Bio
I've been around some!
As a teenager, I started playing in West End clubs that are now the stuff of legend - places such as Bunjie's and Les Cousins. At college, I formed a free music collective, before I moved to the south coast for a day job. The folk music of Hampshire and West Sussex opened my eyes to our islands' rich acoustic music traditions. But my life drifted away from music, as I roamed around Europe and the Americas making a different sort of living. I still played from time to time in covers bands, and I made a couple of soundscapes for modern dance. Basically though, I was done with music.
But one evening in 2000 I was passing the evening in a bedsit in Antwerp where I was working… and I had the urge to pick up a guitar. I started writing again, and ended up recording an album of dubious merit, at home, on tape - just me and guitar. I started to make more tapes at home, and then play for people. The first ‘real’ album I made was in 2016 after I turned 60 - with my band Night Flight.
I started performing wherever I was in the world. In far away places you could find me singing in clubs, bars and even busking - anywhere from London to Barcelona to Auckland. I particularly enjoy playing small venues, where I get to know people in the room.
I write songs about people in unusual or far away places - geographically, in time and in the heart. All might come together in the lowlands of Suffolk, the remote islands of the Scottish Hebrides, the frozen Antarctic, a fragile wetlands in New Zealand, the Thames estuary, the dry red dust of the Australian outback,....
After Night Flight in 2016, I recorded my piano-based album Love in Troubled Times in semi lockdown in the Kent countryside with some young London jazzers. In 2021, I started working with young producer Matteo Galesi, producing three singles which led to the album Still. Of these, the tracks that got most attention have been Let The Wind Carry Me, about the sacrifices people like my grandfather have made to flee persecution and make a new life; The Endurance, about the discovery of Shackleton's ship in the Antarctic; and Okarito Ways, which celebrates the stunning beauty of a threatened lagoon in New Zealand.
In 2022 I had a mild dose of Covid, but since then I've lived with Long Covid, an illness, like ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, that severely limits my energy, my resilience and my mobility… but not my ambition! If anything, it has made me more determined to make the best of what I have, to be who I want to be - and to make the most of life: to make new work.
Now in 2025 I'm so very thankful I can release a new album - Tales From The Undertow. Back to my roots in acoustic music, it combines my folk and singer-songwriter heritage with some Joni Mitchell-inspired shades of jazz. Made at the iconic Cowshed Studios - the vibiest, coolest, analog-rich studio in London. And with musicians who really get what I am about - Pete Oxley on electric guitar, Alastair Gavin on piano, harmonium and other keys, Rob Levy on double bass and Rick Finlay on drums. With Rebecca Phillips and Makeda Fall on backing vocals. James Johnston taking charge on the desk. Mastered by Josh Clark at Get Real Audio.
What I most hope, as a latecomer to music, is that my songs reach the ears of people who might enjoy them.
