To be brief..
Started singing in jazz clubs/pubs/anywhere that would have me from the age of 15. Released my first album on Black Box Records and gigged around. I then performed a show about Peggy Lee at the Battersea Arts Centre and the Edinburgh Festival. It got great reviews and for the next few years, I toured alot in theatres and festivals UK and abroad, bringing to life the refined, understated, image conscious Peggy. In the process I learnt alot about being refined, understated and... not very image conscious - although I can put on a set of false nails in about 10 seconds. I also met my band - who are (they don't even need critics to affirm this) brilliant. Quite nice looking too. Although the joy is dampened (literally) when you have to spend night after night in a sweaty theatre dressing room semi-naked with each other.
The opportunities we got from doing the show were amazing and I feel lucky to have even sung a note inside the Festival Hall - let alone carried an entire show with the BBC Big Band...but this is the thing. Just after that gig (2003), I realised that I could feasibly continue playing Peggy until my hair turned the colour of my wig....and I needed to dig underneath the platinum and try to find my (own) voice. So i went to Canada, to a community full of artists and musicians who had drifted as far west as they could go. And learnt something by being quiet for a while. The songs I've put up came from that time. I booked Porcupine studios for a couple of days and got the old band together to see what would happen. Things As They Are is the result. Hopefully, if I can get past the demands of a very small but distracting one year old baby girl, it will be released later this year.
