Synaesthesia – you either got it or you don’t

I wanted to write this piece about Phil and the way he pulled funny faces when he was playing.
He was teased mercilessly about it from the beginning of of his career. I’ve watched Matching Mole performances on Utube  where some punter has commented along the lines of “What’s wrong with the guitar player? Why is he pulling such awful faces – is he in pain or something?”
He was teased relentlessly when he was in Hatfield and the North where the other players referred to it as “gurning” and accused him (jokingly) of frightening the audience! It wasn’t something that Phil had any control over and a lot of the time on stage you could find him trying to hide away when he was playing.
He did gradually manage, over the years, to control it, to a degree. I thought it was a shame because it was so expressive and enabled one to get a glimpse into a part of Phil’s soul that was normally hidden.
Richard Sinclair had once told Phil  that he should be able to sing every note he played and  for a long time I used to think that Phil was trying to silently sing the notes – and it does look a bit like that – as if he is straining to reach notes that are way out of his range. 
In this fragment of film that somebody took of In Cahoots playing in the Dunois in Paris 1984, you can catch glimpses of Phil soloing on Nowadays A Silhouette, completely taken over by what he is playing, so wrapped up in the music, so caught up in his solo, he is oblivious to the fact that people are watching him, so concentrated is he, and so one with what he is playing. It is so expressive and not confined to the contortions of his face. His whole body is gripped emotionally by every note he plays. Not exactly dancing but writhing expressively with intense feeling. Not so much Lything and Gracing as Writhing and Grimacing!
I found it incredibly moving. Sadly the cameraman/woman seemed to be more interested in filming the back of Pete Lemer’s head than following this amazing soloist and we only get fleeting glances of Phil’s mesmerising performance.
In every day life, although Phil was a warm and friendly person, he was very shy. He was not flamboyant in any way and had an  introverted rather than extroverted personality. He was reserved and dignified. He had never been known to dance. Seeing him behaving as he appears in the film is quite an eye opener and more importantly is in no way an act.
All these years later, now that we know so much about synaesthesia, it’s obvious to me that Phil had a form of this condition, Apparently a lot of musicians have it – seeing notes as colours etc, although I have never read about anyone having exactly this form.
Here is an excerpt from one of the websites about this condition:
Synaesthesia is a phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers, such as tasting coulors or feeling sounds. Some people describe it as having “wires crossed” in their brain because it activates two or more senses when there’s only a reason for one sense to activate.
People with synaesthesia experience the processing step differently. Their brains process the same information through two or more brain areas at once.
Watch the video of Phil with In Cahoots at Le Dunois, Paris, playing Nowadays A Silhouette here: