“i write and perform rock songs with a DIY ethic. i try an approach the process with the same fearless open honest wonderment i had as a child. i am inspired by many but imitate no one.

Things you don’t need to know but i will tell you: The typewriter is my favoured writing tool – i acquired a blue silver reed silverette I from a good friend who inherited it from a good friend in Mayfair. i call her Margrit after her original owner – needless to say i don’t travel light. i used to be a technophobe but the apple store cured me – it is the bookshop culture of the future.

Things i won’t tell you: where i have been and where i am going. i don’t wish your part in my journey to be distracted. i arrived and some day i will go. now is all important”

All creators and performers need room to train and perfect their skills and it’s important that those at the start of their journey be aware that talent requires development, courage, self-belief, support and ’stickability’.

‘Walking To A Different Beat’ provides an insight into the workings of the music business and although it is an intimate account of one person’s life in the music world it’s just as much a portrait of the life of most performers – the ‘unmade pop idols’.

Pop history is filled with stories of success achieved in many ways.

There is the genuine, magical, overnight success where talent is spotted from its’ very beginning – which is fabulous.

The real journey for most artists, however, is that success usually follows years of hard work, gigging, rejections and delivering pizzas when they are discovered by a Record Company and taken on a whirlwind ride to ‘overnight’ success.

Then there is fast-track success via Reality TV. Contestants compete against each other while interactive audiences are worked up into a voting frenzy. One winner emerges while the dreams of many hopefuls are crushed and they might even be seen as failures.

The judges quite often brutally judge the contestants yet emerge from these programmes as ‘Stars’ and with the fame, fortune and recognition that artists dream their work will bring to them.

There is a danger that voices full of angst, vision, pain, love, regret and passion could be fast-tracked out of existence by competition-based shows. Music is of its generation, for its generation, by its generation.