This is the long version, in case you ever wondered. It isn't a CV and it isn't a neat arc — it's the version you'd get if you asked me over a pint. Fair warning, it takes a while to tell.
The dining-room floor
I was eight. My mum and dad had a shared record collection — Queen, The Eagles, a whole stack of stuff between them — and I used to spend hours on the dining-room floor working my way through it one LP at a time. Headphones on, no distractions. Needle down, listen to the whole thing, sleeve it, pick the next one, start again.
One of the records in my mum's side of the pile was The Everly Brothers. She'd been given it by a friend; she wasn't a big fan of them herself. But it caught me in a way nothing else on either shelf did. The harmonies. The way the melodies sat next to each other. I didn't have the language at eight to explain what was happening, but something had shifted. I knew I wanted to make that sound.
Funny to think a record my mum didn't especially love had been sitting there all that time, waiting for me.
The first guitar, and a year with no lessons
My mum and dad bought me my first guitar from Argos in Kingston. It was a nylon-string classical, and I was grateful for it, but it never felt like the real thing to me. It didn't feel grown-up. It wasn't long before I was on my parents' case again about a steel-string, and eventually that second guitar turned up and it had the strings I'd been after.
I'd wanted lessons since Year 3, but they weren't available to me that young. I had to wait until Year 4 — and then in Year 4 the sign-up slip I put in for guitar lessons got lost somewhere along the way, so I didn't get them that year either. Two whole years of wanting them and not being able to, trying to work things out on my own with a guitar in my lap and no real idea what I was doing.
Year 5 was when it finally happened. Lessons at last, in a class of four — me and three other kids, with a proper guitar teacher. Progress was slow. Maybe it's obvious now, looking back at what I ended up doing for a living, but I wanted it more than the other three did, and it showed.
Mr Davies and a guitar club of one
My guitar teacher took care of the lessons themselves, but the real shift came from a different member of staff — a teacher called Mr Davies. He wasn't a music teacher; he was one of my regular classroom teachers, but he played guitar himself, and one term he started something called guitar club every Tuesday lunchtime. He didn't have to do it. He ran it because he wanted to — and, I suspect, partly because of me.
The other three kids from my guitar-lesson class didn't go. For an entire year, I was the only member of guitar club. Just me and Mr Davies, every Tuesday lunchtime. He brought in songs I'd never heard before — songs with riffs, songs that sounded exciting, music a nine- or ten-year-old could actually get his teeth into. He opened up what the guitar could do, beyond the chords and the exercises I was getting in lessons.
I don't know if he ever knew how much that year mattered. He changed my life.
2001 — Tears in Heaven
I was fifteen, Year 10, and the school summer concert was coming up. Up to that point my brothers had been the singers in our setup and I'd been the guitarist, quietly behind them, secretly wanting to be up front.
That year they were going on their first lads' holiday and wouldn't be back for the concert. I was devastated — I thought that was it, our slot was gone. And then my dad said something that changed everything. He told me there was one song I sang really well, and I should do it on my own. The song was Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton.
I didn't believe him. Up to that point I'd always thought of myself as the guitarist, not the singer; nobody had ever really suggested otherwise. I took the song to my music teacher, Simon Amura, played it for him and asked him straight: is it good enough? He laughed — not unkindly, more like he hadn't quite expected what he'd just heard — and said yes, it was.
On the night of the concert I walked to the microphone, sat down and played Tears in Heaven. Honestly, I don't remember thinking much about it at the time; I got lost in the song, and from the way the room went, it seemed like everyone else did too. I wasn't expecting much from myself, and I don't think anyone else was expecting much of me either — which maybe is why what happened next caught us all off guard.
At the end of the evening, the head-teacher gave his usual closing speech, thanking the staff and talking about what a great night it had been. And then he said something like — I think you'll all agree that one person in particular stole the show tonight. I'd like to invite Aaron back up for an encore. I didn't know what an encore was. I went up, took a bow, and started to walk back off. Someone had to stop me and explain it meant play another one. So I closed the night with One More Time.
That moment has stayed with me ever since. I've done thousands of performances in the years that followed — thousands — and out of every single one of them, that school-concert night is probably the most significant moment of my life as a musician. It's the moment I realised I could actually do this. I'm not sure the course of my life would have gone the way it has if that night hadn't gone the way it did.
After the concert
I started doing every school concert after that. My sister went to a dance club called Flight, and through her I heard about an audition at the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead — a woman called Miss Rabin was putting something together. The room was full of girls; I was one of the few boys. I got in. Played the Thorndike. Got invited on to play at London Docklands. Each of those felt like a rung on a ladder I was only just beginning to notice was there.
After school I went to catering college. I knew I wanted to be a musician, but everyone around me warned me the industry was brutal and I needed a fallback. Cooking was the only other thing I half-enjoyed, so catering it was. I had a good time there, but I probably spent more time singing on the Green or entertaining in the canteen than I ever did in a kitchen. The priorities were fairly clear.
When I was seventeen I got onto 95.8 Capital FM with Steve Penk. I'd uploaded a track to one of their competitions and rallied everyone I knew to vote for me. They invited me up to the Capital studio twice, and I played live both times. A lot, at seventeen.
Around the same time I was doing the London open-mic circuit: Half Moon in Putney, The Grey Horse in Kingston, Ginglik in Shepherds Bush, The Bedford in Balham, Spice of Life in Soho. Years of it.
Cousin Wendy, and the meetings that didn't happen
I left college at eighteen. I was working part-time at Millets in Kingston, a camping shop I'd been at since I was fifteen and three months old, alongside a seven-day paper round I'd started when I was thirteen. The moment I was old enough to earn, I was earning.
One night my cousins Wendy and Danielle came along to one of my London acoustic gigs. Afterwards, Wendy said something that has stayed with me ever since: if you want something, why would you not just go for it? Why would you have something to fall back on? I've had thousands of conversations since and I don't remember most of them. That one I do. It landed because it was the truth I already knew in my gut, only I hadn't heard anyone else say it quite like that.
For the next three years I kept at it. I sang at a City Showcase event for Lee Jeans in London and walked out with a free shirt and a pair of jeans, which at that point in my life felt like a genuine perk. My cousin Simon worked for Jamie Oliver and got me onto the bill of an award ceremony for them.
There were two industry meetings that came close to something. One was with a man called Steve Tannett — I think he'd worked with Stuart Copeland, names like that. The other was through a man called George Etchells whose brother had a senior role at Universal; there was a potential management arrangement on the table. Neither came off. With the Universal route especially, I remember walking in and being told almost straight away — we love your stuff, but we want to get you with some songwriters. I had about sixty of my own songs at that point and they'd heard three. Why weren't we starting with those? Maybe I was naive and that's just how the industry works. Maybe I was too stubborn. But I wasn't going to hand myself over to someone I wasn't one hundred per cent sure about, and I didn't.
I think about those meetings sometimes. Whether being comfortable with my parents — knowing there was always a roof — softened the hunger enough that I didn't grab what was in front of me. In a different life, without that safety net, I might have taken a different path and ended up somewhere else entirely.
Someone asked me the other night whether I'd like to be famous. It's a hard question to answer honestly. Fame, to me, is a by-product of being a successful musician — if it comes with the work, fine. But it's not the thing I'm aiming at. I do wonder sometimes who I'd have been if I'd had it young, whether I'd have held on to the opportunities or squandered them. I'll never know. What I do know is that I've stuck to my values, I've been stubborn about what I believe is right, and I'm still here doing this on my own terms. That has to count for something.
The walking-boots moment
I was around twenty or twenty-one. I was at Millets one day serving a customer — they were trying on walking boots — and somewhere in the middle of it I just decided I was wasting my time. I knew I had to be a musician, and the only way forward I could see was through busking and singing other people's songs.
I'd never wanted to play covers. It had always been about my originals. But I was watching musicians whose names were doing the rounds on the same circuit I was — Natasha Bedingfield, Paolo Nutini, Lucie Silvas, James Morrison. They were playing the same kinds of rooms I was playing, sometimes the same rooms around the same time, and each of them was climbing. If no A&R guy was going to come and find me, and no label was going to take notice, I'd have to put myself in rooms where it could happen.
My parents were on holiday at the time. I texted them to say I was handing in my notice and I was going to be a musician. I think they were surprised. They supported me every step of the way regardless.
I made a pact with myself that day. Whatever it took. A marriage — for life — with music. That pact has been the driving force of every decision I've made since.
Kingston with nothing in my pockets
Busking turned into pub gigs, which turned into weddings and private functions. One foot in front of the other, for years.
The first time I set up on Kingston High Street I was terrified. It's a street I'd walked a thousand times as a kid. Walking down it with a guitar, picking a patch of pavement, deciding that this was where I was going to start playing — that was a leap. But I did it, and I kept doing it.
A few years in, I started a small ritual. I'd drive into Kingston with nothing in my pockets. No lunch money, no car-park money, nothing. If I wanted to eat that day, I had to busk until I'd earned it. If I wanted to get my car out at the end of the night, same deal. Bitter cold, no audience, nothing working — still had to play. Little games I played with myself to keep moving.
Two things happened during those busking years that changed the shape of what I was doing. The first was a group of students from Tolworth Girls' School who kept coming to watch me. They were too young to see me in pubs, and they kept asking where else they could see me play. So I offered to come into the school for free and work with them on their own performances — judge their competition, prep them for school shows. I had no idea at the time that I was teaching. Looking back, that was my first classroom.
The second was meeting Katherine, who ran Anstee Bridge — a charity that supports young people through music. We met while I was busking. I've worked with Anstee Bridge every year since — eighteen years of songwriting masterclasses — and I'm a patron of the charity now. It's some of the work I'm proudest of.
Around the same time I picked up my first proper residency at The Oak in Kingston. It started as one night a week and grew to two. When I needed new speakers and couldn't afford them, a woman who used to come to my gigs offered to lend me the money — I've got some sitting in the bank that's not doing anything; as long as you can pay me back, I'll lend it. People like that have turned up again and again in this life, and I'll never stop being grateful for them.
Sandown
I was about twenty-five when I got booked to play Sandown Racecourse, supporting Stacey Solomon, McFly, Alesha Dixon and The Wanted. This was it. The big one. I spent £3,000 I didn't really have — new website, tracks recorded and mastered, CDs printed. I was all in.
The event was supposed to sell fourteen thousand tickets. It sold four thousand.
On the day, I walked up to the green room — massages, gift bags, the whole performers' setup. Stacey Solomon was in there getting a massage. They asked my name. I wasn't on the list. Because the numbers hadn't come through, they'd closed the green room to the smaller acts, and I was one of the smaller acts. The audience never got anywhere near the spot where my merch had been set up. After my first set I walked off the stage as flat as I'd ever been.
Then my mates turned up. One of my best friends did something I'll never forget. He pretended to be the event manager — walked around with his phone to his ear, talking to nobody — and told every security guard to filter the crowd through a specific route. The route that happened to pass directly by my merch stall. I played a second set at the end of the day and sold nearly every CD I had.
The day that was meant to be The One became the day my mates showed up for me. It turned a financial disaster into a story I'll tell for the rest of my life.
They also, between them, stole McFly's beers. I think enough time has passed now for me to say that.
Thirty, and daughters
My first daughter was born when I was twenty-nine. Being a dad was the most important thing to me from the moment I knew she was coming. Work had to fit around that, not the other way round.
My wife and I made a decision early: she wouldn't work, she'd be at home for the girls. We both believe strongly that at a young age it isn't a child's job to face the hard edges of the world — they deserve comfort, support and nurturing through those early years. That was the priority no matter what it cost us financially.
For the next nine years I was a work-from-home musician and a stay-at-home dad. School runs, mother-and-toddler groups, weaning, potty training, first steps. I wouldn't trade any of that for anything.
When my youngest started school, I was offered a teaching role. It was a bigger commitment — more hours out of the house — and it took a proper conversation. We took it on, because my wife being home for the girls still had to come first. That's why I'm currently working seven days a week. I can't do it forever. But I can do it now. One foot in front of the other, same as ever.
Where I am
Since COVID, the gigs have been better than they've ever been. I'm booked out solid. I'm turning down more work than I ever have before, which genuinely breaks me — I hate turning a gig down. But for every one I have to decline, I give myself a small pat on the back for having stayed with it through the quiet years, for being reliable through the easier ones, and for keeping the music at the centre of it the whole way through.
I love what I do. I meet every kind of person. I get to see people at their best — singing along, arms round each other, forgetting whatever they brought into the room with them for a couple of hours. That's a beautiful thing to be part of.
I don't take any of it for granted. Central heating. A tap you can drink from. Streetlamps lighting my road home after a late gig. The convenience store that lets me grab a bite on a long day. The small stuff that makes this life comfortable. I notice all of it.
I've got a beautiful family. An amazing wife. The support of my parents and siblings from the very start. I've been stubborn and I've been unwavering, and that blind determination is a big part of why I'm still here.
Thanks for reading. Every gig I play has a piece of you in it. That's not a line — that's just true.
See you out there.