The debut album he should have released 25 years ago

But he is happy to be releasing it now. Life “happened” and got in the way a couple of decades ago but now is good too for all sorts of reasons.

Simon, who lives in Chelwood Gate, Ashdown Forest near Forest Row, said: “This is my first full release and it should have happened a long time ago but it does mean that the songs I'm writing now are properly authentic. These songs were written from the most authentic part of my heart. I've written them from no commercial leaning. I wrote them from me and that gives me a really good feeling. They are genuine. I wasn't trying to appeal to anybody. I was trying to write the most authentic songs I could.

“The music has always been side by side with the business but when I was younger and had less responsibility it was all about the music and the inspirations and the dreams. As I've gone through life and got older and things have happened, family and so on, I have had to juxtapose that dream with the business. When I was younger I was in bands semi-professionally but I've never stopped writing but it's just I obviously had to supplement my life by working! I work in recruitment as a head hunter but I found pretty quickly that the skills of being a solo music performer were quite easily channelled into business and were quite powerful. If you can perform in front of people in a pub then you can stand up and address a lot of corporates. But as I say, I never stop writing.

“When I was young I met a guy called Steve Brown (who worked with the likes of Wham, Manic Street Preachers, Elton John and many more in his career) and we became good friends. I met him when I was auditioning for Sony EMI when I was 19 and we stayed in touch and he was always pushing me to get on with the record and to do the album. And that has happened now. I am 47 now and in a romantic way the album is a reflection of my last 20 years or so. Steve used to call it new old stock. He had always encouraged me and we worked on it together. We started back in 2019 and then the pandemic hit but we worked as much as we possibly could during the pandemic and we recorded about 50 songs. There are 12 songs on the album. Sadly though he died just after we'd finished recording it but he was massively inspirational. He was such a big part of the album.”

The album is called English American: “I grew up in Plymouth in the West Country which has got such strong connections to the Americas. If you grow up there you're aware of this really deep linkage between the UK and the US and it's the same if you spend any time in The States. And I used to think how did these two sides blend. I was thinking about a title for the album and I was thinking what does the music represent and it represents the two sides in so many ways. Growing up in the 90s with a lot of American grunge bands but then flipping towards Brit pop and which was very anglicised and then jumping on that cart for some time. I was just thinking of the influences. On one side there was Neil Young; on the other side there was The Jam.”

American English seemed a good title for the album which was then flipped to English American: “This year we're going to be trying to build the video content from the album. I'm not gigging at the moment but we will be doing all the promotion we can and I'm back in the studio this year to finish the next album. I'm looking at January next year for the release of that one and I will start gigging. The trouble is I work with a lot of session players and the thing about that is that you can be working with someone who is in Nashville and someone who's in Swansea and someone who is in Edinburgh so it's pretty difficult to get them all together so I think I will promote the album when it comes by gigging on an acoustic basis. If I gig, it will be just me.”