4. Mikey Grant

Mikey Grant is a session keyboard player and composer who’s surpassed 1000 gigs over the last 37 years. He’s played with dozens of different bands (including the amazingly-named Pete Loaf), in every imaginable setting. He composes his own music and gets huge joy from the creative process. The support of Mikey’s music-loving dad has encouraged him to keep learning new musical skills, and his multi-talented grandfather (draughtsman, jazz band leader, music promoter and journalist) is a constant source of inspiration.

Mikey explains how he writes music because he wants to hear the “beautiful noise”. He tells me what it’s like to be at work delivering mail on Scottish streets when his head is full of his latest romantically classical composition. We chat excitedly about the phenomenon of street pianos and our shared experience as participants on Channel 4’s The Piano, before moving onto Mikey’s childhood discovery of The Entertainer via his grandad’s Starship piano, and his school-years habit of playing piano at surprise parties for teachers in the gym hall.

Note for the eagle-eared confused, on behalf of my menopausal brain: Emerson, Lake and Palmer did not write Big Bubbles, No Trouble. That was Ellis, Beggs and Howard. D’oh. 

This episode includes a recording of Quadrilogy Part 1, Mikey's original piece, described by him as "Part one of a four part quadrilogy, completely inspired by the people who I met on The Piano."

Photos of Mikey taken by Vroni Holzmann, Ally Fogg and Clare Sudbery.

The theme music is a live street piano recording of a duet between Anthony Thomas and Kai Henry (@KaiStreetPiano).

A full transcript for this episode is available on Buzzsprout and most other podcast platforms.

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