I’ve been creating music since the 1970s, with albums released worldwide across a wide variety of genres, including electronic, synth rock, progressive rock, jazz, medieval and orchestral soundtrack music.

During the 1980s, I was part of the underground UK electronic music scene, releasing ten albums on my own Eye Tapes label. Alongside my wife Linda, I also performed live at several electronic music festivals.

By the 1990s, my music had begun to move more towards progressive rock. In 1993, I was signed to Cyclops Records, who subsequently released four of my solo albums.

In 2005, I signed to Chicago based Dreamfast Records, who released my album The World Over. The album featured the London Symphony Orchestra’s lead flautist, Gareth Davies, and renowned saxophonist Iain Ballamy.

I was also a member of the Shrewsbury based instrumental progressive rock band Ra, whose albums Wake (2007) and Ra Rising (2009) were both released on the Cyclops Records label.

With the addition of vocalist Richard Benjamin, the band evolved into Ra Rising. We subsequently released Seize the Day in 2014 and Race Against Time in 2022.

I have collaborated with Greek synthesiser maestro Thaneco. And to date we have released three albums: Empyreal (2017), Call of the Ancients (2019) and Time Vortex (2024).

From 2018 to 2022 I collaborated with songstress Sally Oldfield (Mike’s sister) in creating videos for her YouTube channel.

One of my ongoing projects is THE TRANCE DIMENSIONALS, a space rock band I formed in 2016 with the legendary Nik Turner, founding member of Hawkwind. In addition to Nik, Dave Anderson, whose musical credits include Amon Düül II and the Groundhogs, and who had also played bass on Hawkwind’s In Search of Space, agreed to become involved. We were also joined by Angel Flame of Nik Turner’s Space Ritual and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown.

Our debut album, Synchronicity, was released by the Italian label Black Widow Records in 2022. Our second album, Space Angels, followed in 2025, and we are currently completing our third album, titled XiN.

Another of my current projects is colaborating with lyricist and drummer Dave Rees. Together, we have released three albums Live For Today (2015), There’s Always Tomorrow (2021) and Looking Forward to the Past (2024) featuring a variety of established vocalists, and we are now working on our fourth, The Time Has Come to be released in 2027.

BEGINNINGS

Steve was born near Birmingham, in the heart of England, and grew up in Smethwick. As a child in the 1960s, he found himself irresistibly drawn to the new and unfamiliar sounds of electronic music that he occasionally encountered on television and radio. Even at such a young age, conventional instrumentation seemed old and all too familiar, whereas these new sounds were futuristic, vibrant and full of colour.

During the early 1970s, he began seeking out any albums that featured the synthesiser, including Perrey & Kingsley’s Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, and other Moog-based recordings such as Marty Gold’s Moog Plays the Beatles, Walter Carlos’s Switched-On Bach and TONTO’s Expanding Head Band’s Zero Time. As the decade progressed, he also began hearing synthesiser music in the work of bands such as ELP and Genesis, as well as in the more experimental sounds of Hawkwind, Gong and Tangerine Dream.

An immensely powerful impression was made when he first heard Tangerine Dream in 1972, during a live broadcast from Germany on the BBC. This was well before John Peel began giving the group airplay on Radio 1. The experience was akin to a mystical awakening, as though something within the music were calling out across vast distances of space and time. Steve had a strong sense that the music was forging a bridge between other worlds and dimensions. This awareness of the almost magical possibilities of music inspired him to begin his own explorations into the realms of sound.

At around the same time, and almost as if guided by some unseen influence, he experienced another defining moment. At the age of 15, he quite accidentally created a rudimentary audio generator after the idea occurred to him to connect the electronic circuit board from a dismantled tape recorder to the family record-player amplifier. To his amazement, a remarkable variety of electronic sounds emerged from the loudspeaker. These included not only oscillating whistles but also strange rhythmic patterns, bubbling sounds and white noise.

In the early 1970s, Steve attended Oldbury Technical School, where the famous comedian Frank Skinner was also a pupil. It was here that he met his future wife, Linda. Steve subsequently gained a place at Wolverhampton College of Art, although, as the decade progressed, music increasingly took hold of his imagination. Linda went on to attend Birmingham School of Art and also began taking private flute lessons.

Along the way, the acquisition of an electronic organ, a reverb and echo unit, and an Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder provided the beginnings of a modest home recording setup and opened up further possibilities for musical experimentation.

Steve enrolled on several music courses and passed a number of grades in music theory. However, he was largely self-taught in sight-reading, composition, guitar and keyboards. His musical interests were also becoming increasingly diverse, encompassing medieval, Baroque, classical, folk, Eastern, film and progressive rock music, among many other styles. All of these influences would leave their mark on his musical output in the years that followed.