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"If ever a man can put musician in his passport, it's Dominic Finley"
BERWICK AND BORDERS GAZETTE
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. His first solo CD
‘Avalon’ is out now.
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. .
Steve Wilcock, Summer 2008 |

Dominic, performing with
‘Cutting Crew’ on the legendary European
music show ‘Rockpalast’ 2007 |
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Dominic, working solo 2008 |
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