I am a full-time bass-playing, guitar-playing, song-writing, instrumental teacher, based in London.
Playing-wise I am currently playing bass guitar with one of the UK's finest party bands, Groovestone, which sees me performing all over the country nearly every weekend.
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I started playing classical guitar at the age of 9, having lessons with Jill Trueman, before changing teachers just before secondary school. With my new teacher, Simon Jennings, my knowledge of music widened and I bought an electric guitar, and later, my first bass. I became very interested in music from yesteryear, particularly The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Police and Steely Dan amongst others and learned the basics of bass playing whilst ploughing through much of The Beatles back-catalogue.
During this time, as a pupil at Arthur Terry in Sutton Coldfield, I was involved in every single annual musical during my time there (including sixth form!) mostly on stage acting and singing, but with a stint in the orchestra pit on guitar for West Side Story in 2000 and on my nights off from being Captain Tempest during Return to the Forbidden Planet. The shows were not only great fun but a fantastic chance to perform in front of hundreds of people every night for eight evening performances and two matinees each year, not to mention the tour around the local junior schools and a performance at the Symphony Hall in 1996!
Arthur Terry's Soul Band was also a fantastic opportunity to perform and I joined up having recently bought a bass. The standard of musicians was very high during my time with the group, and highlights for me included concerts at Birmingham NEC and Birmingham's Ronnie Scott's (it's now a strip club, sadly).
Through the Soul Band I met Phil Surtees; multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire (sax, clarinet, piano, drums, guitar, vocals and now bass-player with The Bad Robots as seen on C4's Mobile Act Unsigned 2007) and we formed Scooby, an indie-rock band with a penchant for Kula Shaker. The band didn't last all too long with the original line-up (an ill-fated gig at Sutton's O'Neill's heralded a new era) and we became Musika (I don't know why) and recorded a demo and played around Sutton and Birmingham for a few years with moderate success until university picked off members of the group.
As a teenager, I also joined Raw Talent Youth Theatre and journeyed to the Custard Factory in Digbeth every Saturday for rehearsals, culminating in a comedy show penned by the organisers three times a year. Round Midnight Theatre Company (who run Raw Talent) have since moved from Digbeth and now run groups in Dudley and have a base at Arthur Terry as well.
As I got older I worked on numerous projects with Round Midnight, writing music with co-founder Stuart Lane to include in new productions and teaching the songs to the youngsters involved. I continue to work with the theatre company when I am available and when a project requires music.
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On leaving Arthur Terry, I decided to study music and enrolled at Southampton University in 2002. Southampton offered a course and department where it was possible to specialise in popular music (which at the time was especially rare in a university degree course). I studied bass guitar under Bastien Terraz and learned a great deal from Dave Marchant (former guitarist with Courtney Pine and now Head of Jazz & Pop Studies at Southampton) who coached myself and others in ensemble technique.
I played in various concerts during my time on the south coast and joined the Southampton University Jazz Orchestra (SUJO) for a tour to France and I went on to become the orchestra's President for my final year, which saw us perform with Mike Mondesir and British sax legend Andy Sheppard.
I was lucky enough to befriend a group of fantastic musicians with a similar outlook on music. They introduced me to jazz old and new, a genre of music which had never really appealed to me before.
After playing together sporadically towards the end of our first year, we formed a band officially in 2003, Policy Briefs, partly for fun and we also grabbed a few gigs at the fantastic Talking Heads pub (great live venue if you are ever there!) We tried to use computer samples and loops to create a different sound and would improvise around grooves, inspired by the Miles Davis bands of the 1970s.
Our band started with me on bass, Jon Gingell on guitar, Hal Hutchison on keyboard, Sammy Smith on drums and 'Uncle' Tony Reeves triggering samples and were then asked to play in a Masters recital by Dave Bacon (a Masters' student armed with a trumpet) and added him to the line-up. Soon afterwards, awesome tenor saxist Joe Browne was added to the mix and sadly we could no longer fit in one car.
We generated a bit of extra income for ourselves by playing mainstream jazz standards at local venues and student events and put together a function band to play pop music at functions and the odd wedding.
In our third year at university, and in Dave and Tony's absence from uni life (Dave gained his MMus and left at the end of our second year and Tony spent a year in France as part of his course) we formed Dear Gregory from the surviving members. We tackled existing tunes from modern jazz acts that we particularly liked - basically becoming something of an early-Acoustic Ladyland tribute act until we found our feet. We were marked as part of our degree for the band (we'd always kept Policy Briefs extra-curricular) and were rewarded with full marks in performance for our challenging final recital, including an interpretation of Keith Jarrett's 'The Windup'.
Following this success we took the full line-up of Policy Briefs to Vienne Jazz Festival (July 2005) and played two slots on the support stage to some of the biggest names going - Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny ...
With university now over we honed our act as a pop band and became Groovestone, today a hugely successful wedding and function band that now plays all over the country. We even supported Calvin Harris at an event in Oxford.
In 2006 we formed an offshoot band of Groovestone - a more compact 5-piece band - and took it to the French Alps (following in the footsteps of The Feeling, playing at some of the same venues as they did on their rise to prominence) for a month of snow-scenic gigging. On returning to England we started to write original material, and began gigging in London.
I now live in London, if only just to be that bit closer to Big Ben.
Latest developments can be found on my news page!
