I wasn’t the cool kid with the crate of vinyl. I didn’t inherit a collection of jazz rarities or hang out in record shops soaking up taste by osmosis. My musical world was a bit quieter at first a bit more accidental.

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I grew up in a house where music was around but not obsessive. My dad played records Peter, Paul and Mary, John Denver, maybe a bit of Simon & Garfunkel. There were guitars lying around, a piano in the corner. Nothing precious about it, but something stuck. I started poking at the old upright when I was little, just playing with sound. No lessons. No pressure. Just instinct. My piano teacher had told me to to bother years earlier - i had restarted piano but i was a tough student. id struggle through scales and then just jam in front old Mr Jenkins who was bemused but apparently entertained.

While other kids were out riding bikes or hanging around the park, I was inside figuring out how chords worked how one shape could lead to another. I wasn’t a prodigy or anything. I just enjoyed it. There was a comfort in those keys. A way to pass time that somehow felt like it mattered.

The first record I bought? Shakin’ Stevens. A moment of shame, sure, but also kind of perfect a reminder that music doesn’t always begin in glory. It begins in whatever’s available. And for me, it started there: a kid with an upright piano, a few dad albums, and an awkward pop obsession.

But then, somewhere around 15 or 16, I discovered jazz. It came from playing, not listening. I’d find these chords that sounded right, and then later realise they had names 7ths, 9ths, diminished runs. The music theory came after the feeling. And once it hit, I was hooked.

I was a teenage jazz head, but I was also listening to Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. A bit of reggae. And then one day, Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire came on the radio and that was it. That sound hit something deep. I begged my dad for a synth, and somehow he caved and got me a Casio CZ-5000. That machine became my portal. I’d sit for hours building imaginary film scores, nothing preservable (although i wish i had recorded something!) - Melodies, textures, atmospheres. It was the first time music felt like a world I could live inside.[

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A couple of years later I started gigging, playing blues in pubs, backroom sessions down near Cambridge station. I’d drag my arse into the Salisbury Arms with a pint of Newky Brown, sit at the old upright and hammer through “Tutti Frutti,” “Rock Around the Clock,” “Minnie the Moocher.” It wasn’t glamorous but something clicked. There was groove. Grit. Audience. It felt like a conversation. That might’ve been the moment music shifted from hobby to lifeline.

Then came Elias, a 12-piece funk-jazz-pop band with bongos, brass, backing vocals, ragga chat, Dido vibes, and me on keys trying to make sense of it all. We were chaos but beautiful chaos. We supported Gil Scott-Heron (he fell off the stage mid-set I played his Rhodes), and the James Taylor Quartet. For a while, we were right on the edge of something. But like so many bands, we didn’t quite land it.

Still, it kept going. And somewhere between the blues nights, the basement jams, the late-night improvisations and the synth daydreams, I realised this wasn’t just something I did. It was who I was.

Since then, it’s been a strange and joyful ride: theatre scores, kids’ TV lullabies, ambient records, sound design, opera-adjacent madness, and plenty of nights making noise with nothing but instinct and a reverb pedal.

And through it all, there are three albums that shaped me not just sonically, but emotionally, spiritually, structurally. Albums that taught me how to be in music.

  1. Vangelis – Chariots of Fire

I heard it as a teenager and it stopped me in my tracks. It was vast, emotive, cinematic music that moved like weather. It made me want to build sound. It wasn’t about songs. It was about territory. Scope. Scale. This was the record that sent me into the world of synths and ambient textures. Without it, I’m not sure I’d ever have thought of music as architecture.

  1. Tom Waits – Small Change

Especially “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” That song hit me and gave permission to something real. Waits taught me that music could be messy, ugly, cracked and still utterly beautiful. That the piano didn’t have to be clean or clever. It could stagger, slur, bleed truth. That track made me trust my own playing more than any lesson ever could.

  1. Hans Otte – Das Buch der Klänge (1984 Recording)

I discovered this in my late twenties, working with the early founders of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. It sounded like a whisper from the future minimal, intimate, transcendent. It reminded me that music can be made of air and silence, not just notes. That less is not only more it’s everything. It still sounds ahead of its time. A premonition of where contemporary classical would eventually head.

Of course, there have been dozens probably hundreds of other albums that changed something in me. Herbie Hancock. Thelonious Monk. Moodymann. Josh Wink. Pretty much everything ECM ever released. That’s probably another post: My Top 100 Albums (and Why the List Will Be Different Next Week).

But these three? These are the spine.

I’ve never had a brand, or a genre, or a single path. I just keep following sound. Jazz taught me that the mindset more than the music. The idea that freedom comes through structure. That listening is as important as playing. That generosity is part of the deal. You give something away, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, something comes back.

Music lets you disappear. It lets you become someone else for a while or maybe just more yourself. Whether I’m scoring a film, building an ambient world, jamming with kids in a studio, or sitting alone at a piano, that’s still the thread. That’s the feeling I’m after.

And sometimes, it all starts with a dodgy old upright and a half-warm pint.

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