Following an undistinguished education ("Martin could try a lot harder" ) and an engineering apprenticeship in a tin-can factory, a spell in college gave me what little I can now remember about typography, off-set litho printing, darkrooms and Rotring pens.

If only I'd paid as much attention to all that as I did to playing in bands, running the college disco and organising the end-of-term rave-ups. I've been in and around the music business for most of the last 40 years, 22 of them spent working for a "major record label" (remember them?).

A deceptively amiable misanthrope with poor attention to detail and an eye for novelty, my interest in photography goes back to when I was a lad, back in the day when boys wore short trousers and long socks. My dad, noticing the covetous looks I gave the cheap Leica knock-off he brought home from the war, bought me an Ilford "Sporti 4", which took 12 pictures per roll of 127 film. It had two settings: "Cloudy" and "Sunny" and, miraculously, didn't require focusing. It later dawned on me that the focus-free convenience was inextricably linked to the inability to take pictures in anything less than bright daylight - unless one wished to dabble in the finger-scorching mysteries of single-use magnesium-filament flash bulbs (I didn't).

I've come on a bit since then (though probably not as far as I'd like to imagine).

Staggering randomly between the spontaneous and the contrived, the artful, the playful and the straightforward documentary, as you'll see from my pictures I don't have a speciality (or a style, some might say...). Jack of all trades (you know the rest...).

Technical perfection interests me less than a picture that speaks to me (even if I don't know exactly what it may be saying at the time), or captures a mood or a moment - or just hits me in the eye with colour and action.

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