biography

John Dutton is a British composer specialising in film and television scores.
His earliest musical experiences were playing along to records as a four year old, which encouraged his parents to send him for piano lessons. From an early stage he was improvising and composing music, and he soon took up the violin as well, winning a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music when he was twelve.

He completed his musical education as a composition and piano student at Trinity College of Music, London. Experiments with an old synthesizer at college spurred him on to save up and buy his own studio equipment and he started to integrate electronic sounds into his work. This broadened his approach to composition, where dynamics, emotion and risk taking were the stand out features.

After graduating from college he was signed to Acid Jazz records (pka The Apostles) releasing several albums as original artist on the label including The Apostles, Mo Jazz and the Totally Wired series.

Moving to focus on composing, producing and arranging, he composed several works which would lead to commissions for film and television scores, ranging from the BBC Trench series, short films including the award winning Roy’s Addiction, thumping orchestral scores for mini-films Spartacus and Richard the Lionheart in the BBC Heroes and Villains drama series and the WGBH Nova series for US television. The scores for Spartacus and Richard the Lionheart led to a submission by the BBC for the 2009 Ivor Novello awards.

In the early part of his career he was also in demand as a session keyboard player and producer, working with artists as diverse as Junior Walker, Mary Wells, Boy George, Imagination, Kim Wilde, Joe Brown, the Brand New Heavies and the James Taylor Quartet.