Toyota Express Service

Advertising

By completing a full service in just 60 minutes, Toyota promised to release its customers from tiresome hours spent without a car. My campaign concept reassured drivers that while they wouldn’t miss out on Toyota expertise, they could wave goodbye to service-day raindrops falling on their miserable car-free heads.

Wipeout for PlayStation

Storytelling

Wipeout was the anti-gravity racing game that won the console crown for PlayStation across Europe, and as creative writer for Sony Psygnosis, I devised its living, breathing, gurning sci-fi universe. From the Nevada desert to a PlayStation near you, it turned science fiction into head-spinning historical fact.

Motorola

Product marketing

I worked with Motorola for well over ten years producing ads, sales literature, print, digital… you name it, I splattered words onto it. Take Moto Magazine for instance, as pictured above. This was an info-packed mag for phone dealers designed to help them keep their phone-friendly ears close to the ground.

Aegean Airlines

Advertising

When Aegean Airlines first flew into the UK, they wanted to tell our sun-dodging nation all about their superlative levels of service. With a vapour trail of in-flight features, my concept told its tale across a deep blue double-page spread: These aren’t added extras it said; this is Greek hospitality in the sky.

Human Studio

Storytelling

A sculpture show might seem a familiar concept, but when the UK’s Human exhibited at Calm & Punk in Tokyo, they did things differently. They sent the artefacts as digital files to be 3D printed in situ, and as a fan of their work, I was honoured to add a time-travelling twist with a piece of sci-fi fiction for the catalogue.

Zenith Building

Brochure writing

When a 1960s office block was turned into a premier Manchester business address, I gave it a suitably aspirational name and helped create a beautiful brochure to match. Conceived as a journey from ground floor to penthouse, it combined estate agent’s facts and figures with copy that revelled in the poetic.

Interflora

Advertising

When you’re famous for delivering flowers to the doorstep, some days are more important than others. My campaign for Interflora hinged on getting Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas just right: smiling faces, exquisite bouquets and headlines worthy of Mills & Boon. And the results? Blooming great.

Celestia for Redrow

Branding

Gazing at the vast Cardiff Bay skies is a favourite pastime at this luxurious waterside apartment development, hence the name I gave it – Celestia. With residential blocks named after heavenly bodies and a constellation of branded campaign materials, this Redrow development proved to be a star turn rather than a black hole.

Bido Lito magazine

Feature writing

As a big-hitting cultural city Liverpool’s rich musical past needs no introduction, but when it comes to documenting its present day scene, Bido Lito excels at reporting every thump, bang and clunk. It’s always a source of pride when one of my features appears in its rosy pink pages.

Vets4Pets

Writing for the web

The handful of high-and-mighty cats I’ve owned didn’t prepare me for writing the immense Vets4Pets website. Instead, I relied on research, collaboration and a good grasp of conversational writing styles to keep pet owners topped up with invaluable advice about their beloved animals.

Llechwedd Slate Caverns

Scriptwriting

The Llechwedd Slate Caverns in North Wales have been telling the story of Welsh slate mining since 1972. However, when they invested in new audio-visual technology for the 2016 season, I wrote them a brand new script that brought the Victorian miners coughing and wheezing to life.

Stuplex

Art

Ask a few writers and artists to create artefacts for a limited edition box, and you never know quite what you’re going to get. That’s exactly why Stuplex is so special, and why I love contributing to this intriguing project. Handmade and highly collectible, Stuplex is affordable art for aspiring Guggenheims.

Mint magazine

Journalism

Young people get lots of career advice, but encouragement to start their own business is less common. Mint magazine was devised to get them thinking about self-employment;  entirely written by me, it oozed pick-up-ability and spoke to dem yoot in their own voice without once using the word “innit”.

Toyota Tyre Programme

Advertising

My concept for the Toyota Tyre Programme urged drivers to think about the role of those four crucial rubber doughnuts. As the headline says, Everything rests on them. I also wrote all the supporting literature, from brochures to leaflets to key fobs – a full suite of items that were… wait for it… rolled out across Europe…

Wipeout Fusion

Writing for the web

I’ve written plenty of websites over the years, but none quite like the digital behemoth that was the Wipeout Fusion game site for Sony. Dense with detail, it purported to be the official website of the 2160 anti-gravity racing season – an entire gaming universe scooped out of my fevered imagination.

Toyota Parking Aid

Video scriptwriting

Once upon a time, drivers just needed to use their eyes, ears and common sense when parking their car, but these days they can take a little nap while sensors help avoid a bump. My video script, coupled with some classy graphics, explained Toyota’s Parking Aid system to drivers wanting an easy life.

K3 Cloud

Video scriptwriting

Now that we all know what cloud computing is – don’t we? – it’s easy to forget that only a few years ago, explaining it to the uninitiated was a challenge. That’s why K3 Managed Services asked for a video that would turn a complex subject into something simple – and why their salespeople loved my script.

Aequitas Legal

Video scriptwriting

Who’d have thought that complex legal procedures could be turned into a cute two-minute animation with as much screen-appeal as kittens falling down stairs? I’m not saying it was easy, but working together with a super-powered animator, I helped give Aequitas Legal a personal injury video to out-cute them all.

The Curfew Tower

Art

In 2012, I was artist-in-residence at the Curfew Tower in County Antrim, a project masterminded by the pop/art maverick Bill Drummond. I produced a spoken word audio cassette, performed alongside the band Clinic, and fulfilled 99% of my teen dreams by being preserved for posterity on vinyl.

Northern Soul

Feature writing

Launched by former Times journalist Helen Nugent in 2013, Northern Soul is one of the North of England’s leading culture webzines.  As the Liverpool correspondent, I contribute reviews, features and other articles that provide a flat-vowelled counterblast to the shandy-drinking tendencies of other arts outlets.

Lyceum Theatre Book

Writing and editing

The Sheffield Lyceum Theatre is one of the great Victorian playhouses, and as part of a huge renovation programme, I was commissioned to research, write and co-edit its official history book. After years of semi-dereliction – of the theatre I mean, not me – it was a thrill to help bring the old luvvie back to life.

Record and Play

Music writing

When the DJ and journalist Bill Brewster invited me to write about a series of themed playlists for his DJ History website, I couldn’t help but conceive them as old-fashioned mixtapes in the analogue tradition. They went down well, so I published them as a book. Made of paper. Like I said, strictly old-skool.

Everyman Theatre

Scriptwriting

My short play The Brick Becomes a Celebrity, performed at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in 2014, turned an everyday house brick into a true star of the stage. The play was conceived, written, rehearsed and performed within two hectic weeks, while the brick itself was last seen heading for Broadway.

Central Processing Unit

Storytelling

A well-told narrative can really bring a brand to life. Central Processing Unit is a record label that wanted a unique backstory – a tale that would help it build a conceptual identity of its own. I delivered a sci-fi take on a dreamless world, with my words appearing as intriguing prose for sonic explorers to discover.

This is just a small selection of work salvaged from my 20-plus years as a copywriter, scriptwriter, feature writer and artist.

While every writer can list the things they’re good at – and I can turn my hand to conceptual copy, editorial, technical writing, script development, writing for digital media and much more – over the years, I have found that distinctive creative voices are harder to come by. Yet it’s voices like these – heck, like mine – that turn a technical facility with words into powerful writing no matter what the context.

If your brand, business or other creative project could benefit from my distinctive voice, please get in touch. After all, now you’ve heard mine… isn’t it time I heard yours?