This selection of my songwriting showcases stand-alone songs from some of my musicals that are suitable for cabarets, concerts and auditions. The original plan had been to take one song from each of the twelve shows I have written so far, but as Simon Grieff (from SimG Records) and I talked and sang and played through various options, in the summer of 2020, we both felt the final twelve selected sat together best as a first salvo.

Our criteria for choosing were what would be good for a solo singer to perform, in, say, a cabaret or concert context or in an audition. Songs that are entertaining, funny, moving, stirring. They should have strong melodic material, clear lyrical ideas, containing satisfying emotional arcs and were musically and lyrically rooted in a musical theatre tradition. This meant that for the performer there is something to actually act, there in the song – dramatic potential where a specific character makes a choice (like At The Crossroads) or makes a discovery and has to process it (like Gloucester Road or Nothing To Be Done), or is making an introduction (like Big Cheddar), or persuading another character (like All Men Are Bastards or I Say We Fight), or confessing a problem (like Alphabet Soup), or making a complaint (like That Kind of Day). We agreed there should be a range of internal thinking and external speaking, comedy and pathos, characters and personalities, as well as a range of musical styles – jazz, waltzes, folk, ballads, patter songs and so forth, that have my own personal voice, but also fall within a wider lingua franca of the MT mainstream.