About Offbeat
"The first job i got at Offbeat was to record an album for Nectarine No9, an Indie guitar band signed to Postcard Records which was fronted by ex Win and Fire Engines singer Davy Henderson. During all of this I was also recording many local songwriters and also writing music for TV commercials and playing in my own band The Harmonics with singer Kirsty Anderson and percussionist Dave Haswell. The Nectarines album was a 'cult' success and after that I was approached by Mouth Music vocalist and New Yorker Talitha MacKenzie who asked me to produce and co-arrange some tracks for her debut album Solas for World Music Network after seeing me play live with The Harmonics on a bill we shared at Edinburgh's Assembly Rooms. I told her she had come to the wrong guy as I had no history of recording folk or world music. She explained that she didn't want a typically folky album so we went ahead. The album was also a success, reaching no3 in the US World Music charts and no 12 in the European Charts. I spent the following 18 months touring with Talitha as guitarist and being MD for her band. We went all over the UK and also went to Europe where we played the famous Melk Weg (Milky Way), Terschelling island festival in Holland and Womad in both UK and Berlin as well as festivals in Canada.
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Around the same time i produced Mike Herons first solo album for 17 years called 'Where The Mystics Swim' for Demon Records, in which I also played keyboards and drum programming. Mike was co-founder of The Incredible String Band who were cited by both The Beatles and Led Zeppelin as an influence. My accidental excursions into World Music led me to record Senegalese drummer Hamed Kane in the late 90s for my own Offbeat label. The album entitled Akassa was distributed worldwide and was the very first release of Bayefall music. The Bayefall were a tribe, formerly called The Serere who had converted to Sufism. The music was a bizarre cultural mix of ethnic drumming and Sufi islamic chants. During that period I met piper Jimi McRae and after an amazing jam session at the studio I found myself bizarrely in an instrumental band based on bagpipes, me playing Bass alongside Kirsty on Electric Violin and Dave H on Drums doing a blend of Folk, Rock and World music. We made three albums together and enjoyed touring extensively. Playing T-In The Park and the Edinburgh festival fringe for three years running as well as playing New Year events in Stirling Castle and Beijing and touring festivals all over the UK and Europe before parting company in 2005".
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