“I got friendly with a guy called David Klein, who was ‘International Tour Manager of the Year’ 2-3 years running in the magazine Pollstar. I'd been introduced to him a little while before and he sent me an email saying, “Hey, you know all the people in London - do you have a backline guy? I need a guitar tech to do a Brixton Academy show”. I was like, “Oh, yeah, I can help you with one of them. Don't worry about it”. What I didn't realise was that he’d sent it in the American date system and about four days later he called me up; “Yo, who's my guitar tech for tomorrow?” and I was like “f***, I'm shit at my life, why am I so bad at this? I'm going to have to do this, aren’t I…’ so I went and I was guitar tech for Tori Kelly for a week at Brixton, having no real clue what I was doing.
I got on really well with Tori and her dad who was the old production manager. He'd been with her since day one and grown up with it, and I hung out with my friend David a bunch. He then ended up working with Justin Bieber and Keisha [White] - pretty savage. When Tori came around last year, she’d just won a Grammy (now two Grammys), and she was everyone's sweetheart, like she's the best artist in the world, she's incredible. She released a gospel record. They were looking to tour it in the States and I got the call. We took a couple of buses out and went into these churches, a bunch of venues that people don't usually go to, and got to do a really interesting run. That was when we brought the Aston guys back in. A lot of what I do is Brixton to arena-level hip hop where there aren't a huge number of big microphones involved, we have 4 radio microphones, and that's basically the entire show.”