Biography

I was born at a very early age in 1970, in Kirkby, near the city of Liverpool and the town of Ormskirk in Lancashire (now Merseyside), UK, and started learning the trumpet and the recorder at the age of 7 (thanks to a far sighted local education authority) and played in various youth orchestras, wind bands, and brass bands. At 10 I moved to a house in a different authority, and had to have a private trumpet teacher. Shortly after I started doing occasional jazz workshops with Digby Fairweather and Stan Barker, which I found incredibly useful.

In 1981 I got interested in computers, regularly going into Tandy to play with the TRS-80s and then after saving up my £1 a week spending money for months getting my very own ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000). From this point music and computers took up most of my time, but I had no particular plans to go into either directly as a career, so consequently didn’t do quite as much practise as perhaps I should, and shyed away from commiting myself to learning Z80 assembly language ! By 15 / 16 I’d kind of decided I wanted to be a sound engineer, so I chose my A Level subjects of Maths, Physics, and Music as the prerequisites for doing the Tonmeister Studies music degree at the University of Surrey. Unfortunately, having glandular fever during the first year of A Levels meant I wasn’t able to do as much work as I should, and finding out that the grades BCC in the Surrey prospectus realistically meant AAA kind of made me think about a different track; getting training by the BBC seemed the best option to try. Anyway, in the meanwhile, the 6th form college I was at had just bought a 4 track and a synth, and a South Bank Show documentary about Philip Glass had recently been shown on TV, as well as the film Koyaanisqatsi, which captured my imagination enough to start some early experiments in composition at the age of 17. I got the BBC application form, but never posted it, deciding that I might as well try for music college auditioning as first study trumpet and second study composition. Birmingham Conservatoire accepted me as joint first study, so I went there, and started doing second study percussion as well on the Graduate Performing (GBSM, now BMus) course. I’ve lived in Birmingham ever since.

I spent most of the first year locked in the recording studio, learning just about every thing the teacher could teach me about music technology. I also developed an interest in what gets called ‘World Music’ resulting in me to having John Mayer as my composition teacher. After graduating I happenned to be in the right place at the right time, and was taken on as a part time tutor in composition, studio production, and world music. Also during that period I had one commission – a piece for school orchestra, choir, recorder group, guitar group, handbell group, and narrator, The Legend Of Saint Kenelm which is based on a legend local to the Halesowen area.

Then In 1997, in the week of the start of the new academic year I was given a ‘career opportunity’ by the Conservatoire – I was unexpectedly given the opportunity to find a new career ! Needless to say, I was vaguely annoyed about this, but it significantly opened my eyes as to the true nature of the music industry – at every level of every sector, be it education, performance, recording, whatever, there is only a certain level one can reach via your abilities alone – sooner or later the only way you can progress any further is to trample all over other people around you, and lick the bottoms of the other people ‘above’ you; both of these I was unwilling to do, and do manage to hold a certain amount of pride in the fact that I managed to get as far as I did without so doing.

It was then I moved into the web and multimedia world, working first as a web developer for Ocean Multimedia (Now Stormnet), then as the technical development manager for Oakwood Village. Many friends were quite surprised at what seemed like a total career switch, but to me it’s just a case of communicating in one medium rather than another one; I’m quite adamant that I’m not a computer programmer or expert or whatever, and I get quite irritated when people describe me as such – yes, there is a certain amount of programming skill involved in what I do, but the key thing to focus on is the audience and the message. The technology is the servant of the message, not the message itself, and just because I use computers to do my job I’m no more a ‘computer person’ than the secretary who uses Word to type up documents.

Since November 2003 I’ve been working for Birmingham City Council as a website communications officer. Although I still do some freelance web work coding .asp sites to keep my hand in, mainly I’m as much responsible for the content of what I work on as I am the technology – indeed, the council website is constructed using a 3rd-party content management system which I have comparitively little control over the code which is output, and no control at all over the code which drives it. I still occasionally do some music work, but purely for the amusement value rather than with the idea of it being a career, and I also do a fair amount of photography.

I live with my wife Bettina on a pair of narrowboats, in Birmingham.