And so we come to the end of a busy 2016 – here are my highlights in a nutshell!
I ran another three highly successful London Songwriters Retreats in the beautiful English countryside attended by 45 writers in total, all of whom rated the overall experience 5 out of 5. You can register for the Spring 2017 Peak District Retreat if you want a magical songwriting break in beautiful surroundings!
There were also 22 of our monthly Collaboration, Songshare and Industry Guest workshops in London and in the summer I also had two three-day stints mentoring young people in music skills for NCS – The Challenge.
For the fourth year running I organised two concerts for the homeless charity Crisis At Christmas and this attracted media attention from London Live TV News:
Organising these events took up the bulk of my time but I also had three of my own songs included on Nub Music’s award-winning 100×30 compilation album series – they are in The Guinness Book Of Records! I also tried my hand at doing some accompanying video production as well, with quite pleasing results I think – see my Summer’s Day post below and my Christmas video for Crisis here:
On the non-musical front I attended England’s Euro 2016 football match with Russia in Marseilles whilst on holiday in France – a most dispiriting and tear-gas perfumed affair!
There were sad and difficult family matters too but hopefully we can carry forward the good memories, so here’s looking forward to a positive attitude to the challenges ahead and wishing everybody a happy 2017!