Biography
A mans work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. (Albert Camus)
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience. (Henry Miller)
I was born in the early hours of 6th December 1969 in Oxford. On that night across the Atlantic in the USA the Rolling Stones were playing Altamont to a crowd of 400.000 people. Events at this concert turned ugly when a 19 year old Meredith Hunter attending the concert waved a gun and pointed it in the direction of the band boasting that he was going to kill Mick Jagger. Meredith Hunter was beaten, stabbed and killed by Hells Angels who were the security for the concert and this night marked a change from the peace,hope and love of those heady, high, hippie times to a night when all started to turn ugly and a night when many claimed that the hippie movement and the music died.
I refer to this event on my birth night as I don't think too much was happening in Oxford at that time other than according to my mother a snow blizzard blowing and falling outside the hospital. The period of music prior to this event and the exodus of many timeless musicians to California has always and is still a constant source of inspiration to me along with many other artists and musical movements. I remember from the age of seven first being turned on to music by a couple of uncles who were also budding musicians, the first of which played me the album Surfs Up by the Beach Boys along with Eddie Cochran's "Come On Everybody", along with some hits at that time, such as The Stray Cats, "Runaway Boys" and Blondies "Denis Denis". My other uncle sat me down and played me "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart and this, along with hearing lots of random music being played at home usually accompanied by the industrial sound of my mothers hoover, definitely sewed the early seeds of my love and obsession with music, harmony and noise.
After an uneventful and forgotten time at Primary School I attended Bayswater middle school in Oxford on a pretty horrible estate called Barton, which was an estate thrown up originally to house London evacuees, during the bombing of London in the second world war and is still standing today. At middle school I became a Ska "rudeboy" after discovering and loving the new Ska bands of that time such as, The Beat, The Specials, Dexys Midnight Runners and Madness. After middle school I attended Cheney comprehensive school in Oxford from the age of twelve until I left school and took an art foundation course for a year in Banbury in Oxfordshire in 1988. During my Cheney school days I bought tickets and went to my first concerts in the New Theatre in Oxford and watched bands such as The Cult, The Damned and Big Country. At this time, from around the age of fourteen, I made my childhood dream and ambition which was to play and headline in my own group one day at the New Theatre where I was so blown away by my first live concert experiences. I never, realistically, thought that I would ever achieve this dream and certainly would never have imagined that within five years from then my dream would be achieved, singing and playing guitar to a sold out New Theatre with Ride.
Going back to Cheney school days, it was there that I started to get to know Andy Bell and also there that I met Steven Queralt who was two years my senior and a class friend of my sister. The first time that I sang before an audience was in a school production of the musical, Grease. The guitarist in the show was Andy Bell and around that time we became good friends with a common interest in all things musical particuarly at that time, The Smiths, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie and Africa Bambatta and it was also around this time that I started learning to play guitar. By the time both Andy and I left Cheney school and landed in the same art foundation course together in Banbury we had made the first attempts at creating some music together which I played to Loz Colbert who was also on the course and had mentioned that he could play the drums "a little". Thus the seeds of Ride were sewn. Within a year we had played a few gigs and were then signed to Creation records by Alan McGee.
This Ride period has been and is well and, at times, not so well documented. Studiowise, during this whole period and the various musical projects that I have been involved with to this day I sat, sang, played, smoked and worked alongside many sound engineers, mixers and producers, all of whom taught me so much.
With the knowledge I have gathered over the years, along with an understanding of being on both sides of the recording process, I am now mixing and producing bands and musicians alongside ongoing solo and band shows, songwriting and guest vocals with "rinôçérôse" and many other musical collaborations that can be found and linked to on this site.