Entertainment

‘Ents’: music, television & film

Music has been important to me since the late 1960’s. I seem to recall I went to my first gig in 1972 when I was 15 or 16. Moving to London in 1975 opened up a big wide world of entertainment and I dived right in.

I have always liked film too, and the LSE film club opened my eyes to the kind of ‘arthouse’ movies that I loved and would never have discovered otherwise. MUBI is one of the few means of finding great movies now. Like many film lovers I’m a bit like Graham Greene I suppose, who wrote both serious novels and ‘entertainments’. I enjoy Three Colours Red, White and Blue just as much as Star Wars or Event Horizon; it all depends what mood I’m in – and whether I’m sober enough to read subtitles!

I have been very lucky in being involved in Ents at university and working for a major West End record chain, both of which brought me into contact with record labels, distributors, musicians and lighting and sound engineers. I actually think I would have made a good producer or engineer, desperate to perfect a particular sound. Oddly enough, my sound is very much ‘Bristol’: deep bass and driving rhythms – Portishead and Massive Attack for example. That’s what my records would have sounded like…