HISTORY

I live in Gipsy Hill in South East London. Grew up in Orpington and was taught the piano and more successfully the violin from the age of 7. I had a somewhat ‘relaxed’ (read as ‘lazy’) attitude toward my musicianship when I was young, but enjoyed my years in the Bromley Youth Symphony Orchestra and more enthusiastically the Bromley Youth Chamber Orchestra. The Chamber orchestra toured in Belgium, Edinburgh, Yugoslavia, Shrewsbury, Hook Norton and Vienna, all of which were life-changing experiences. I chose not pursue academic music beyond o’level and grade 8 violin, being more interested at the time in a career in drama, film and television, which I studied at The University College of Ripon and York St John (now called York St John University).

 In the late 80's and 90's I spent my time in various rock / indie pop bands as a keyboard player and backing singer: Chutzpah, Rainchaser and Victoria. None of which had any notable success, but all of which were of course, utterly brilliant. About 6 months after we played our final Victoria gig at The Monarch in Camden in 1997, former members; Ed (singer/songwriter), Julian (guitar) and myself decided to record some more songs as Ed had written some new material post-Victoria. I had a digi 8-track recorder gathering dust, so we set to work and continued doing this until eventually we had enough songs in 1999 to release an album (with help from the technical wizardly of Steve Cooper) under the new name of HUCKSTER: https://sptfy.com/4Xq6 - 22 years later, Huckster is still going strong, sometimes with Julian, sometimes without when he is off galavanting in some far flung corner of the world. We have never performed live as Huckster and it is unlikely we ever will.

In 2013, (15 years after playing my last live gig with Victoria), I was asked to join the band: Jay Scott and The Find. The lure of playing in front of an audience again proved irresistible. It was an amazing experience and I met some wonderful people along the way. We gigged in Madrid, Siguenza, Sardinia and Guernsey as well as extensively in London & UK. We also recorded an album with producer Steve Power (which was sadly never released), for which we recorded professional strings for 4 of the tracks at Abbey Road Studios. After 3 years however, I decided I’d had enough of pretending to be young again, and humping a heavy keyboard + equipment around, so parted company with Jay and shifted my attention back to my long-neglected love of classical music and my violin, which I picked up with earnest along with my dusty old Schradieck technique exercise book and soon after, in 2016, I joined the South East London Orchestra (SELO), a local amateur symphony orchestra comprised of an incredibly talented group of local musicians and delivering 5 concerts a year.

With this return to the orchestral world of symphonic classical music, I found that my idle doodlings on the piano changed dramatically. Piqued by curiosity, I decided  to take one of these doodlings further, actually work on it and see where it led. Before I knew it in late 2018, I had finished my first piano composition: Gipsy Hill Serenade. This was followed in 2019 by The Autumn Quietus and Midnight Reverie, and in 2020 by Circus and The Life and Death of.... I couldn't tell you who I am influenced by, it is probably everyone from Tchaikovsky to Radiohead, so I'm not really sure if these pieces fall under the genre of neo-classical, new classical, avant-garde, new wave, contemporary classical or one of the numerous other genres out there, but I do know that they come directly from my heart and soul.