I was born in Liverpool in 1955 but grew up in Wrexham, North Wales. I'm of mixed Scottish and Welsh parentage and on my Welsh side related to the composer Grace Williams. Luckily, this did help encourage a positive attitude to my early attempts at ‘composing’ on Nan’s old piano. Eventually, at the age of eleven, I was sent off for piano lessons which did not put a stop to it.

Piano lessons were good, but so was playing in bands: A few years later I took up the flute - inspired more by Tubby Hayes and Ian Anderson rather than anything officially deemed appropriate! Consequently, most of the music I wrote as a teenager was a sort of jazzy prog-rock.

The earliest music on this site, however, dates from my student days at University College Cardiff, during the late seventies, when my post-graduate composition tutor was Alun Hoddinott.

My student compositions, mainly a collection of multi-movement sonatas, were still very much influenced by prog-rock and jazz, which set me apart from the prevailing atonal/serial orthodoxy prevalent at the time. However, I did receive a number of performances the first being of a Sonata for Two Pianos, performed by Martin Jones and Richard McMahon.

I later rebranded this collection of Sonatas ‘Academic Sonatas’  and the first of them a sonata for flute and piano was later performed and recorded.

After leaving academia in 1980 I formed a music-production partnership with fellow post-graduate Ben Heneghan - a partnership that has lasted over 35 years and is still occasionally producing music for film and TV from our base at Fieldgate Studios near Cardiff. We spent most of the eighties co-writing pop music and TV music (including perhaps our best known work the theme song to Fireman Sam). Our pop music from this period provides much of the repertoire for the The Boo-Hooray Theory -  a 12-piece rock band that we occasionally assemble to record and perform.

After spending half a decade composing music for film and TV a return to writing concert music was prompted in 1984 with the score for a Welsh language documentary series about the ‘Great Little Trains of Wales’ called Crwydro’r Cledrau (Wandering the Rails). For this series Ben Heneghan and I wrote a great deal of tuneful and picturesque music to accompany the various trains in their respective landscapes, and soon realized that these ideas could also form the basis of a substantial orchestral suite.

We pitched the idea to the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra and they premiered the first movement Snowdon in a gala-type charity concert conducted by Louis Fremaux in June 1988. The piece was successful enough for the director of St. Davids Hall to program a second performance the following year in a Welsh Proms concert given by the Hallé orchestra, conducted by Owain Arwel Hughes -  concert that was also broadcast on HTV television.

However, it wasn't until July 4th 2019 that the first complete performance was given by the City of Cardiff Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Martin McHale.

The Great Little Trains of Wales stands apart from most of my concert music in that it was jointly composed (with Ben Heneghan) and derives from music originally written for film.

Despite the success of Snowdon we were unable at that time to secure interest in a performance of the complete four-movement, 25 min. work. We might well have abandoned the idea of writing orchestral music  if it wasn’t for the emerging new music technology that presented the possibility of producing 'virtual' renditions of orchestral instruments. Embracing  this technology would at least give the opportunity for us and others to hear our orchestral scores in a form not previously possible.

My next orchestral piece Celtic Fanfares 1, which later became the first movement in my four-movement work Celtic Fanfares, was released by Chandos Records on ‘Walking the Wild Rhondda’  a CD of orchestral music by Ben and myself produced using this virtual orchestral technology.

A couple of years prior to this, however, another orchestral work Overland to the Sea saw the light of day when it was featured in a concert tour given by the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera in January 2000. 

During the following couple of decades despite still writing media music pretty much full time I began build up a catalogue of concert works.

it was at this time that I first started to write choral music and very soon Cantemus Chamber Choir Wales recorded an album called The Contingent World  featuring a number short choral pieces by Ben and me.’

I also started writing  a series of mult-movent 'sonatas' for various instrumental conbinations. The first of these, Isca (flute, viola, and harp) was commissioned by Sarah Broder for her final degree recital at the Birmingham Conservatoire.

The fourth work in this series The Glittering Plain (alto sax, jazz piano trio, and string quartet) was commissioned by Lara James for her Signum Classics album also called The Glittering Plain. 

In April 2016 my setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 104 Three Years won first prize in The Fourth Choir’s inaugural composing competition. The first performance was given on the bard’s 400th anniversary in Middle Temple hall - the only still-standing hall in which it is known Shakespeare performed. Three Years has also subsequently been performed by the Ulster Youth Choir.

A month later High Aldons a piece for Northumbrian pipes, Accordion, Celtic harp, and Cello was a finalist in the Alwinton music festival composing competition, and performed by Kathryn Tickell and the Side. 

In January 2018 an orchestral version of High Aldons was performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and broadcast on Radio 3.

Choral music has also become a important part of my output. I have written a number of large-scale cantatas each setting an anthology of poetry based on a particular theme. The first of these One World was premièred in March 2019 in Llandaff Cathedral by the Llandaff Cathedral Choral Society. This was followed up in 2024 with the same forces giving my second cantata Time its first performance. Also in 2019, I won a competition to set the words Beethoven inscribed on the title page of his Missa Solemnis: From the Heart was first performed by the Crouch End Festival Chorus in the Queen Elizabeth Hall preceding, without a break, their performance of the Beethoven. In contrast, from the same period, a jazz-styled Missa Brevis has proved to be very popular. 

Finally, since 2020 I’ve been composing much piano music - aimed mainly for me to record and perform. So far I have recorded four albums (although only two have been released so far). In addition, early in 2025 Viv McLean recorded an album of some of my more demanding  piano music for future release.