You probably wouldn’t know it but since establishing the business in 1990, RHP has been the creative driving force behind some of the regions biggest events over the years. The beginning of this fantastic journey began some years earlier, quite literally by accident…

In the spring of 1984, at the age of 16, I had a bike accident that resulted in a four month stay in hospital and missing all my school exams. Although I didn’t know it at the time, this formative period sowed the seeds of a career in events and steered me away from being an electrical engineer. A guy I met in hospital asked if I would like to be a volunteer steward for the Mystery Plays in York’s Museum Gardens - I had nothing better to do, so why not? It was also the year that BBC Radio York first started broadcasting and I suddenly, rather unexpectedly, became interested in a career as a radio presenter. This came about because one of the presenters at Radio York (David Farwig) invited me to a cricket match that was taking place not far from where I lived. The Radio York team were playing a team from WP Browns department store and when I arrived they were a player down. I was on crutches, so obviously couldn’t field but apparently if they needed me to bat then I could have a runner. I played, we won and in celebration they invited me back to the studios and that was where I instantly fell in love with the idea of being a radio presenter - but how do you do that? I was invited to take a very formal ‘voice test’. Tony Fish was the Programme Organiser and he sat with three colleagues on the other side of the glass in the control room whilst I took my position in front of a microphone, presenting a news story, introducing a record and doing the weather. Tony informed me that I passed the voice test but there’s a problem he said - back then the BBC didn’t employ teenagers, so he suggested I take myself off to university and get into student radio there. I was just about to re-take my O levels, so university seemed a very long way off. Tony’s more instant solution was to instead try hospital radio - “tell them you are interested in sport or religion and you will get straight in” he said. A few weeks later I was a new, fresh-faced sports presenter at York Hospital Radio. Unlike many volunteer radio stations, this one was really professional, they had a fantastic studio facility and I spent all my spare time there. By 1997, at the age of 19, I became the youngest station manager in the UK. I helped raise funds for the station by doing mobile disco’s with one of the other presenters and loved getting involved in Outside Broadcasts, which gave me an interest in setting up equipment and laying cables. Again, I didn’t know it, but this was another foundation stone for the events career to come. On one of my shows I interviewed a local rock group - The Guard - who had just won a Battle Of The Bands competition. At the end of the interview they asked me if I would like to be their manager. I told them I didn’t have any experience about being the manager of a rock band but their reply was that they didn’t have any experience of having a manager - I couldn’t really argue with their logic and it sounded like a fun thing to do. This role tunred out to be far less glamorous than it seemed at first as it mainly meant driving the van and setting up the PA and lights - but looking back, it was this moment that was truly life changing - at the very first gig in charge I met the girl that would five years later become my wife and mother to my two children. In 1988 I got a job as a producer in a York based community recording studio, where my greatest claim to fame was to record the demo for a York band called Brockley Haven - those school boys became better known a few years later as Shed Seven! I was still interested in getting into professional broadcasting, so when an opportunity came up to be a freelance features writer for my local paper I thought this would be a valuable transferable skill. As the writer of the ‘Rock On’ column for The Yorkshire Evening Press I was invited to be a guest Rock DJ at GG Barnums nightclub. Those rock nights were great, playing tracks that I was really into and introducing live bands on stage. I continued working as a rock DJ in venues across the North for the next decade and cultivated a team of rock specialists into my first brand, Masters Of Rock.

After leaving The Old Dairy Studios, being a DJ was slowly turning from a hobby into a proper business, so in 1990, I decided I should make it official and set up a company - that was the birth of Rockin’ Horse Promotions…