It didn’t take Tom Mitchell long to recruit a producer for his debut album ... all he had to do was ring his dad. SAM WONFOR talks to a father and son in perfect tune

“You did pay me,” says Billy, who also brought his Lindisfarne mucker Ray Laidlaw into the studio to provide beat-keeping services. “I got a voucher for HMV. He even let me do a couple of verses on one of the tracks.

“There were little bits of tension in the studio now and again. It comes from his 26-year-old ears and my 64-year-old ears. There’s a difference there and also the cultural divide which comes with that. But I was there to offer however many years of experience I’ve clocked up.

“It was probably the first time we’d sung together in the studio ... apart from the Julia Hankin show on BBC Newcastle when you were 12,” Billy adds with a laugh. “We did Honky Tonk Woman.” Recollection slowly spreads across Tom’s face.

“I think we may have a tape somewhere. Don’t ask me to find it.”

When Tom was 12, he was already a budding musician. He was playing the guitar and had started piano lessons too.

Mind you, it wasn’t his dad who taught him to play.

Billy, who came back from a spell in Vancouver to join Lindisfarne spin-off band Jack the Lad when he was 27, had attempted to teach him the guitar, but quickly handed over responsibility to a “proper teacher”.

“It was when he was about six,” he remembers. “And he just cried. I wanted him to play Smoke on Water and proper stuff like that, but of course that’s not how you teach someone to play. The teacher at school started him off with Three Blind Mice, which is how it’s supposed to be.

“He didn’t like the piano lessons mind. I pushed him into it, but I think he’s glad of it now. I gave up my lessons when I was about 10 and have always regretted it.”

Although Tom’s musical prowess is easy to trace back a generation, that’s not how it was for Billy ...

“My brother was really good on the piano – he was doing that when he was a teenager, hanging out with the lads who became The Animals. And I could play, but we didn’t get it from anywhere. Mam and Dad ran pubs.”

Clearly proud of his youngest son (and now a doting grandad to Jack, and Jamie’s daughter Martha who arrived a month before Jack), Billy is the first to recognise that choosing music as a profession isn’t the easiest of decisions.

“I’m pleased all the kids can play,” he says, “But it’s a dodgy existence, financially, which is harder now than it was when I was starting out, unless you’re prepared to be a clown and go on the X Factor or something.

“But if it’s what you want to do, it’s a hard pull to resist.”

And that comes from a father who really does know his onions.

Tom’s album Paper Thin Walls is available from his website www.tommitchellmusic.co.uk,  which also has details of upcoming performances, including two summer gigs at the Porter’s Coffee House in Tynemouth Station on July 1 and 2.