Michael is an award-winning composer with many film, television and pop music credits to his name including the score for Richard Loncraine’s feature Finding Your Feet starring Imelda Staunton, Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie. Other projects of note include the evocative jazz score to the Peabody-winning BBC/PBS documentary Jazz Ambassadors and Churchill and the Movie Mogul for BBCFour.

 

Michael’s composing credits also include Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles starring Zac Efron and Clare Danes and indie feature Forget Me Not (Winner London Independent Film Festival) starring Tobias Menzies. He is an accomplished arranger and provided string orchestrations for Ricky Gervais’ David Brent: Life On The Road. Michael’s music also appears in films including Wild Card starring Jason Statham, Wild Target with Emily Blunt, plus TV drama, The Wire, Young Dracula and Dark Angel.

Michael also works in partnership with DJ-producer Paul Oakenfold on film and documentary scores including the soon to be released Citizen Bio, Overture Pictures’ Nothing Like the Holidays starring Alfred Molina, and the award-winning Japanese anime feature, Vexille. He is also a member of the ZeroVU team with Nick and Mitch Taylor whose credits include The Drifters, Balls of Steel and Risk, nominated in 2019 for Best Music at the Idyllwild Festival, California.

Michael has scored many prestigious long-form documentaries including BAFTA-winning J’accuse, Einstein’s Big Idea and Battle of the Hood and Bismarck, National Geographic’s landmark ocean series Alien Deep, Queen of the World and The Coronation in Colour. He has three regional Emmy nominations, winning Best Instrumental Music for PBS’s ‘Tennessee Yearbook’. 

Michael studied piano and viola at the Centre for Young Musicians and Leeds College of Music. He also plays guitar, mandolin and assorted stringed instruments which often feature in his scores. In 2006 he gained a Masters in Composition for Screen from the Royal College of Music in London where he was the PRS Sir Arthur Bliss Scholar and was awarded the prestigious Joseph Horovitz Prize in Composition for Screen. 

 

His interest in improvisation led him to work aged 17 in Dick Heckstall-Smith’s band, Big Chief, at the same time being mentored by the legendary conga drummer, Reebop Kwaku Bah (Traffic, Rolling Stones). Working with Reebop left a deep impression and continues to inspire him. Michael’s first break in commercial music came aged 20 when Ian Dury hired him to co-write and arrange his album Four Thousand Weeks’ Holiday. As a writer and/or producer he worked with acts including Curiosity Killed the Cat, Soul II Soul, Teena Marie, James Taylor Quartet, Patrice Rushen and Future Sound of London. He also performed live and in the studio with Scritti Politti, Orange Juice, Sting, The Bee Gees, Mark Morrison and many others. He has had a long association with Steve Winwood, touring with him in the reunion of rock band Traffic in 1994 and afterwards becoming his Musical Director.

As a jazz composer, he has written and produced three albums including The Long Way Home (2014) which received glowing praise and featured a stellar line up of British jazz stars including Nigel Hitchcock, Gerard Presencer, Jason Rebello, Ben Castle and James Maddren. Michael's composition Mother Medusae commissioned by violinist, Thomas Gould, earned him an Ivors Composer Award nomination in 2019.