Paul Cromford is an English composer, songwriter, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and singer, based in Leek, Staffordshire. His output ranges from old-school singer-songwriter material to experimental soundscapes.  

The first five decades of his life were spent absorbing music from radio, records & gigs, while quietly studying irrelevant topics at school & college, or doing many different jobs to make money for other people. Finally, in around 2008, he decided he'd had enough of that and began giving priority to his own creative impulses.  

Since then, he has:   

played hundreds of gigs up and down Britain, mostly with his wife Carole, sometimes alone, a few times with a band around him;  

written (or polished up) & recorded hundreds of songs, instrumental pieces and experiments;  

masterminded a sell-out series of musical shows at Buxton's Festival Fringe in 2013;  

recorded & mastered an 'official' concept album in 2014, which was released and acclaimed in 2015;  

devised an ambient soundscape to accompany the grand switch-on of Buxton's Christmas lights in 2015;  

had a stab at writing and scoring a large-scale orchestral work in 2016, a cyclic symphony in four movements;  

developed and recorded (between 2012 and 2016) a series of radical re-arrangements of many of Burt Bacharach's best-known tunes;  

premiered a new show of live, pared-down acoustic performances entitled 'Paul Cromford's Vanity Set', in the spring of 2018.  

written and performed another new show entitled "The Ancient Pull" which explores our relationship with the moon, and which garnered a nomination for Best New Writing at Buxton's 2019 Festival Fringe.

completed a new collection of recordings --- studio-rendered versions of his Vanity Set songs (described above).

What's next for Paul? He and his wife recently performed a revised, expanded version of  "The Ancient Pull" in Cheadle, Staffs (commemorating the achievements of local astronomer Mary Adela Blagg), and there are plans afoot to mount the show in as many venues as can be cajoled into hosting it.