Living in England, Mike was bombarded with the late '70s / early '80s synthetic music explosion which opened his ears to a whole new palette of sound. This new technology relied heavily on his other passion of computers being used for digital control.

It started small, but building on more and more complex setups he eventually created a fully-functional private studio which rivaled commercial midi-based programming facilities of the time. This meant that programming could be a 24/7 process, most of which he did alone...

But after a major change of writing styles in the late '90s, and a move from London to Los Angeles in 2001, Mike joined forces with a neighbour to release a darkwave / synthpop album on an indie label in Chicago, comprising music & vocals totally produced in his home, under the name 'Alaska Highway'.

When the eventual evolution meant the band amicably split in late 2006 after recording their second album, Mike was invited to join Rose's project primarily as the programmer, but this quickly turned into a fully-fledged writing partnership which saw a whole new raft of songs created in the heavier style he had been unable to produce in the previous project.

With 'Among the Weeds' there is now no compromise. This is revolution...

Mike conceived & built an electronic drum kit played standing up, and for obvious reasons was dubbed 'the drum tree'. Pintech Dingbat trigger pads mounted on an Ultimate Support speaker stand, firing sounds from an Alesis drum module using Xcel Drumsticks, the drum tree strikes an interesting visual on stage...

Mike : "I basically taught myself to play drums whilst sitting in London traffic listening to bands like Depeche Mode, Simple Minds & The Cult. Driving a vehicle is not the most obvious choice for drum lessons but this meant that my brain associated hitting 2 pads for the hihat & no bass drum pedal, so when it came to actually play a real drum kit I couldn't co-ordinate my actions so, out of necessity, I invented the drum tree..."

"The original concept used an angled tube to space out the drum triggers but this new evolution works much better. Stage set-up & tear-down takes only a few minutes as no microphones are used, just an Alesis drum trigger / brain combination firing sounds in to my stage mixer. Both simple & effective...".