Biography Simon Rogers

Simon Rogers studied at the Royal College of Music, London, between 1976 and 1980, gaining the ARCM and winning the guitar prize in 1980. On leaving the College he joined Ballet Rambert’s Mercury Ensemble as a guitarist, playing in many of their productions. During this period he composed several ballet scores, including Entre Dos Aguas and Fabrications for London Contemporary Dance Theatre; and while at Rambert he also co-founded the South American folk music group Incantation, which enjoyed a number of hit singles and albums during the early 1980s. In 1985 Simon left both Rambert and Incantation and joined Mark E Smith’s The Fall, playing bass, guitar and keyboards. He produced their 1987 album The Frenz Experiment as well as subsequent Fall projects.

Simon first began to compose for television during his time at Rambert. He worked on several BBC TV dramas, including The Old Men at the Zoo (1982) and Much Ado About Nothing (1983). Other credits include Naming the Names (1986), The Rainbow (1986) and two American TV movies, Daddy (1987) and The Preppy Murder (1989) for ABC.

In the 1990s Simon’s career developed in a different direction, taking him away from television work. He moved into pop production, beginning a long association with The Lightning Seeds, for whom he produced the albums Sense, Jollification, Dizzy Heights and Tilt as well as the infamous 3 Lions. Throughout the ‘90s he was also deeply involved with underground dance music, working on numerous remixes and hit singles under the names RAMP and Slacker, and co-writing Generations of Love and Everything Starts with an E, amongst other songs, with Boy George. More recently he has been developing his own projects Leuroj and T-Era for the Skint/Loaded labels, and Steiger for John Digweed’s Bedrock label. Simon has also signed his Lautrec project to Planet Funk’s Bustin’ Loose label, featuring vocals from Terry Hall and London MC Cantankerous.

Company Television’s 2003 series 40 (starring Eddie Izzard and Kerry Fox) for Channel 4, marked Simon’s return to television drama, with a score that attracted very considerable attention, both from the public and within the industry. Offers of work to work on other productions followed very swiftly after the first broadcast of the series. Recent credits include the Tony Grounds-scripted 6-part drama Family Business (Tiger Aspect for BBC1), the title music for Hustle (Kudos/Spooks Ltd for BBC1), and Carlton’s 6-part drama about life in the navy, Making Waves.

Simon’s latest drama score is for Beneath the Skin, a psychological drama for ITV. Alongside Simon's media composing, he has also recently completed production and writing on an album with the London MC Cantankerous, due out in January on TommyBoy in the US. Simon's alter-ego 'Steiger' will also be releasing 'Cha Cha' in October on Jukebox In The Sky.

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