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After university I started to make some money playing drums and singing in house bands on holiday camps, in the pit for stage shows, and on cruise ships which took me around the Mediterranean and Caribbean.
Through college and university I played with more rock bands than I can count, switching between playing drums, keyboards and lead vocals. In 1998 I was playing the clubs and pubs which meant being on the road every weekend in the band van. The clubs paid (and still pay) barely enough to survive on as a solo act, so as a five piece band we were making next to nothing, doing terrible day jobs to make ends meet and sending out as many demo CDs and videos as we could afford to different agents.
I was cold calling for a double glazing company when the guitarist phoned me to say that we'd got a gig in Spain. I put the phone down and walked out of that job on the spot. Spain didn't happen, but after a couple of desperate weeks we got another call about a two month contract playing in Dubai. Nobody had heard of Dubai at that time so we had no idea what we were signing up for but the agent was very helpful, assuring us that there was stable 220v electricity, air conditioning and even alcohol. From that point I just kept going and evolving with the music scene in the Middle East.
I was head of IT for a company in Dubai for about nine months. It was horrible but allowed me to do a bit of acting in the evenings.
Apart from a couple of stints playing back in Europe and on ships, I've gone from band to band in the Middle East for most of the last twenty years, sometimes I worked solo playing guitar or piano, sometimes flying to another country for one gig and back again. I did a couple of contracts for the US military and got to fly out to play on the deck of an aircraft carrier. I've also done a bit of stage and film acting both professionally and in amateur productions and I did voice overs for corporate promos and announcements.
I moved back to Bahrain in 2018 and I'm currently playing rock and pop covers 5 nights/week with my band.