IAN LAWSON

I was born in Liverpool in 1955. However, I’m of mixed Scottish and Welsh descent and was brought up in Wrexham, North Wales. On my Welsh side I am related to the composer Grace Williams.

After studying music and composition at Cardiff University (1974-1980) I formed a partnership with fellow postgraduate student Ben Heneghan. Originally the aim of this partnership was to form a pop group, and indeed we did, playing anywhere that would have us; we even got on to Radio One. However, producing music for television soon provided an interesting distraction and, combined with finding ourselves managing a commercial recording facility, we moved into the studio never to remerge!

My initial ambition was to become a ‘serious’ composer of concert music: not very practical, especially as I wanted to write tonal melodic music! Luckily, when Channel 4 and S4C started broadcasting the TV work took off and we have since had about 400 commissions in the Media field.

However, I still continued to compose ‘serious’ music some of which is now beginning to see the light of day thanks to the Internet and the support of Chandos Records and others.