The demos became the now almost entirely ignored first album (titled, with near Lovecraftian imagination, ‘The First Three EPs’) released in November 2016 and marked the starting block of a self-set challenge to record and release three albums over the following 12 months. I completed the three albums with days to spare and the following almost entirely ignored fourth album, ‘The Pen, The Sword and The Song’, was released in April 2018. Despite this rather lukewarm and muted beginning my fifth album ‘Lantern’ (2020) was also almost entirely ignored. Since then I’ve released several EPs and singles that have all gone almost entirely ignored and am (at the time or writing) recording ‘How the Night Gets In’, my next EP which will be available to download in September.
Over my (hitherto) 25 year career I’ve played across a huge spectrum of genres with many bands/ensembles and supported Martin Simpson, Newton Faulkner, Grace Petrie and Gomez’ Ben Ottewell, as well as members of The Stranglers, The Smiths, The Libertines and The Subways. In 2023 I was awarded an MA (with distinction – let’s not piss about) in composition from Leeds Conservatoire and have recently begun pimping myself out as both a session guitarist and arranger.
As well as music I dabble in poetry and occasionally write for online publications (mainly music journalism pieces), the high point of this belletristic moonlighting being a 2015 interview with the then just breaking Sleaford Mods for Sheffield’s Counterfeit magazine. They were tall and fucking terrifying.
Hello. First-person Del here. The following is a little more personal than your average mail-out-to-venues biography but much less so than the sort of hardbacked balderdash as rushed out by televised talent show winners in time for Black Friday.
I began playing guitar at 13 years old after borrowing a Guns ‘N’ Roses cassette from a classmate and deciding immediately that being an offensively wealthy, LA-conquering r’n’r titan like Slash was marginally preferable to being a skint, underdeveloped Barnsley schoolboy. Saving up a princely £35 over the course of a few months I bought a half size, unbranded electric guitar and taught myself a handful of timeless melodies, including ‘My Darling Clementine’ and the theme from TV’s own ‘One Foot in The Grave’. After this industry-shattering start I had lessons with a local blues guitarist and dedicated alcoholic who would occasionally fall into a drunken slumber while teaching. However, the palpable risk of airborne cirrhosis aside, I learnt a lot during those lessons and remain grateful for that first artistic shoe up the arse.
My first proper gig was at 19 when I auditioned for and was hired by a recently formed local club turn. We spent the next 4 years hawking our chiefly ‘80s wares around the nation’s least pleasant WMCs, a truly but not always pleasantly eventful 48 months (memorable moments found me falling out of the band’s ruefully maintained van while traversing a rather tricky junction, and sweating copiously through a very narrow escape from an arson charge). That said, and despite the threat of life-altering personal injury underpinning every gig we did, those years were a high point of my life and I’m still good friends with the other members.
With the band very precariously established on the club circuit (it went through several changes of name due largely to the unsavoury and often sociopathic exploits of the band’s singer) I left my day job at a timber merchant’s and enrolled on a music course at Wakefield College. There, I pursued classical guitar (having begun dabbling with ‘proper’ music) under the exceptionally knowledgeable and encouraging Kevin Bolton, and studied jazz theory with composer/saxophonist Tony Davis who recruited me for his jazz and latin ensembles. Over those two years I learnt an enormous amount about music theory and different approaches to guitar, as well as being exposed to the artists (notably John Martyn, The Smiths, Jeff Buckley, Nick Drake, Elvis Costello, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits) who would later become my chief songwriting influences.
In 2005, following a somewhat tumultuous time studying towards a music degree at several institutions around the midlands (it was during a particularly miserable period on the jazz course at Birmingham Conservatoire that I realised songwriting was the most spiritually rewarding if absolutely the least lucrative way forward), I moved back to Yorkshire barely any wiser and several thousand pounds in the shit. After a little under two months on the dole I found a job at a local music shop, started teaching guitar to supplement that wage and, needing a more creative outlet, joined a local indie punk band. After a few months of getting to people on the local circuit I began forming and writing for the indie/folk/prog band Mynas, with which I would play, write and record until 2014.
Mynas (a very fine band, in all seriousness) released two albums of my songs in its 8/9 year run; the eponymous debut in 2010 and ‘The Sober Drum’ in 2013. The band eventually became a six piece with two couples among their number and this, quelle surprise, would be its undoing. During the last few years the band came to resemble Fleetwood Mac, albeit free of the glamour, recognition, money and cocaine reserves. Massively arsed off with it all but writing almost daily, I begun recording acoustic demos and playing solo gigs.
Songwriter, guitarist and composer
Hello. First-person Del here. The following is a little more personal than your average mail-out-to-venues biography but much less so than the sort of hard-backed balderdash as rushed out by televised talent show winners in time for Black Friday.
I began playing guitar at 13 years old after borrowing a Guns ‘N’ Roses cassette from a classmate and deciding immediately that being an offensively wealthy, LA-conquering r’n’r titan like Slash was marginally preferable to being a skint, underdeveloped Barnsley schoolboy. Saving up a princely £35 over the course of a few months I bought a half size, unbranded electric guitar and taught myself a handful of timeless melodies, including ‘My Darling Clementine’ and the theme from TV’s own ‘One Foot in The Grave’. After this industry-shattering start I had lessons with a local blues guitarist and dedicated alcoholic who would occasionally fall into a drunken slumber while teaching. However, the palpable risk of airborne cirrhosis aside, I learnt a lot during those lessons and remain grateful for that first artistic shoe up the arse.
My first proper gig was at 19 when I auditioned for and was hired by a recently formed local club turn. We spent the next 4 years hawking our chiefly ‘80s wares around the nation’s least pleasant WMCs, a truly but not always pleasantly eventful 48 months (memorable moments found me falling out of the band’s ruefully maintained van while traversing a rather tricky junction, and sweating copiously through a very narrow escape from an arson charge). That said, and despite the threat of life-altering personal injury underpinning every gig we did, those years were a high point of my life and I’m still good friends with the other members.
With the band very precariously established on the club circuit (it went through several changes of name due largely to the unsavoury and often sociopathic exploits of the band’s singer) I left my day job at a timber merchant’s and enrolled on a music course at Wakefield College. There, I pursued classical guitar (having begun dabbling with ‘proper’ music) under the exceptionally knowledgeable and encouraging Kevin Bolton, and studied jazz theory with composer/saxophonist Tony Davis who recruited me for his jazz and latin ensembles. Over those two years I learnt an enormous amount about music theory and different approaches to guitar, as well as being exposed to the artists (notably John Martyn, The Smiths, Jeff Buckley, Nick Drake, Elvis Costello, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits) who would later become my chief songwriting influences.
In 2005, following a somewhat tumultuous time studying towards a music degree at several institutions around the midlands (it was during a particularly miserable period on the jazz course at Birmingham Conservatoire that I realised songwriting was the most spiritually rewarding if absolutely the least lucrative way forward), I moved back to Yorkshire barely any wiser and several thousand pounds in the shit. After a little under two months on the dole I found a job at a local music shop, started teaching guitar to supplement that wage and, needing a more creative outlet, joined a local indie punk band. After a few months of getting to people on the local circuit I began forming and writing for the indie/folk/prog band Mynas, with which I would play, write and record until 2014.
Mynas (a very fine band, in all seriousness) released two albums of my songs in its 8/9 year run; the eponymous debut in 2010 and ‘The Sober Drum’ in 2013. The band eventually became a six piece with two couples among their number and this, quelle surprise, would be its undoing. During the last few years the band came to resemble Fleetwood Mac, albeit free of the glamour, recognition, money and cocaine reserves. Massively arsed off with it all but writing almost daily, I begun recording acoustic demos and playing solo gigs.
The demos became the now almost entirely ignored first album (titled, with near Lovecraftian imagination, ‘The First Three EPs’) released in November 2016 and marked the starting block of a self-set challenge to record and release three albums over the following 12 months. I completed the three albums with days to spare and the following almost entirely ignored fourth album, ‘The Pen, The Sword and The Song’, was released in April 2018. Despite this rather lukewarm and muted beginning my fifth album ‘Lantern’ (2020) was also almost entirely ignored. Since then I’ve released several EPs and singles that have all gone almost entirely ignored and am (at the time or writing) recording ‘How the Night Gets In’, my next EP which will be available to download in September.
Over my (hitherto) 25 year career I’ve played across a huge spectrum of genres with many bands/ensembles and supported Martin Simpson, Newton Faulkner, Grace Petrie and Gomez’ Ben Ottewell, as well as members of The Stranglers, The Smiths, The Libertines and The Subways. In 2023 I was awarded an MA (with distinction – let’s not piss about) in composition from Leeds Conservatoire and have recently begun pimping myself out as both a session guitarist and arranger.
As well as music I dabble in poetry and occasionally write for online publications (mainly music journalism pieces), the high point of this belletristic moonlighting being a 2015 interview with the then just breaking Sleaford Mods for Sheffield’s Counterfeit magazine. They were tall and fucking terrifying.
Mobile: 07988775994
Mobile: 07988775994 | Email Del Scott Miller