None of my mates sang or performed when I was growing up, and I didn’t really tell anyone that I did it on the quiet. When I first realised that I wanted to be a singer I kept it to myself, and it wasn’t until I moved to Bahrain that I even took part in a school performance.
When I was about 12 or 13 they gave me the part of the undertaker in the musical Oliver! I also played the General in The Pirates of Penzance. I won the Performance of the Year award from my school for my role as the General. All my family and friends said how good I was in the role. At the time I just thought they were being nice because I was young, and I didn’t realise I had any proper talent. Whenever I was in plays it was because my teachers used to encourage me to get involved, and they really pushed me, otherwise I’m not sure I would have bothered.
I had a lot more confidence back then, so I just used to dive in without thinking. I was a bit of a loudmouth, I didn’t take any crap from anybody, and I was pretty laid-back and happy.
We stayed in Bahrain for a few years and I had an amazing time. We came back down to earth with a bit of a bump when my mum and my stepdad got divorced and all the family decided to move back to England. I guess it was a rags-to-riches, then back-to-rags kind of tale. It was once we moved back to Redcar that things began to go a bit wrong.
I started going to a local school which was quite rough. Singing and dancing weren’t really the done thing. I probably would have got my head shoved down the toilet if I’d got up on stage and started singing and dancing. I stopped having anything to do with singing and I became the class clown instead!
I found it hard coming back to the same place I’d previously lived after being away for a few years. A lot had changed, and although I was able to go back to being mates with the guys I knew before, life had moved on and I didn’t feel like I fitted in any more. I felt like a real outsider. I was never the guy that the girls fancied or the clever one that people looked up to, so I created this character for myself – as the joker who didn’t care about anything.
Things weren’t that great at home and I was arguing with my family a lot. That meant not always paying attention and basically being quite disruptive at school. I used to walk into some classes and get chucked out before I’d even had a chance to sit down. Teachers would say things like, ‘I can’t deal with you – you’re doing my head in. Get out!’
I spent a lot of time tapping on desks and winding the teachers up. If I was asked to stop I’d do it even louder and put on some stupid accent. I secretly had it in my head by that point that I was going to be a professional singer, so I felt like school didn’t matter any more.
I was really into soul and post-hardcore heavy rock music, and Nirvana were my heroes! I was also really into rappers like Eminem, because he used to sing about having a rubbish life, which I felt like I did at the time. I suppose if you were to sum up my musical tastes from when I was 14, you could say I was mainly into angry music.
In the same way as I did at school, I caused trouble at home, so my mum kicked me out quite regularly – and I can’t say I blame her; I was unbearable to live with. She couldn’t really cope with me and I ended up in foster care for my last year of school. That was actually my decision to a certain extent. I couldn’t bear the rows at home and I hated seeing how much my behaviour hurt my mum, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself. I was angry about everything and so I lashed out verbally. I wanted to get away from everything, and so when foster care was offered I took it. I didn’t feel like I wanted to be around my mum, and she was finding me hard to handle, so it seemed like the right decision all round.
Even though I was in touch with my dad I didn’t go round to see him that often, so I didn’t really have a male role model during those years. I think that was part of my problem. I suppose I sometimes took on the male role in the house myself, because much of the time it was all women, and I found that quite a lot of pressure.
I was in foster care for about two years in total, until I was 17. I didn’t want any of my friends at school to know that I was living in foster care, so I kept it a secret from them. If we were walking home and my mates asked me where I was going I’d lie and say I was going to stay with my auntie or something. I didn’t want anyone to know the truth. It was really awkward.
When I was about 15 I decided that I wanted to learn guitar and start taking music a bit more seriously. My mum’s boyfriend at the time bought me a charity shop guitar for Christmas and that was it for me. I think it cost about £40 or £50, so it wasn’t the world’s greatest guitar, but I loved it. I don’t have it any more and I’ve got no idea where it’s ended up but I’m keeping an eye out on eBay!
I taught myself to play and started writing songs about girls and heartbreak and all the kinds of things you go through when you’re a teenager. That coincided with me having my first proper girlfriend. I was madly in love with her – or I thought I was at that age. We dated for around a year and that was my first serious relationship. I’d had other girlfriends before but that was more about sending Valentine’s cards and holding hands than anything else. I always loved women when I was growing up. I even used to flirt with my mum’s friends, and I’m still the same now.
When I was young and confused by what was going on in my life, music was a coping mechanism for me. It was my escape when everything else around me was rubbish. It was my own little made-up world that I could go into. It was also a way to channel all my emotions and express how I was feeling when I didn’t feel like I could do it in everyday life.
I came up with a lot of melodies. Thinking back, I’d always been humming little melodies to myself and singing tunes even when I was a kid, so it was a natural progression to put words to them. My voice wasn’t great back then, to be honest. I used to listen to albums by the bands I loved and the lead singers had husky voices, so I was always trying to emulate them. That’s when I started experimenting with how my voice sounds and finding out where I felt comfortable musically.
As I got more confident I slowly started to tell my friends about my singing, and surprisingly they were really interested in it all. They used to come round to my house and listen to me playing for hours. They were always saying that my lyrics were great and they encouraged me to carry on writing. I’ve written literally hundreds of songs now. I’m not sure how many of them will see the light of day, but hopefully one day some of them will end up on an album.
It wasn’t until I left school that I really started focusing on music as a possible career. At school I was too busy messing about to think too far into the future, but once I had the space to decide what I wanted to do, music was really the only thing I felt passionate about.
I took all of my GCSE exams and I did okay. I got a B in English, and that was the most important subject to me, so I was really happy with that. I honestly can’t remember now how many passes I got in total, but I know it wasn’t many because I didn’t put much effort in. I truanted quite a lot back then, and I was caught smoking in town a few times when I should have been in lessons.
After school I went to do a music course at a local college, where I learnt about the theory side of things, and we would get put into bands with other people on the course, which was a good introduction to making music with other people.
It was a two-year course, but I dropped out after a year because I felt the tutors didn’t really care whether I did my work, or if I was going to make something of myself. Half the time the tutors wouldn’t turn up to lessons, and sometimes I couldn’t afford to pay the travel costs just to get in there, so all in all it was a bit of a disaster.
I decided that I would be better off doing things on my own, so I carried on writing and singing in my own time. I was about 16 when I formed my first band with some other local lads. We were called Traceless and we played quite a few gigs together. We supported Bromheads Jacket – they were quite big at the time – and