“With horns and a full rhythm section, the drums always looked like the best seat in the house.”
– Levon Helm
I am available for gigs and recording sessions. I pride myself on being reliable, flexible and always in time. I am fully click compatible.
Listen to me playing on the Media page.
Experienced live drummer
A bit of history
Influences
A live drummer experienced in rock, pop, funk, jazz, ska and reggae
- A solid, reliable and no-nonsense drummer.
- A great time-keeper (musically and arrivally).
- Plays for the band and supports the music.
- Listens.
- Styles range from rock, pop, funk, soul and jazz to ska, country and most other variants of Western popular music.
- Years of recording experience, comfortable with a click, never (knowingly) sarcastic to producers.
- (Almost) Never plays a 13/8 tribal groove over the solo in Smoke On The Water.
- Fully click trained
- Available for gigs and recordings.
Bands I play with:
I can currently be seen playing with Jake Vegas and The Black Diamonds as one of their many drummers.
A bit of history
I started playing aged 10 when my father appeared with an ancient Premier kit that he’d bought off a guy called Benny Band. I set it up and went nuts to Steve Miller’s Abracadabra.
My relationship with the drums grew from there. My relationship with the neighbours downstairs deteriorated.
Throughout high school and my early twenties I played with as many bands as I could, hoping to carve out a career in the music biz.
In my mid twenties, I found myself residing in Kathmandu, where I was offered the drummer’s seat in leading expat hippy/pub-band Too Loose To Trek, playing Stones, SRV, Woody Guthrie, Clapton et al to audiences of wild eyed tourists back from conquering the Himalayas. I was also able to sit in with many of the great local bands. I had a great 18 months playing often 4 nights a week. I also got my first teaching gig, working at a Finnish school for kids with troubled backgrounds.
On returning to the UK, I moved to Brighton and went to study music production in Eastbourne (a veritable hotbed of Rock n’ Roll) which gave me hours of experience in the recording studio and had the wonderful opportunity to learn from legendary engineer, Phill Brown. During my college years played drums with rock covers band Voodoo and a Blondie tribute band.
I formed a label to make a record with singer songwriter, Ru Horne which had some industry interest but, just before the success of Nora Jones, the light soulful style wasn’t what the industry wanted.
When I joined RipChord, an Eastbourne rock band trying to make it on the London scene, I met the owner of Galaxy Records and became the house engineer at Galaxy’s studio in a disused mental home (we pretty-much stuck to the building’s original use). As well as working on the label’s pop projects, I persuaded the owner to give me a small budget to develop an Indy arm to the label. I signed RipChord (gosh!) and the brilliant Noxious. I employed guitarist, Dave, as an assistant and we made several records with both bands (alongside producing Galaxy’s main pop product), booked gigs, ran publicity campaigns with PR and pluggers, designed album art and posters and brought CDs to market via a distribution deal with Universal. We made videos and got a bunch of airplay on rock radio and cable TV channels.
During my time at Galaxy I recorded every conceivable style of music, gave myself loads of session work and got pretty geeky about the subtleties of drum tuning, heads, sticks and drum micing (and don’t ever get me started on guitars!).
Needing a break from the strains of doing too many jobs at once, I left Galaxy and spent a substantial chunk of 2007 in India and Nepal. Whilst in Kathmandu I reunited with the old band and did a massive gig for some aid related VIP types and then got involved in consultancy for a local recording studio and ended up recording and mixing leading jazzers, Cadenza’s last Album before their drummer decamped to the US to study music.
I returned to London mid ’07 and have been working as a freelancer since then.
Influences
Some of the drummers who influenced me and continue to influence me include Carmine Appice, the Mighty Max Weinberg, Earl Palmer, Hal Blaine, Benny Benjamin, Al Jackson, Zigaboo Modeliste, Ringo Starr, Ian Paice, Aynsley Dunbar, Chad Smith, Levon Helm and Art Blakey.