From radio dogsbody to a big mover and shaker in Hong Kong disco

I WAS BORN IN Tidworth Military Hospital (in southern England) in 1956. My father was a medical orderly during the 1956 Suez Crisis and I was conceived on a rooftop in Benghazi (Libya) and flown back to England to be born. My father was doing his National Service. He later went to London Bible College. My maternal grandparents had a wonderful little house in Flitwick, Bedfordshire, where my brother and younger sister were born. Much later, in 1974, my youngest sister was born. My father graduated around 1963 and became a vicar. He was ordained in York Minster and we moved to York, where he became a curate. He wanted his family to see the world so he joined as a chaplain in the British Army. The Reverend Ian Henry Bull, chaplain to the forces.

I WAS ABOUT NINE when we lived on a sugar-cane plantation. We had a wonderful white house on legs and in the evening we would be allowed to stand at the window and watch the bats before going to sleep under a mosquito net. Next door we could hear the West Indian families listening to steel band music and dancing. There was a lot of calypso in those days. I could hear them making this happy noise, and that affected me. It stayed with me, that I would always like to be responsible for making that noise.