History

The beginnings of my career in music in Melbourne, were to say the least, very humble, and in fact, almost finished before they began. Having recently arrived from London, my Brother Steve and I began playing music together, he played bass and sang and I played guitar and sang. We found that like many brothers, our voices blended well and harmonies came naturally. After many months of practise, we were asked to perform on a Saturday night at a The Forrester’s Arms pub in Oakleigh and we accepted the gig seeing only good things to come. One small problem was that the gig was 3 hours and we only had enough songs for 2 hours, no worries, lots of requests and instrumental versions of songs that we had already sung. The job was painful and we were just relieved when it was done. On the Monday morning, we received a call from a guy telling us that he’d seen us at the gig and although he thought we didn’t sound that good, we looked OK and asked if we were available for a TV show on the following Saturday morning. The show was called Do It with Ian Molly Meldrum and a magician named Ian Buckland and the show that we did was only the second ever. We ended up performing on 8 of the first 9 shows and learned so much that it gave us the confidence to give live performances another go. That started 4 years of solid live work and TV around Melbourne that saw the duo become a trio with the addition of Steve Nicholson on drums and a name change from The Two of Us to Magic. Sadly, Steve made the decision to leave the band for family reasons and I decided to give things a go as a solo performer. During this time, I worked at a number of Melbourne restraints and clubs as well as more TV. In 1979, I appeared on New Faces and won through the heats, finals and made the judges choice final at the end of the year. I was very lucky to tour with a number of fabulous entertainers as well including, Debbie Reynolds, Phyllis Diller, Jose Feliciano, Freddy & the Dreamers and Herman’s Hermit’s. Then, as so often happens, life changed and I left the business and joined the corporate world, and now, after so many years, through a series of circumstances and good friend John Wells, I found myself back on stage and singing, this time, my favourite kind of music, the songs of Francis Albert Sinatra and friends.
Then, as seems to happen, the world changed for me on the 25th of July, 2021, when I suffered a major Stroke.
I was so lucky that over time, I had a fantatsic recoverey, and regained almost all that the Stroke took away, all that is except my singing voice.
It seems the singing voice comes from a different area of the brain to the speaking voice, and unfortunately, the singing voice has not returned to this day.