It Started in Another Corner of the Universe

Seems like only Yesterday

The Boy at Heart story begins way back before I had any awareness of the name and I certainly hadn’t imagined quite the lifestyle I would be living today. Lets go back to 1996. Do you remember that far back. What I find incredible is that very soon 1990 will be 20 years ago!

In 1996 I wrote a song. It didn’t have a title, but it was a song. I was playing in a band (I have played in several over the years) and it was at the height of the "Brit pop" era in the UK and we were treading the usual path of trying to secure a record deal.

I had always been playing the role of lead guitarist in all the bands I had been in including this one and was always playing songs that I had not written, which was fine until one day I started to feel like I was not fulfilling my potential, so this song came along and made me feel pretty good about myself. The songwriter in this band told me it was a really great song, but we never got round to playing this song and after a couple of weeks I had forgotten all about it. The song was loosely about having the feeling of still being a boy, but not in a childish sense. More a feeling of something in me that will always feel young and keen to dream any possibility.

At this point I had completed an amazing audio engineering and production diploma (which serves me to this day), but due to certain life-situations and my own personal fears and beliefs at the time I had returned to a day job in an industry that I knew was not in my heart (telecommunications). The band was all I had to keep me inspired and have something to look forward to outside of work.

Some time early in 1998 whilst messing around on my guitar at home I started coming up with some really interesting music. Something I had never really done before. What I realized was that I had suddenly become adept at composing music and it was starting to flow. No lyrics, just music, but I was happy because I had never come up with anything this cool before (except that fluke song in 1996). I kept a lot of it to myself (not sure why). None of it ended up as songs for the band, although we tried.

1998 provided a huge change in my life. This is was the year that the band split up and my dream of making music for a living felt dead in the water. I started to have thoughts of hanging up my guitar permanently and just sticking with what I had, which was a well paid, albeit boring job and a rather nice apartment in a mansion block in a very desirable part of West London with a rock star as a neighbour!

So it had become another tolerable, but pretty uninspiring year until August when I decided to buy a copy of the NME (a UK music paper) for the first time in years. What I discovered in the classified ads in that paper was to set my life in a totally new and very eventful direction.

The next installment is a demonstration of the power that exists in this universe, even if I hadn’t become aware of that at the time. Don’t miss it!