As an unsigned, unmanaged artist who over the last ten years has recorded four albums and toured around the world the internet has been indispensable. Aside from allowing me to have personal relationships with fans, I have complete creative freedom over how and in what format my albums are released. It has also given me the opportunity to reach venues, festivals and booking agents worldwide and arguably most importantly run two successful crowd-funding campaigns. The most recent being for my third album The Banshee And The Moon, produced by Danton Supple.



At fifteen I was given my first electric guitar. I had been singing since I was a child but as I grew up my fascination with words and capturing a story through melody took hold, as did my curiosity with far away lands which led in later years to studying Latin American Cultural Studies and Literature at Manchester University. I spent three years absorbed by Hispanic culture whilst playing in various different bands, but I had yet to find my own sound; a sound inspired not only by the music of generations that preceded me but also nurtured through my life experiences and travel.

After my degree I returned to London with my focus on writing, recording and playing. I never spent time chasing labels or managers; it never really crossed my mind, all I wanted to do was write and play. Soon I found the support of a great band and a producer with whom I recorded my first EP, Without Time, and so began my introduction to the power of the internet.

My first distribution deal was secured through emails in 2006 with Pete, who runs Genepool Records. I would release my albums from my own record label Transducer Records and Genepool would distribute them throughout the UK and digitally worldwide. It is worth noting that Pete and I actually never met until late 2011! My elation on releasing Without Time, was soon crushed by heartbreak and my band falling apart. So I resolved to just get out on my own and play. I emailed as many festivals and venues as I could under the pseudonym of Sophia and around 50 replied and booked me. So that summer armed with a dilapidated old Volvo, copies of my EP, Pete’s support and a guitar I set out around the UK singing and sleeping in the back of the car. With each gig a new army of supporters added names to email lists and words of encouragement. 

By 2007 through a mutual friend I was introduced to producer Marius De Vries and we began work on my debut album Libellus. I had become disillusioned with peoples relationship to music and it was becoming increasingly hard as an artist to survive through CD sales. I decided to find a way to address this! 

As a child growing up in a household with a basement full of vinyl records, to me a album was best represented as an LP - not only was the sound quality infinitely superior but they were beautiful; real collectors' items. You really had a sense of who the artist was and took time to value what they had created. This was in stark contrast to simply downloading a track which not only sounded over compressed but also just became lost in the database on your computer. There was no opportunity to hold and savour the moment. This was the experience I wanted buyers of my music to have, but in a way that was practical at a time when so few people have record players. I decided to create a book the size of a 7in record. Each song would be represented with a piece of artwork, or photograph and a piece of text either telling the story behind the song itself or a piece of prose that I felt was relevant. The CD would be in the inside cover. I even tried releasing the first single from Libellus, Only You, as a 7inch single with a download code. This was a pretty much unknown idea in 2008. In an attempt to involve fans further, each of the vinyl singles had a download code on it, buyers were asked to email their individual codes to as many people as possible and the fan whose word had the highest download hits won a price – my mum came in top with 3000 downloads!