Writer of stories, poems and songs
@Sam Scadgell Photography
About me
I have been playing music and writing songs since I was twelve. But apart from the odd story or poem when I was at school, I never wrote without an instrument in my hands. That all changed when I was in my early twenties. I was teaching English in the Middle East when I discovered a book of poems by Simon Armitage, a brilliant British poet. What struck me the most was how the poems made you look at ordinary, everyday things like you were seeing them for the first time; and for a moment I was a child again, caught up in the feeling that everything was intensely alive and interesting. Immediately I began experimenting and found that I could express more through poems and stories than I could through music alone. At some point my feel for the rhythms of music began to fuse with a growing awareness of how to paint images with words and, slowly, I learned how to write with the ear and the eye. It was a time of discovery in which I devoured all kinds of writers (especially Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas, and Steinbeck) and, though I had studied literature at university, this was an entirely new type of studying that made me fall in love with language all over again. I now live, work and write on the Isle of Wight. I especially enjoy writing and performing for children.