Let's begin at the beginning. Can you tell us how you started?
Well, technically speaking, you could go all the way back to when I was three years old, dressed in a cowboy outfit and hat, strumming a toy guitar and singing to an umbrella stand deputising for a microphone! By rights, all my songs should feature Honky Tonks, three-legged dogs and loose women! (And, before all you country fans ring in to complain, the Hag rules!)
My intention, when I started out, was to be a lyricist...to be Bernie Taupin to someone's Reg Dwight. Unfortunately, my efforts to stay firmly behind the scenes weren't entirely successful. Unable to find any budding composers to match winning melodies to my crumpled sheaf of lyrics, I eventually resorted to forming my own bands (or joining other people's) in a frequently futile attempt to jumpstart the process. Inevitably, though, I drifted closer and closer to centre stage by default as much as anything else. One morning I looked in the mirror and discovered I looked just like a singer-songwriter!
What were your early influences?
How long have you got? Everything I could get my hands on...from classic rock to power pop, prog, punk, folk, country, big band, AOR, MOR and all points in-between. These days, it's almost easier to tell you who I don't like than who I do. My CD collection might give the game away entirely or, more likely, it could mystify pop historians for the next thousand years!
I've listed some of my favourite songwriters elsewhere on this page but the truth is I'm not actually sure how many of those have impacted on my own style, either as a singer or songwriter. Do I even have a style? I open my mouth and a sound comes out - generally, if it's close enough for jazz, then I'm happy! Sounds like? I have absolutely no idea.
Can you encapsulate your songwriting approach for us?
I'm not really an "over-in-three-minutes" kind of guy! I think that much may be obvious if you listen to the demo tracks I've posted. In my defence, I'm not necessarily coming from that Brill Building tradition. Most of my friends are musicians and songwriters and many of those have a mastery of the craft way beyond anything I could hope to emulate. They do that so much better than I ever could so I do something else.
Which is not to say that the music doesn't count. Obviously, it does...but you are talking to a lyricist, as I explained earlier. In my case, and for the most part, the music serves the words rather than the other way around. There also tends to be a narrative at play in most of my songs...even if it may not be immediately apparent to the outside ear. I'm not even close to being a classic storyteller in the folk tradition but there is usually a structure of some sort to be found - most of my songs have a beginning, a middle and an end and the denouement couldn't come anywhere other than in the last verse.
Where do see music heading over the next ten years?
It's a cliché, of course, but I think that, even today, the Beatles are the Rosetta Stone of song-writing and recording. In just eight years, they reinvented the wheel so many times that it's almost inconceivable today that it could be possible to achieve so much in the way of artistic development in so short a period of time. The music industry hasn't been capable for many years of supporting that rate of creative turnover. It's now de rigeur to pull five singles from an album and send the band round the world for eighteen months to work it. That's finally beginning to change with the global reach of the net and the likes of myspace finally allowing artists to make their own connections and dictate the speed of their own creative progress. Over the next few years, the conglomerates will have to adapt or die. It's that simple.
Lastly, why are you here on myspace?
I've been out of the loop for a while and have only recently made the decision to climb back in the ring. The demos you can hear on the site were recorded piecemeal over the least year or so on stone-age equipment and this is really the first time they've been aired. Though I played everything on these songs bar the drum tracks (courtesy of my faithful old friend, Mr Korg), I'm not a multi-instrumentalist by nature and this was borne of necessity rather than grand design. For live performance, or indeed for future recording, I'm hoping to link up with other songwriters and musicians and make life much easier for myself! Beyond that, I'm just like everyone else - I'd like these songs to be heard and, if anyone actually likes 'em, it would be a bonus!
