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For the last decade and a half
Dominic Finley has successfully adapted to various
different styles of music. He has moved though
Brit-pop, Motown and jazz, to more recently doing
session work and playing progressive rock with
Combination Head and classic pop-rock with the
recently reformed Cutting Crew. Currently he is
working on his first solo album which is due out at
the end of 2008.
As a teenager Dominic served his
musical apprenticeship in the international six
piece show band LA Tour where he played electric
bass and spent six months working in major hotels
across Asia. At this time he also started to play
upright bass and make his first forays into jazz.
Returning to the UK in 1996
he joined critically acclaimed Liverpool Brit Pop/Motown-style
band The Transparents. Over the next three years the
band recorded their debut EP and toured with bands
such as Dodgy, The Real People, Travis, The Long
Pigs, Shed Seven, Baby Bird, Cast, Heavy Stereo and
others.
After the band broke up in 1999,
Dominic, now playing double bass, formed a trio with
Colin James on piano and the highly regarded young
drummer, Ronny Lessard to play the worldwide cruise
liners operating out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Returning again to the UK Dominic formed an
eponymous jazz trio and worked and recorded as a
bassist with the Jim Diamond Band. He continued to
take on session work as a bassist, including playing
electric bass on recent releases for We Deliver
(formerly K-Klass), but has also branched out into
writing tutorial books. So far he has had two books
published: Secrets of a Professional Bass Player the
revised version of which includes extra chapters and
a foreword by legendary bassist, Herbie Flowers and
Groundwork for Bass.
The last
two years have probably been the busiest in
Dominic’s career so far. In 2005 he joined original
singer/writer Nick van Eede in a reformed version of
the Grammy nominated/multi-million sellers Cutting
Crew. The rest of the band consists of Sam Flynn
(keyboards), Gareth Moulton (guitar) and Tom Arnold
(drums). The band has toured heavily playing in the
US, Canada, Europe and the UK and some of Dominic’s
personal highlights included playing legendary
German TV Show Rockpalast, as well as performing
alongside such famous names as Supertramp, Robin
Gibb, Midge Ure and Howard Jones. The band is
currently working on a new project and Dominic
potentially has a couple of co-writes on the
forthcoming album. The other major group project
Dominic has been involved with is his collaboration
with esteemed producer and keyboard wizard Paul
Birchall and fellow Cutting Crew member Gareth
Moulton in the prog-rock, Yes/ELP-inspired band,
Combination Head. They have just completed
“Progress” the follow-up to their acclaimed debut
album and are now in pre-production for their new
live show.
To top
off a few busy years Dominic has started working on
developing a solo career as a singer-songwriter in
parallel with his group work. Recently he has struck
a rich vein of songwriting and has already written
more than an album’s worth of new songs and is using
whatever free time he can reserve in his busy
schedule to record them. He hopes to have the album
finished some time in 2008, but in the mean time is
playing occasional gigs to polish the songs in a
live setting and is posting some of the work in
progress on his
MySpace site.
Steve Wilcock, Autumn 2007 |