But you pursued it anyway?
I went to Salford University and did a BA in music, which was really a classical music course, so I did have to play my violin! But they had a small Recording Studies module where they encouraged you to use the gear in the studio to experiment and really have fun with it rather than focusing on the theoretical side of things. So I used to be there until midnight every night, recording different bands and having fun. Then one of my tutors offered me a job in a studio that he wasn’t able to take on because of other commitments. I didn’t know if anything would come of it, but I ended up engineering for a producer called Bill Leader, who had started recording music in the 1950s — he was 80 when I started working with him, so he had so much experience that I was able to learn from.