Hi I’m Mark, and I’m a Londoner songwriter living in Byron bay. I perform songs that focus around beauty and spirit, sing on various electronic music, co-write with other fantastic indie writers and travel as widely and as often as possible. My songs have come from world travels, dips in oceans & walks through wide open fields, forests and cities. Songs have been written in a variety of places from India, Morocco & Tuscany, to London, New York & Barcelona. The songs are inspired by love, the natural environment and the exploration of consciousness. Alchemy is the transformation of one thing into another; limited thoughts into positive thoughts, limited beliefs into positive beliefs & limited aspects of myself into my highest potential. It is incredibly satisfying inner work that I express through song. I also work as a music therapist with mental health & intellectual disabilities. My musical life in a nutshell: Originally from the UK, I began learning the piano and the trumpet from a tender age. After realising I wanted to ROCK I learnt drums and started playing in bands making severe levels of noise and sweating a lot. This was so much fun, but I was also nurturing a more ’sensitive’ side that was itching to come out through short poems and little songs. Through the natural course of things I found my first acoustic guitar which then became my main songwriting companion (as well as tea). This old guitar would eventually be covered in flags of all the countries it travelled to. My guitar playing came together with a close friend whilst jamming Radiohead and Nirvana songs for fortnight when we were 13. We rented out a place in the Scottish highlands to go snowboarding, but when we found there was no snow, we spent the entire week singing and learning new chords. I carried on playing drums and electric guitar in heavy rock bands whilst developing my acoustic writing, until the singer-songwriter in me took over entirely. After studying the Psychology of Consciousness and gigging around Bristol & London for the next 6 years, between travels to the East, I moved to Byron bay with my Aussie girlfriend who is now my wife. I was also in and out of the studio recording vocals on tracks for big name electronic producers Antix, King Unique, Alex & Filip and Jamie Stevens. I have been playing gigs at markets, cafes and bars in Byron for the passed 3 years, with a European tour thrown in for good measure. A move to Sydney is in mind for Summer. I enjoy films, friends, food, hikes, the ocean & travel….but my main passion lies in writing a song: I love the whole process. The excitement of the initial idea, it’s perculation, helping it grow some more, jamming it over and over, finding the flow of the structure, then watching the words come. Once ripe, helping it find its way out into the world. People sometimes ask how I write. For me, the music always seems to come to me first. Something starts happening on the guitar, I play around with vocal melodies, then other sections evolve once the melodies feel right. The lyrics then emerge whenever they they feel like it, sometimes much later than I might like! The words are formed to fit the intonation of the melody and the feel of the sound. Nearly all my songs are written over the period of months or even years. As much as you’d want them to be ready when you want them to be, they have their own process, and when and where never seems up to me. Mark x