Martish

Martin was born and brought up in Greater Manchester, England. He has spent most of his music career based in the North West, latterly working in both Manchester and Liverpool. For the last 20 years he has worked as a guitarist, singer and song writer, fronting his own bands, writing and performing his own songs. He is an all rounder having worked as a DJ, promoter, manager, sound engineer and producer.

Martin combines a professional career with an academic one as Head of Music at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. He studied music at Salford University completing an MA in Compositional Studies after his BA (Hons) in Band Musicianship when he was the first student in the country to complete a degree specialising in songwriting and sound recording.

He began to write songs for other performers recently, and has had songs placed in the final stages of the Song for Europe competition 3 times since Song for Europe 2000.

After winning the UK “Song for Europe competition 2003 Martin’s song “Cry baby” went on to represent the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest in Latvia. The performance by Jemini gained the dubious honour of coming last and scoring the UK’s first “nul point”.

“Cry baby” went straight in to the UK charts at number 15, which ironically, in terms of chart position, makes it one of the UK’s most successful Eurovision entries.

As well as writing pop Martin writes hard hitting, passionate power pop songs for his own band.

2006 saw the premier at LIPA of a suite of songs for Big Band ( September - December) performed by the Leeds College of Music Big band.

2007 also saw the receipt of an Honor Award in the 2006 Great American Songwriting Contest Country section for "Just Say Goodbye"

www.myspace.com/martinisherwood