About SMG Creatives

Life in bands, bars and classrooms

After Dundee, I studied music in Edinburgh, got married, and threw myself into playing in bands every weekend. Life was full on, loud, and wonderfully musical.

At Napier College I studied piano teaching under the remarkable Margaret Murray McLeod — the kind of teacher who makes you wish you’d met her at the age of three. She shaped not only how I play, but how I teach and think about music.

From there I taught piano, flute and violin, while working as a professional musician. I played in bands anywhere between Thurso and RAF Boulmer, and spent many evenings in piano bars, indulging my love of jazz and improvisation. Along the way I raised a family and somehow kept all the plates — and the notes — spinning.

Writing has always been part of the picture too. I’ve been scribbling poems since secondary school and never really stopped. Words and music have always gone hand in hand for me.

Grand pianos and grand hotels

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of playing many beautiful grand pianos in some very special places. My work has taken me to prestigious hotels in the UK and abroad, including The Old Course Hotel, Gleneagles, Crieff Hydro and the Petwood Hotel — the famous Dam Busters hotel.

Those venues, those instruments and those audiences all left their mark. Every room, every piano, every conversation at the bar afterwards has fed back into my playing and my writing.

When everything stopped (almost)

In April 2026, while on holiday in Tenerife, everything changed. I had a serious accident and managed to break my humerus clean in half, shatter the outside of the bone into many pieces (some still floating around), and break my arm in three places. When I do something, I apparently commit to it fully — accidents included.

Suddenly, I couldn’t physically write with a pen, paint, draw or play the piano. For someone who lives through their hands, that was a brutal shock. Frustration set in quickly. I needed something musical I could still do, even if it was just one-handed typing.

That’s when I discovered Suno, the AI songwriting platform.

Songwriting with Suno — and staying true to the music

I fell in love with it. Here was a way to keep creating while my arm healed, and to explore new sounds at the same time. Since then I’ve written over fifty songs.

I write all the lyrics myself and spend a lot of time on the production: choosing instruments, keys, tempos, key changes and moods; deciding where harmonies come in and whether they’re male, female or mixed; shaping where the music slows down or speeds up. I also work with the stems Suno provides in the studio to refine and polish the tracks.

This level of creative control means the songs are authentically mine. Suno is credited, as it should be, but I hold full rights over every song. Some tracks come together quickly; others take days of tweaking after the lyrics are written. Either way, the heart of the song is always human.

Pantomimes, piano books and other works in progress

Because I’m an Aries and patience isn’t my strongest feature, I don’t tend to hang around once I’m excited about an idea. Somewhere between the lyrics, the songs and the recovery, a new project appeared: a pantomime.

The whole concept is mapped out and quite a few songs are already written. It’s a big piece of work and it needs collaboration to really come to life — script, staging, voices, musicians. Now that I’ve said that out loud on a website, I may just have to finish it. Time will tell.

I also compose and record original piano music (I promise there’s no AI involved in these). I’ve printed the scores and I’m exploring ways to publish them in book form — another work in progress. If you’d like to hear some of these pieces, you can listen on SoundCloud: have a listen to my piano compositions on SoundCloud.