My Journey

SMG: The Person Behind the Name

SMG Creatives is the place where all the threads of my life meet – music, words, storytelling, and the urge to keep creating no matter what gets in the way. The “Creatives” part is important to me. This isn’t meant to be a solo project; it’s a home for collaboration, conversation, and ideas that need more than one mind and one pair of hands.

A Three-Year-Old at the Family Piano

My love affair with music started when I was three, perched by the piano while my mum sang and played with the neighbours. I tried to copy her and it was, frankly, terrible. But that early failure did something important – it made me determined. I wanted to know how to make those sounds myself. So I started piano lessons, worked steadily through the grades, and eventually found myself studying music at college in Dundee. Those wild student nights, endless rehearsals, and concerts felt like freedom. I was finally an adult, and music was where I truly belonged.

Playing — The Be All and End All

At first I trained to be a music teacher…..my parents more or less cajoled me into studying to be a teacher, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I just wanted to play, to perform, to live inside the music, rather than spend my life trying to teach kids in school that really didn’t want to learn. Teaching would come later.

Whilst I was at college, I had the chance to play with Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue before Deacon Blue existed.

We would play in church halls and the kids loved us, I felt then that Ricky had something very special, and soon the world would know…. Despite being part of the early chapter, I was going to study music in Edinburgh, I played 3 nights every weekend, and I knew that I just wouldn’t manage to get to rehearsals so I made the decision to pull away. With a very heavy heart I stepped away. It’s one of those decisions that stays with you, but I’m grateful that our paths crossed when they did.

After two and a half years I left teacher training college without a real plan for what was coming next, and the next portion of my life was wonderful.

I then studied in Edinburgh for two years under the remarkable Margaret Murray McLeod – who was the kind of teacher you’d wish that you’d had your whole life. She really shaped me as a player. When I left Napier life quickly filled up with lessons and late nights.

I got married and I began teaching, flute, piano and violin.

Life was busy playing 3 nights a week, life was full.

Life as a Working Musician

In Edinburgh I studied piano teaching at Napier College under the remarkable Margaret Murray McLeod – the kind of teacher you wish you’d had from the very start. She shaped not just how I played, but how I thought about music and learning. When I left Napier, life quickly filled with lessons and late nights. I began teaching piano, flute, and violin, while also working as a professional musician.

I played in bands from Thurso down to RAF Boulmer, and in piano bars where my lifelong love of jazz really found its voice. Over the years I’ve had the joy of sitting at some beautiful grand pianos in hotels across the UK and abroad – The Old Course Hotel, Gleneagles, Crieff Hydro, and the famous Petwood Hotel, better known as the Dam Busters hotel.

Alongside all of that, I was raising a family, teaching, performing, and quietly writing in the gaps. I’ve been writing poetry since secondary school and I’ve never really stopped. More recently I mapped out the concept for a full pantomime, with several of the songs already written. It’s a big, ambitious piece – the kind of project that really deserves a creative team around it.

The Accident That Stopped the Music

Then, in April 2026, everything stopped. While on holiday in Tenerife same stubborn streak that pushed three-year-old me back to the piano turned up again. Out of sheer frustration, I started searching for anything musical I could still do – something that might be possible with one good arm and very slow, one-handed typing.

Finding Suno and a New Way to Write Songs

That search led me to Suno, an AI songwriting platform – and something in me lit up. Here was a way to stay close to music, even when my body wouldn’t cooperate in the ways it used to. Since discovering Suno I’ve written over 50 songs.

I write all the lyrics myself and spend a long time shaping the production of each track – choosing instruments, key, tempo, key changes (or not), mood, harmonies (male, female, or mixed), and the places where the music should breathe, speed up, or slow right down. I then work with the stems Suno provides, refining each song in the studio until it sounds the way I hear it in my head. Some songs take days to shape once the lyrics are written. As I often say, “It keeps me off the streets.”

These songs are mine. Suno is always credited – and rightly so – but every creative decision is intentional, and I hold full rights to each track.

Beyond AI: My Piano Music

Alongside my work with Suno, I still compose and record original piano music – not AI, I promise. There’s nothing quite like the feel of real keys under your fingers, even when those fingers are still recovering. I’ve printed out the sheet music and I’m exploring the idea of publishing my piano compositions in book form. Like so many creative projects, it’s a beautiful work in progress.

If you’d like to hear where all of this has led, you can listen to some of my piano compositions here:

Playing still isn’t as effortless or joyful as it once was – I’ve been told recovery may take a year or more – but creatively I’ve never felt more awake. In a strange way, that painful moment in Tenerife opened the door to a whole new chapter I might never have found otherwise.

Why “Creatives” Matter

SMG is me – but I added “Creatives” because I never wanted this to be a one woman show. SMG Creatives is my creative home, but it’s also an open door, a space to work with others, and a space to showcase what we do. Songs, scripts, stories and music all brought together under one roof. At the moment I’m writing a new pantomime. Still a long way to go to finish it but the full story is locked in, and if anyone would like to be a part of it, then technology can bring us together….