In The Office

Aged 23, my intention was to become a music lawyer. This was my motivation for getting a Graduate Diploma in Law, and was also the reason I chose to train at media firm Davenport Lyons, where I qualified as a solicitor in 1998.

At around this time, I was also getting regular work as a saxophone player — nothing earth shattering or glamourous, but the sort of work that was hard to turn down, especially on a trainee’s modest salary. I therefore moved into a Professional Support Lawyer role, which enabled me to pursue both careers and still have time to sleep.

My first job as a PSL was to modernise the firm’s precedent bank — both the legal drafting and the document production side of things. This eventually led me to study Visual Basic for Applications, a programming language used to automate Microsoft Office, such as in the creation of automated templates. VBA was similar enough to the BASIC of my childhood, that computer programming re-emerged as part of my career, and soon extended well beyond the original remit of precedent automation.

Thus, at 33, my grown-up self was back to being fully engaged in the things my 13 year-old self had most enjoyed: programming computers, making music and ... correcting people’s grammar.

For the next decade, I fulfilled a hybrid PSL and IT role, the latter growing over time to include database development, web-based programming and process mapping, while continuing to develop a range of increasingly sophisticated automated templates.

Since 2011 I have been an independent consultant, working with many of my former colleagues, and in particular with legal IT consultancy SLFtech.

On The Stage

The summer before law school, I took a band from London to Menorca, where we spent three months playing in numerous (largely English) resorts and bars all over the island — not at all what I'd pictured when sitting down with a Balearic booking agent earlier that year.

Menorca is a small place, and a Spanish-speaking, English saxophonist was a bit of a novelty, so I soon found myself playing with local Spanish musicians. This continued over the next few years, during which I recorded albums in Barcelona and finally played some memorable, more scenic gigs in Mahon.

These experiences, which came just as I had apparently settled on a sensible, grown-up career, led to a long, and quite unexpected, parallel career as a live musician.

Given my background, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I continued as I started, by managing many of the groups in which I perform. For several years we worked extensively with major chains Luminar Leisure and First Leisure, touring the UK and beyond during the boom years of the early 2000s.

During that time, the playing mostly took care of itself, while the challenges were predominantly logistical and organisational: dealing with agents; liasing with venus; navigating dozens of unfamiliar towns and cities in a time before google maps and sat nav; sourcing power adapters in the UAE (where our leads bag was temporarily confiscated) and out-of-hours food in Amsterdam.

More recently, I have managed a function band which has played more than a hundred weddings and corporate events, from the Albert Hall to Sardinia to, er, The Adam & Eve in Mill Hill. The work has remained largely unglamourous, but rewarding.

Education

I was born in Boston, Massachussets, immigrating to England when I was all of six months old. I grew up in London, where I did A Levels in double maths, physics and Spanish.

My family ties in New England prompted me to return there for my degree, where I graduated from Amerst College with a BA in sociology.

I spent a year of my degree course at the University of Madrid, where I also played my first gigs and did subtitles for a weekly TV programme about the latest cinema releases. I remain essentially fluent in Spanish, though my vernacular is frozen somewhere in the mid-90s.

I took the Common Professional Exam (as it was then) at the University of Westminster, and did the Legal Practice Course at London Guildhall University.

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