Making music: a Welshman living in the Geneva village of Avully, Steven Roberts enjoys a growing reputation as a premier guitar maker, and for founding the successful GENA Festival. Swiss News finds out more.
The Steven Roberts Guitars web-site notes that he's been repairing, customising and building stringed instruments for 20 years, before listing an astonishing array of them. But to a visitor at his Avully workshop--surrounded by guitars in various states of construction and repair, tools and materials--the question that first comes to mind is not how be came to this relatively unusual occupation but how he came to be pursuing it here.
The story begins
Steven Roberts was born to Welsh parents in 1950 in a village called Clevedon, a popular seaside resort about ten miles from Bristol. He moved to Geneva in 1958 where his father Maxwell, a nuclear physicist working at Bristol University, had accepted a job at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, still best known by its old French acronym, CERN.
The family of four--Roberts had a brother three years older--found an apartment in the Geneva neighbourhood of Charmillies. Roberts doesn't remember having any particular problems settling into local school: "it took me about nine months to speak French fluently", he says. At the age of 14, though, his life was turned upside down. A routine X-ray revealed that he had a hole in his heart.
"Heart surgery in 1964 was very different from what it is today," says Roberts. "They really opened you up, and recovery was long and painful. Massive scars. I was on morphine for two months. I even had to learn how to breathe properly again." He spent two months in Geneva's cantonal hospital, and it was over two years before his life got back to normal again.
By the time he was ready to go back to high school, Roberts had given plenty of thought to what he wanted to do, and he decided that classical education wasn't for him. "I liked math; didn't much care for Latin and the rest of it." So he chose a three-year course of schooling and apprenticeship as a commercial employee, and got his certificate.
Enter music
But something else changed during his convalescence: Roberts taught himself to play the acoustic guitar, an interest he shared with his mother. By age 20, he was performing in local cafes and bars.
"I sang a little, but it was mostly instrumental, folk music, rag-time, British and American stuff," be says. He was influenced by Welsh guitarist John James, British acoustic guitarist John Renbourn, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the "beautiful, simple melodies" of the Beatles, he says.
At first, his music was "just a side thing" while he worked at a company...
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