Who?
Derek T Booth is a singer songwriter and the Redeemers are his jolly band of merry peeps who help him sail the musical ship. After many years of being a broke musician Derek took the opportunity to run a company and experience the joys of having money to play with. Eventually that became old hat and he had accumulated enough songs to put out several albums, so he turned back to making music! Right now he is working on not one, not two, but FOUR albums simultaneously! So watch this space for a lot of music to come!
Derek is from the old school of songwriting with the music being a back-up or support to the poetic message in the songs.
“It’s very important for me that the songs stand alone with maybe only a guitar or piano accompaniment. It will very quickly become obvious to you that there is a lot more to these songs than just simple entertainment. I feel the only other artist that ever wrote a philosophically drenched album was David Bowie with Hunky Dory. So if you understand that album, I think you will get something out of my collection of songs. It is not that I want to preach to anybody, I just want to share the higher concepts than just the beauty of life, such things beyond the physicality and reaching out to higher states of awareness.”
-THE STORY SO FAR-
At the tender age of three Derek had a fascination with a pen and a blank piece of paper, and this was the first start into the world of writing poetry.
But it was only at the age of seventeen that he finally started out as a poet when he discovered Bob Dylan while in a borstal for juvenile delinquents. He took a music class and learned to play guitar. He became a singer songwriter by default – he never thought he could sing! He liked the guitar so much he stole it when he got released…
“I spent the next three to four years writing songs and messing around in my bedroom. At least I inspired my probation officer who wrote a play based around my life story! He was always writing plays and one of them was a contemporary Greek mythological musical. He wanted me to write songs, perform them and teach actors to sing them. To this day I am often accused of being theatrical, maybe this is where it comes from.” The singers did not always get it right so Derek did it himself, playing guitar and singing from the pit.
It was this performance that started Derek messing around in bands and gigging for more years than he can remember.
Derek T Booth
“In my early 20’s, one day I was staring out the window at snowy England and a branch, heavy with snow, snapped. That was the moment I decided to go to America..”
“I spent most of the 80’s in Los Angeles being a New Romantic, always in and out of one or another record or movie deal which I found I couldn’t be bothered with.”
“Then I went to Canada and made some videos with my then right-hand man, Alex Caplin. After a while David Bowie’s management got in touch and were really interested in what we were doing.”
“I said, let me think about it… okay. That’s why I came home to England. But as ever it all fizzled out.. and shortly after I just gave up. I was really old by then, a whole 37 years old! A friend called and asked me to run his business for a couple of weeks, so I did and ended up running it for years. For the first time I had real money, I liked the money so I carried on with the business.
“After years of chasing and trying to write hit songs I decided to just create music as a work of art and make the music I would like to hear.”
-ALMOST LIVE IN NASHVILLE and beyond-
“I started accumulating 20-something-year old friends, among them Simon Taffe who thought it wasn’t good enough that I wasn’t doing my music. He sent me back to the US to Nashville to record an album and invited me to play the End of the Road Festival in southern England. And that got me back on the music treadmill.”
Some more years went by and Almost Live in Nashville and a new album SAY Something! are out there. Go listen to them and if you like please buy and keep Derek producing!
Derek is currently working on several new albums, catching up the back-log of the past 35 years of unrecorded material plus new songs that want to be heard too.
