Mike joined Smokie as the Lead-singer in 1995. With his charme and sympathie he has a lot of "old" Smokie-Fans and also gets more and more"new" Fans. During the gigs he is full of energy and he shows a lot of stunts, so we will know, that Smokie never only a Oldie-Band.

 
Mike's story about his years before Smokie

I played drums from the age of 10/11. Toured UK with a music/comedy show from 17 to 30. During that time I was writing. As well as the music/comedy show I had my own band called "Shanghai Star" playing our own songs. We couldn't get enough gigs because we wanted to do our own material. The places to play wanted you to do covers. That split when the guitarist got a job in the south of England. I
tried to find a new guitarist without success but a guy called Pat MacDonald saw us play and asked me if we could try to write some songs together. Pat and I formed a band called "Bite the Bullet". Interestingly,"Bite the Built" had three girl backing singers, one of which was Ellie. She is now touring with Chris Norman and has been for many years. We are still good friends. She is the best friend of Vernon's wife. Pat also did some live gigs with Chris for a little while. We played only one gig - all our own songs. We got a fantastic review.
Pat began working with other people and we spent less and less time together. He went to America for a while and eventually came back to England with a wife and two children. We have got back together and are working on some new songs.
I formed the band "Little Egypt" 14 years ago after just singing some sessions with some local musicians. They were doing some 'blues' covers and asked if I would sing some stuff. It felt good so we did more and more gigs.
"Little Egypt" lasted about six years, one or two people came and went from the line up.We got more adventurous with the covers we were playing and ended up covering all sorts of music. Rock, pop, funk, blues.
 It all stopped when I was approached to help Smokie after the death of our mutual friend Alan Barton. Barty used to come watch my band play when we were in the area. Everything was done in spare time - I had a full time job during the day working for Polygram records. I was with them 12 years promoting and marketing some great music. A&M, Polydor, Island and sub companies of the three were the labels I concentrated on so I was promoting people like Bryan Adams, Sting, The Police, U2, Falco, Chris de Burgh, Extreme, Sheryl Crowe, Boyzone and many many more. Too many to list.
In between all this I was asked many times to do some backing vocal sessions
alongside Alan Silson and Terry Uttley. We did many sessions together and became good friends. And so it startet.

Many Thanks to Mike for his review !!

 
Mike produced a song for the  "James Skillington Challenge for Leukaemia" - Fond. "Forever in my heart". The song is written by Tom Balaam and Mike Craft.

More information you'll find here !!