My Mum (the greatest human being I know and my driving force) – introduced me to Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole & my first tastes of classical music & jazz. My Dad – an avid James Brown & funk fan, and my four siblings played me everything from roots & soul to progressive rock.

Growing up in the 70’s & 80’s filled in the blanks. I got deep into the new romantic & alternative movement with the help of my best mate and her older brother who took us to places we weren’t old enough to go.

And from across the pond,anything and everything, U.S. soul, hip-hop & disco electro funk and rock.
All the schools I attended had strong music programs so I was always involved. Choirs, musicals, pop bands, concerts, recitals music competitions were all the norm, and was thankfully encouraged.

I had my first classical singing lesson at 10, & stuck with it until I was 20. Meanwhile joining various local bands as a lead or backing vocalist until my favourite of those bands, Soul Station decided to aim for the big time.
As a strong if naive unit, we up sticks and moved from our home town of Leicester to the Big Smoke – London. The choice was find a job or go to college while we got ourselves organised.

After a couple of failed attempts at trying to get onto an opera course (yes opera), I had the good fortune to get a tip from one of the guys in the band that The Royal Academy of Music had a jazz course. I auditioned, got in, and never looked back.
This place was like a sweet shop. You got to play, write and study music all day long with the cream of up and coming British talent not to just in jazz, but classical and commercial music too.

All through college I was performing and writing with various jazz groups and my own quintet and sidelining as a session singer . Having already made a couple of house records I hooked up with Manchester based dance group Evolution,and signed to Deconstruction. This really steered me away from jazz ( probably the toughest music with which to try and make a living) towards dance music.

I had good friends who were introducing me to the underground club scene in London and I had the Evolution boys doing the same in Manchester. So that was it, I was hooked. Soul Station had pretty much given up. Trying to make it as a 7 piece funk band was next to impossible. So we all did our own thing.

I got into house in a major way, making records for the some of the best of house music labels with some of the best dj producers.So that’s it, a brief synopsis of what I’ve been up to in the last ** years… There is such a thing as too much information! But house isn’t my only love. I remain a member of Grupo X ,a Latin jazz group, and Strayhorn( a very new soul project) and Buttaball, my left-field electronic duo with one of the original members of Soul Station (which so far has had nothing but bad luck, but the future is bright). There are plans to get back to jazz at some point. Hopefully not too far away.