Hi!   I’m Martin Smith and, in-between stints in my “daytime job”, I am a musician, singer and songwriter.

As a musician, I’m primarily a guitar player and I can turn my hand to a range of styles – rock, blues, jazz, country, folk, classical.  These days, jazz and blues are my greatest passions.

I play a few other instruments with varying degrees of success. I keep meaning to find time to really improve my piano playing.

As a singer, I’ve performed rock, blues, jazz and musical theatre.

Here’s some performance  links:

Rock

Blues

Jazz

Regards songwriting, I had a purple patch about 8 years back when I was writing a lot of material.  Some of this found its way into live performance with my band at the time – SkyHunter – a bluesy rock outfit.  A subset was also recorded by SkyHunter.  The eponymous album can be found on Spotify here.    By the way, the “Drive by EP” and the track “organFarmer” aren’t by my old band.  Seems a new bunch of lads have picked up the band  name and are running with it.

Songwriting and recording are things I’m keen to get back into the swing of and I’m hoping to use this blog to air song ideas – both new material and covers – and get your feedback.

Recently, I very seriously contemplated going down the solo “singer-songwriter” path – just me and an acoustic guitar. There is a nice, elegant simplicity about it – it makes your live act nice and portable – plus, there are no band members to fall out with!

However, I’ve recently started to form a new band, playing a blend of jazz, blues, soul and funk. I will use this blog to post updates on the progress of the new band through formation, rehearsals, gigs etc.

Beyond that, I will also  generally let folks know what I’m up to music-wise, share thoughts with you about musical directions I’ thinking of taking, let you know about up-coming gigs, share my creative angst, let you know what I’m listening to and who’s influencing me  and generally share music related “stuff”.

I hope that what I post going forward is sufficiently interesting and entertaining for you to pop by for read (and a listen) from time-to-time.  Please do feel free to comment, ask questions, make suggestions and so on. It would be great if this becomes a conversation and not just a mouthpiece for me.

All the best,

Martin