Biography

I grew up in the Netherlands although I did travel a lot to Scotland as my parents were originally from there. When I reached the age of 10 I began to show a great interest in music and started to play keyboards. I never had any formal music training but just taught myself the basics I suppose.

In 1993 after much exposure from the single "I'd do anything for Love (but I won't do that)" (written by Jim Steinman and performed by Meat Loaf) I went out and bought the album "Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell". I soon began to understand what was possible with symphonic rock. I was lucky as I was at a high school where you could choose music as one of your A levels. At this time I was living not too far from Amsterdam, in the west of The Netherlands.

At high school I started to perform music. In 1995 there were some music evenings held at the high school where I performed "Anything for Love" (instrumentally). At this time I also started to sing a bit, but felt my voice at that time was not really up to the standard necessary for that song. After some success performing this tune (using my keyboard to partly program backing tracks but playing the piano part live) I was asked to perform at Haarlem's highschool music contest in April 1995. Although I did not win a prize the song went down really well with the young audience.

After completing my high school I had a gap year. For a while I was thinking about which university to go to and finally decided to move to Glasgow, Scotland in September 1998 to study Film & TV and music. I also studied IT in the first year but eventually did a single honours in music. Partly because I lost interest in Film & TV but also because I was able to study a multimedia course within the Music degree curriculum. I graduated with a Master of Arts in Music (2.1). Although the music degree was quite theoretical I learned a great deal about composing and orchestration. I was given the opportunity to orchestrate several classical pieces and had these played by several professional orchestras and solo performers. This was some of the best stuff I did during this degree.

I stayed at Glasgow University to do a Masters of Science in Information Technology in 2002-2003. This was a great year. Although it was quite a challenging course with a lot of late nights programming in the IT labs, I made lots of friends and there were quite memorable times. I was also in a band during this time, but we never made it past the rehearsal stages unfortunately as some of the other band members moved and got into other things.

While I was at university I continued my music interests also outside of my studies by learning to play guitar. I got quite interested in music by Bruce Springsteen (this actually came about because one of my flatmates suggested some of my own music, in particular a song I wrote called "Time after Time", reminded him of Bruce Springsteen). As I never really heard a lot of Springsteen's music up until 2000, I was pleasently surprised to find that Springsteen had for many years been a great ambassador of the type of music I had always (possibly subcounsiously) been interested in.

After university I worked at IBM for about a year, using my bilingual skills. In 2004 I was offered a programming job down south, so I moved to England where I still reside. Currently I am busy recording lots of songs in my home studio and this website will hopefully provide a good source for people to learn about my music and invite them to listen to some of my own incarnations of popular rock songs....