Born and raised in Birmingham, England in a ‘teaching’ family, together with a younger brother and sister… “all our houses had pianos in ’em, one uncle played boogie woogie, another more the classics and me mum and me nan played a bit too. I remember as an 8 year old, singing along to the songs on the radio in our living room… and then the 60s come along!”

Got given my cousin’s Hofner and a copy of Bert Weedon’s ‘Play in a Day’.  – well, I didn’t… and gave up after a bit, but went back to it a few months later and managed to make some kind of acceptable noise with it. I think the first song I tried was ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ ‘cos the chords were simple – I couldn’t sing it though, it went too high in the chorus.

I started writing songs, I’ve still got some of them scribbled down on pieces of paper somewhere, but they’re incredibly bad. One song, though, withstood the tests of time and a couple of years ago, when I started having a look back at stuff I’d done, I took it apart and ‘re-wrote’ it. You may hear it one of these days…

There were a few of us who played a bit and we had a go at putting bands together, with all the gear piled up in the hallway at home. Mum and Dad were really impressed… it was around that time that Dad come out with the immortal

“You’ll never be Paul McCartney, concentrate on yer proper job!”

Never forgot that.

If we go 10 years further down the line, I’d really had enough of working in offices by then, doing accounts and all that stuff, so with an offer of work in a city centre, backstreet pub, I left ‘the world of business’ and started working amongst people. Probably the best decision I ever made.

They got me to start playing there too, 1 night, 2 nights, 3 nights a week and things just went on from there. After a while, I met up with Brian Murphy who convinced me that going to France for a summer season would be a good idea. So, like you do, I said goodbye to the pub and went to France… no job there, of course, but after 6 weeks or so we did secure a summer season which lead to 5 glorious summers in Brittany and a fair amount of touring in France at other times of the year.

I met Maartin Allcock for the first time in that period in the early 80s when we were both booked to play pubs in Oslo. He helped me and Brian with an album that we sold in France and I was later to call on him again in 1993, after I’d moved to Norway, to produce 3 songs we were recording in Sortland. Now, in 2016, we’ve been working together again and ‘Shade of Blue’ is due for release in October with a ‘few’ more songs planned for 2017.

Since moving to Norway in 1987, I’ve been lucky enough to meet, get to know and work with some great people and brilliant musicians.

There’s been a couple of singles and a couple of albums and now we have this collaboration with the wonderful England Brooks that Maartin’s produced. With projects in the pipeline and new songs on the table, there’s a lot more yet to come and the future is bright and well worth looking forward to.

Perhaps Dad was right, I’ll never be Paul McCartney but the wonderful, rich and varied life I’ve enjoyed since following my dreams and going where the music has taken me, would I not swap for anything.