PERSON

After a long period of intense self-taught music study and varying degrees of success writing for media, I felt a strong desire to make my first solo album. I’d already done plenty of bedroom recordings as a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and I’d spent years playing in bands, including writing and touring on and off with 'The Wedding Present'.

Then came an unwelcome choice. My home, and the bedroom studio inside it, was due to be demolished. I was being evicted. I could either walk away from recording music the way I knew how, or go into serious debt to keep going. I chose the debt.

I found a new place to live, did the research, and spent eight arduous months building a garden studio from scratch. For the initial song ideas, I pulled a few from the collection I have been accumulating since I was a teenager, probably around a thousand, and got to work.

Compositionally I wanted to bring together everything I’d learned - indie rock at the core, but with orchestral textures, shifting song structures and arrangements that treat the album as one continuous listening experience rather than a collection of isolated tracks. The recording philosophy was straightforward: real instruments, performance focused, and careful attention to the sound engineering. Mixing was handed to someone who shared that same preference for an organic, alive feel - Barny Barnicott (Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian, Sam Fender etc).

From conception to finished record, 'Missing Person' took roughly two years. Life stuff got in the way at times, and I have a habit of slowing down as the finish line approaches. But I got there.