A MUSICIAN who gave up his job in the civil service and went on to perform on the same television programme as The Beatles has released a book about his time in the music business.

Peter Kerr was part of Scotland’s premier jazz band – The Clyde Valley Stompers – and toured all over Britain, as well as Germany, before the band suddenly called it a day in 1963.

Seventy-five-year-old Peter, who played clarinet, explained it had taken a number of years for the story – Don’t Call me Clyde: Jazz Journey of a Sixties Stomper – to make the journey from his memories onto the page.

He said: “It’s a story people have asked me for years to write.

“I never really believed that many folk would be interested but more and more people of all ages asked.

“There is a fascination for things back in the 1950s and 1960s and I thought it would not take me long to write but it took me three years.

“It’s the memory thing – you think you have got a vivid memory and on some things you do but others it is is very sketchy and you have got to get the facts right.”

Peter, of Haddington’s Chalybeate, was working with the civil service but admitted it was “just not me” and felt his future lay away from there as he continued to play with the Hidden Town Dixielanders, before becoming a key part of the Clyde Valley Stompers.

The band were known as one of the top jazz bands in Britain, and Peter quickly took to the road with the band.

That saw the group appear on hit television show Thank Your Lucky Stars, which was shown on ITV from 1961 to 1966.

The Clyde Valley Stompers performed on the same show as The Beatles in February 1963.

However, with the Clyde Valley Stompers at the height of their own fame, the musical journey with the band came to an end for Peter.

The band split due to financial disagreements, with Peter getting in touch with his former Knox Academy classmate Jim Douglas, who previously lived in Gifford, to put together the new book.

Peter is no stranger to writing stories, having penned a series of hugely successful books about his time growing oranges on the Spanish island of Majorca, as well as a fiction series following detective Bob Burns.

He said: “Even the Majorcan books, I wrote them not that long after being there and there were still a lot of details you do not notice and there is a lot of checking up on things.

“The fiction stuff is good fun and you make it up as you go along and the characters take over the story for you.

“Ultimately, the common denominator is it is all about telling stories and that is what I try and do.”

Don’t Call me Clyde: Jazz Journey of a Sixties Stomper is on sale at Kesley’s, in Haddington, and available online.