My brother Martin Weedon, who has died aged 67 from cancer, was founder of the highly successful Piano Warehouse, providing pianos for musicians and celebrities.
Martin and a colleague, Mike Neill, set up a business together in 1977, starting with secondhand furniture and pianos. This evolved into piano renovation, and then became the Piano Warehouse, based in Surbiton, Surrey. In the 1980s it expanded into importing modern pianos. Over many successful years, the business provided instruments to musicians including Oasis, Coldplay, George Solti and John Ogdon, and other well-known figures, including the broadcaster Jon Snow and film director Sam Mendes.
Martin was born in Dorking, Surrey, the third of four children of Veronica (nee More), a writer, and Tom Weedon, a freelance photographer and lecturer at Guildford School of Art. When Martin was six, our family moved to Fornalutx in Majorca. Our father died a few months after the move, but we stayed on for three years. Martin made friends in the village and developed a lifelong connection to the place.
We returned to the UK in 1962, to Newdigate in Surrey, and then to London. Martin did well at Ottershaw school, but left aged 16. Partly as a result of my work as a music photographer, he met musicians of the time, made many friends among bands and taught himself to be a drummer. But he knew he needed a new direction. In 1972 he joined the Divine Light Mission – briefly living in an ashram and leading a very austere life – and worked on setting up charity shops for the mission. While doing this, he made friends with Mike, and they went into business together.
Martin was a keen sailor and spent much of his free time chartering boats in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, often taking his teenage nephews along to give their parents a break.
He was an avid reader, of philosophy in particular. He was also a whizz at solving IT issues, so on discovering an old manuscript written by our mother about our father’s life in photography, it was Martin who had it digitised in 2019 and helped with the editing for publication by the Majorcan archive of sound and images, ASIM.
He never retired completely and was still working part-time in his business, based from his home in Horsham, West Sussex, up to his death.
Martin married his longterm partner, Deborah Hollier, in 2017. She survives him, as do his son, Alex, from a previous relationship, his stepchildren, Eleanor and Freddie, and his siblings, Tom, Fiona and me.
