The Pit of Pat

I was born in 1949 (two years after Roswell - but that’s not important) in Ontario, Canada. I moved to Montreal when I was 18 and worked at Expo 67 where my background in electronics and love for music made me a natural for some of the groundbreaking multimedia work and synthesizers which were part of this magnificent internationalist event.

After spending a some time tramping around the US after Expo - including a run to Woodstock, and some token folk music following - I spent some time feeling out the psychedelic music scene on the west coast, becoming involved with experimental band “The United States of America” before its meltdown. I moved to England when Haight-Ashbury started to become less about the exchange of free-flowing ideas and cultural experimentation and more about the exchange of free-flowing narcotics and spoiled bourgeois experimentation.

I interned at the BBC for a few summers, spending a great deal of time at the Radiophonic Workshop working on sound effects (especially Doctor Who) with the legendary Delia Derbyshire, who I courted with little success. Slightly heartbroken and feeling it was time for change I left the BBC and helped to produce the visual elements for a little known band of young musicians who went by the name of Genesis. Quite happy in this role I toured with the group for a few great years, taking my cue to leave from Peter Gabriel’s own departure.

Using the modest savings I had accumulated, I built a small cottage on the west of Ireland where with a warm fireplace, a cozy studio and a growing library of literature and music I hermitized for a great many years. I disappeared from all known record in the fall of 1979. Some say I vanished while on a backpacking tour of New Zealand, others that I returned to the wilderness of Canada’s west coast, and still others that I returned to the sea or some such romantic fancy. The truth is, no one really knows for certain what became of me. And I quite like it like that.