After a brief flirtation with Irish music (when Planxty and the Bothy Band came to his attention), Richard was introduced to bluegrass, much to his surprise, while on a busking trip in Barcelona. There he played for a couple of years in a band called Pigtails, with Mike Pryor (guitar/mandolin, vocals) and Sue Pryor (bass) from England, and Spaniards Javier Sanchez (banjo) and Montse Perez (autoharp/mandolin). They had a lot of fun gigging around Catalonia.

As pretty much the only performers of Americana around Catalonia at the time, they attracted the attentions of a rat-pack of rockabillies from Girona ("They were nice - they showed us around and designed posters for us, even though local shopkeepers were scared by their excessive use of denim and Brylcreem") and a group of Hell's Angels from Tarragona ("Not so welcome! They would turn up at gig venues even before we had and the bar owners would take one look at them and shut up shop for the night. When we first saw them at a gig, we thought that they would be the kind of bikers that looked menacing but would spend their spare time helping old ladies across the road - we heard later that they returned to the venue after we'd gone and trashed the place - several ended up in the nick.")

Although distracted from the fiddle by another flirtation - this time with the early-music scene (including a period studying viola da gamba in the USA) - he has returned to it in recent years, playing in the local English folk scene around the Greenwich area of London, in barn-dance bands such as the Flying Chaucers, and in the Mounthoolies.