Scottish Catholic Observer

John Richards, a retired tax inspector from Cardiff, has spent more than 18 years travelling the country playing the organs of scores of cathedrals—featuring on the BBC’s Songs of Praise earlier this year—and he stopped off recently in St Andrew’s Cathedral in Glasgow to play his 80th.

Mr Richards took in the 18th century cathedral before heading to Our Lady of Good Aid Cathedral in Motherwell and St Mirin’s in Paisley, also playing organs in a number of other locations across the west of Scotland during his trip, including in Paisley Abbey.

“It was fantastic,” Mr Richards, who was accompanied on his trip by his wife Lyn, said. “All the Scottish people were very good to us and made us feel at home.

“I’m quite impressed that so many people are asking and talking about what I’m doing—it’s lovely. Because I don’t regard myself as anything special but for some reason the way I play some things I think people get to understand that I’m playing with feeling—not just playing the notes.

Mr Richards’ momentous task was born out of tragedy. In 1992, his wife Barbara died suddenly leaving him ‘going down hill and all over the place.’

However, he met his second wife, Lyn, who encouraged him to start playing music again, and without his knowledge, attained the permission from the Duke of Marlborough for her husband to play the organ in his residence at Blenheim Palace.

“I played for two hours!” Mr Richards said. It was his wife who also started his marathon endeavour and encouraged him to play his first cathedral organ in 1997.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today without her,” he said. “Out of disaster has come some good.”

Mr Richards said there is something spiritual about playing the organs in cathedrals, a ‘presence,’ he said, that he respects. “You go into a cathedral, the way it’s built—it really is something.”

Mr Richards is currently planning another trip to Scotland to play the rest of the country’s cathedrals, from Dundee to Aberdeen and across to Oban, with only 11 of the UK’s 94 cathedral organs left to play. “I’m beginning to see the finish line,” he said.

Pic: Paul McSherry

—[email protected]

—This story ran in full in the December 6 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.