Biography

Favourites

I moved to England in the summer of 1991 from Ireland where I spent most of my time playing lead guitar in speed (thrash) metal bands. I was heavily influenced by The Bay Area scene with bands such as Testament, Forbidden, Death Angel and also guitarists such as Al di Melo, Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, Marty Friedman and Jason Becker. I devoted most of my early life to learning different styles from all of the above.

While still putting many hours into my practice with encouragement from my parents as always, I played in bands supporting Anthrax and Sepultura on two tours. After arriving in England I spent a year just playing guitar with some friends and did a few demos but nothing really came of this. One friend in particular knew EMF very well at the time; so much of this period was spent enjoying ourselves.

After this I decided to go to Birmingham to seek out other people who were into similar music. I joined a band called Firestorm who were in the vein of Trouble/Alice In Chains. We managed to gig quite a bit throughout the UK but the more commercial type of metal was overshadowing heavy music at this time so success was never going to come easily. I also joined a band called Celestial who had ex Benediction drummer Ian Tracey, an album was actually recorded and featured Paul Madisval from Cynic who also played on Death's album "Human" but this was never released as the record company went bust. By 1995 I had discovered the dance music which was around at that time, and while still being very much into my guitar playing, I was becoming increasingly drawn to the harder edge of the dance music genre.

One of the first big parties I went to was an Atomic Jam at the Que Club in Birmingham; there I saw Jeff Mills and Chris Liberator, which at the time for me was awesome. Then a friend introduced me to Psy parties, most notably, Return To The Source. I saw some mind-blowing people play here such as Hallucinogen, Mark Allen, Green Nuns of The Revolution and Tsuyoshi Suzuki.

I was amazed by this music; I enjoyed listening to stuff like this and acid techno for a few years, but didn’t mix / play at this time. I then got into Tony De Vit, he really inspired me, and during '98 I decided to stop playing guitar and bought some belt driven decks, which were a nightmare. As soon as I managed to get enough money together, I bought some Technics which, looking back seemed amazing compared to those old belt drives.

Over the next few years, I saw various changes in the music I was listening to, but I was becoming quite bored with dance music and a bit lost in terms of what I wanted to do, so in 2000, I just stopped mixing and playing and went to study music technology which I finished in 2004. During my time at college I listened to a lot of different electronic music such as; Lamb, Talvin Singh, Hefner, Blue States, Afro Celt Sound System, Giles Peterson, Herbie Hancock and so much more.

During this time I had the good fortune of meeting Nick Hughes (Toad) in a record store, I had lost touch with Nick over the years so this meeting turned out to be the beginning of Toadstool. Soon I started going out to clubs again with Nick; one special night in particular was a Tribe of Frog night at the Black Swan in Bristol. That was my first encounter I had with F’da F’da, his set that night was dark and fast and was the only DJ who actually made me want to dance.

Nick (Toad) then decided to do a night in Cheltenham after he and his wife Corky decided upon the name Toadstool. Nick later asked if I would become involved in Toadstool, which has been a great success. Future plans include relocating and continuing with gigs and studio work.