A RICH VEIN OF SONGWRITING IN A ROOTS, POP INFLUENCED STYLE

For the last decade and a half Dominic Finley has successfully adapted to various different styles of music. He has moved though Brit-pop, Motown and jazz, to more recently doing session work and playing progressive rock with Combination Head and classic pop-rock with the recently reformed Cutting Crew. His first solo CD ‘Avalon’ is out now. As a teenager Dominic served his musical apprenticeship in the international six piece show band LA Tour where he played electric bass and spent six months working in major hotels across Asia. At this time he also started to play upright bass and make his first forays into jazz. Returning to the UK in 1996 he joined critically acclaimed Liverpool Brit Pop/Motown-style band The Transparents. Over the next three years the band recorded their debut EP and toured with bands such as Dodgy, The Real People, Travis, The Long Pigs, Shed Seven, Baby Bird, Cast, Heavy Stereo and others. After the band broke up in 1999, Dominic, now playing double bass, formed a trio with Colin James on piano and the highly regarded young drummer, Ronny Lessard to play the worldwide cruise liners operating out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Returning again to the UK Dominic formed an eponymous jazz trio and worked and recorded as a bassist with the Jim Diamond Band. He continued to take on session work as a bassist, including playing electric bass on recent releases for We Deliver (formerly K-Klass), but has also branched out into writing tutorial books. So far he has had two books published: “Secrets of a Professional Bass Player” – the revised version of which includes extra chapters and a foreword by legendary bassist, Herbie Flowers – and “Groundwork for Bass”. The last two years have probably been the busiest in Dominic’s career so far. In 2005 he joined original singer/writer Nick van Eede in a reformed version of the Grammy nominated/multi-million sellers Cutting Crew. The rest of the band consists of Sam Flynn (keyboards), Gareth Moulton (guitar) and Tom Arnold (drums). The band has toured heavily playing in the US, Canada, Europe and the UK and some of Dominic’s personal highlights included playing legendary German TV Show Rockpalast, as well as performing alongside such famous names as Supertramp, Robin Gibb, Midge Ure and Howard Jones. The band is currently working on a new project and Dominic potentially has a couple of co-writes on the forthcoming album. The other major group project Dominic has been involved with is his collaboration with esteemed producer and keyboard wizard Paul Birchall and fellow Cutting Crew member Gareth Moulton in the prog-rock, Yes/ELP-inspired band, Combination Head. They have just completed “Progress” the follow-up to their acclaimed debut album and are now in pre-production for their new live show. To top off a few busy years Dominic has started working on developing a solo career as a singer-songwriter in parallel with his group work. Recently he has struck a rich vein of songwriting and has already written more than an album’s worth of new songs and is using whatever free time he can reserve in his busy schedule to record them. Steve Wilcock, Summer 2008