Mike Kidson

Hullo!I've been playing wind instruments of one kind or another for pretty much all of my life, concentrating on saxophone since my teens. I developed a taste for playing music in a theatrical context while still in school, pursued it much more actively while at university (although my degree is in English Language and Literature) and then spent the next 10 years working professionally as a musician, occasional actor and sometime scriptwriter in many British repertory theatres. During the 1980s that phase of my career peaked and culminated with Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd", for which I co-wrote the first ever small band musical arrangements (with comments by Sondheim himself), and the original production of Willy Russell's "Blood Brothers", to which I contributed the original saxophone parts, playing them during the show's first West End run.All the while, though, I played in all kinds of pub rock, covers and jazz outfits on the side. During the late 1980s, as I took stock of my working life and developed a few new paying lines of work (primarily editorial work on economics textbooks!), my ex-partner Khris Brown and I started a total improvisation music group, The Marvin Suggs Quintet (lineup size varied, but I don't think there were ever five of us...), playing occasional gigs around Liverpool. This was a tremendously important experience - learning how to listen to the musicians around me, to respond instantly to newly generated ideas and to create calls and responses on the spur of the moment.In 1990 I became a founder member of The Muffin Men, a Frank Zappa tribute band in which I played saxophones, squeaky toys plus anything else to hand that would generate a sound, and lead clown in general. The band achieved some fame along the way, eventually working with numerous former Zappa sidemen including Ike Willis and Jimmy Carl Black... and musically it proved incredibly stimulating, combining the challenge of interpreting Zappa's highly complex compositions with that of improvising lots of "anything goes" sections.In 1999 I joined forces with Doktor Combover, a rough, tough and sleaze-oriented r'n'b (50s style!) /funk/punk/garage/surf outfit with which I still play regularly in Liverpool. Since 2003, however, I've spent about half of each year touring as saxophone player with The Australian Pink Floyd, a band which has offered a new challenge - that of replicating exactly, yet also in my own style, the saxophone parts on Floyd's classic 1970s albums - and which has taken me all around the USA, to South America, across Canada and in and out of Europe. It also led, courtesy of original Pink Floyd sax player Dick Parry, to a guest appearance with Dream Theater in Amsterdam in October 2005, which was an amazing experience.And that's about it so far! I'm always on the lookout for exciting new musical experiences, both as a player and a listener... and I look forward with anticipation to the future, whatever it may bring!