I began writing about music in 1981, at the height of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. I was about 19 at the time. I was buying a lot of Neat Records’ and Heavy Metal Records’ releases and thought they needed to be brought to a wider audience. So I wrote an irregular metal music column for the in-house magazine at Swansea University, and then began to submit articles to an American fanzine ‘Metal Rendez-Vous’.
Moving to London in 1983, I began contributing (both as writer and photographer) to a number of fanzines such as ‘Forearm Smash’ and ‘Marshall Stack’ in the UK, ‘Rock Brigade’ (Brazil), ‘Sagritura Escritura’ (Portugal), as well as being the main UK contributor to the re-launched and expanded ‘Metal Rendez-Vous’. I convinced Neat Records that they needed a promotional magazine and thereby created and wrote ‘Lead Weight’ for them. I signed up to ‘Marshall Stack’ full-time and when it folded created and published ‘Stack Attack’ from its ashes. Around this time I became a regular contributor to the Deep Purple Appreciation Society magazine ‘Darker Than Blue’ which I’ve continued to this day. I founded and ran the Queensryche UK, Blitzkrieg, and Hellion Fan Clubs, and also managed metal band Playn Crazy for the duration of their lifespan.
I relocated to Bristol and joined the rat-race, although turned in occasional music articles here and there. I became a professional portrait photographer with my own company in 1999 and, as I’d missed shooting live bands, I incorporated this as a side-line.