric guitar his dad had built for him in spare hours off at the BBC engineering department, he was bouncing sounds back and forth between an ancient reel-to-reel and a Fisher Price tape recorder like some kind of miniature Epworth. It was, to the stunned creche supervisors, nothing short of rusk’n’roll.
“When I was a kid all I did was listen to music,” Matt remembers, “so I started playing and writing songs when I was four or five. At that age I only knew, like,
“When I was a kid all I did was listen to music,” Matt remembers, “so I started playing and writing songs when I was four or five. At that age I only knew, like,
two chords so it was mainly Bolan rip-offs. They’ve got pictures of me lying on the living room floor with a little toy piano and tape recorder, just lying around and pressing things. I used to be fascinated with multi-tracking. I had this Fisher Price tape recorder and my mum’s reel-to reel and I used to bounce across. I don’t know if those tapes still exist, I’ll have to find them and do some remixes.”
And while this didn’t make Matt – Switches mainman and a classic rock nutter in the making - a ‘child prodigy’ as such (“A child prodigy is someone who learns classical piano and gets grade 8 by the time they’re five, not a toddler wishing he had an afro and stars stuck to his face”), it was certainly the start of a childhood obsession with rock that bordered on the pathological. Having taught himself rudimentary mixing techniques at about the same age the other kids
And while this didn’t make Matt – Switches mainman and a classic rock nutter in the making - a ‘child prodigy’ as such (“A child prodigy is someone who learns classical piano and gets grade 8 by the time they’re five, not a toddler wishing he had an afro and stars stuck to his face”), it was certainly the start of a childhood obsession with rock that bordered on the pathological. Having taught himself rudimentary mixing techniques at about the same age the other kids
