Tommy Pattison

A few years ago a young kid I knew who also has autism blew my mind when he told me:

'I don't understand the soul within a person, but I do understand the soul within music.'

I had never heard anything so true to my own experience of life...

For me, human emotions are very difficult to work out and explain... I can play them on the guitar no bother though.

Music is my mode of communication, it is how I interact with and interpret the world around me. If it wasn't for playing in bands, I would have no link to society at large.

Sometimes people ask me about my guitar solos, they want to know about scales, keys, time signatures etc… I have no traditional musical theory, instead I have chromesthesia, I have my own musical theory based on colour, far too complicated to explain here, suffice to say that it works and is unique to me.

I have tourette’s and echolalia, when I was younger these were more severe than they are now and were accompanied by a stammer and rhotacism. Learning to sing as good as stopped all my motor speech issues; it literally gave me a voice.

Recently somebody complimented me on my musical achievements, they said I had done amazing despite my autism; I corrected them because everything I have achieved has been so because of my autism.