I wasn't handed an easy route in.
I came out of working-class Dagenham, punk rock, and the habit of throwing myself at whatever opportunity appeared in front of me: A fanzine. A contact. A camera. A studio. That was how I progressed. Not through some grand plan. Oh, and a willingness to go that extra mile.
Running alongside all of that was alcoholism. Not hidden. Not subtle. Anyone who knew me knew. For a long time I was one of those people who somehow kept moving forward through chaos, bad decisions, arrests, fights, and the general fallout that comes with living that way. From the outside, I was still functioning. But underneath, things were getting darker. Much darker.
Eventually life caught up with me and had a little whisper in my ear. What followed was depression, serious strain, and a period where I came close to losing everything and going over the edge. Pulling back from that sheer drop was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But, what came after that was different.
Over time, I dragged myself into more professional worlds: broadcast, post-production, studios, technical departments, serious systems, serious consequences. I progressed by staying useful and putting in more than was required. That road took me through ITV Digital, BDA Creative, NBCUniversal. Decades of high-pressure work in broadcast and post-production audio.
But my deeper interest was always what makes the mind tick and how sound can affect people.
Not just making fancy television stuff, or even the music I was now regularly making. I was always more interested in what sound does underneath that level. Mood. Thought. Memory. The way rhythm, beat, frequency and indeed silence can change how something lands inside a person.
That is where EnTrance came from.
Not from the wellness industry, and not from some pious idea of helping cure people. It came from lived experience, professional audio craft, and a real interest in making something deeper and more useful than what I was seeing out there, and nearer to the type of content which really helped me turn my life around. EnTrance became the place where the technical side of me and the personal side finally met.
These days I spend my day driving huge lorries. A surprise refuge after the ever decaying media industry threw me a curve ball in it's efforts to adapt to the changing mass markets. It gives me the headspace and a healthy place to process new ideas which I'm producing for EnTrance. It also means I'm directing my creative energy at work that matters more to me now: building things that feel honest and sincere.
So if I seem steady these days, that was earned the slow way. Through chaos, recovery, pressure, setbacks, and time.
We do recover.
