Tony Mckenzie - Get to know him

Tony Mckenzie started life in music after visiting the last great music festivals in the UK at the end of the 60’s. He often went to see live bands, many now legends in their own right such as Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, Queen, Charlie, Ten Years After, Rory Gallagher, Gary Moore, Santana and a host of others way too long to mention here.

At school Tony Mckenzie had little interest in music – Tony did make it in to the music classes but was later thrown out of the music class for fraternizing with the girls (what other reason is there?). But in the times when he started his first job, the Beatles were gods, and others were all to follow. Then Hendrix and Santana came along. That spirit found in those and the other bands rubbed off on to Tony and the road was set for many years to follow.
 
Through the 70’s Tony Mckenzie was a member of many different bands and honed his guitar skills through long hours of practice, but when the 80’s arrived and music focused on electric guitar, Tony was at the front of the queue to hone those skills even further, while at the same time working in his day job in the early days of the IT Industry in different places around the world.

Music, however, was always his first love and as time progressed, he developed his song writing skills, with influences right across the music scene, but primarily guitar based music.

Since those early days Tony has continued to develop his style of guitar, which in the early part of the 21st Century is instrumental rock. But that has moved on a little these days.

Tony Mckenzie had worked with Alan Bruce on an earlier album called ‘Eniac’, an instrumental thing from 2007 which did not really achieve the recognition it deserved for many reasons, basically locked in the depressive world of the music business of the 21st Century - it can be a really depressing place and people get ripped off these days just as they did in the 60's, 70's and subsequently.

Later Tony Mckenzie completed the technicalities for an album based on the ‘Jack the Ripper’ scenario. While the ‘Jack’ theme has been covered before, nowhere have you seen this idea extended to buying the CD. 'Berner Street' has some really good music on there and as you might imagine for a subject like Jack the ripper the music is heavy some of the time. But there was blues, progressive, rock and metal throughout that album. Berner Street was completed in 2008.

Gravity Waves concept first appeared in 2012 but as you will read was delayed.

The Gravity Waves album was completed in July 2016 with Alan Bruce, who wrote lyrics, played Bass Guitar and contributed to the album with some of his own music notably 'Al's Blues' and co-writing on 'God Particle' which in reality is a live recording. This album was released by Tony's own record company ‘Bigdan Records Inc.’ worldwide on August 29th 2016 and published by CDbaby in the USA for mainly audiences around the world. It's also available from CDbaby and the regular crowd such as iTunes and Amazon and many others. Tony decided NOT to release this album to streaming companies because of the incredibly poor payments that those companies offer while at the same time often 'fleecing' their customers for between $10 and $15 per month.

This entire release is self financed by Tony McKenzie’s own money with Bigdan Records Inc. The other associated things Tony worked on for this album included website design www.gravitywavescd.com which is where you are right now.

Gravity Waves is a collation of music that was to be released in 2014 but fate stepped in and decided to stop that happening. Tony suffered from prostate cancer but after an early diagnosis in September 2013 and operation in May 2014 Tony was cured. Suffice to say that it took some time for Tony to recover and the end result is Gravity Waves so in total that album has taken four years to make and complete. We sincerely hope you will like some of it.

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Of course that's not all Tony does... he has a YouTube channel where he regularly reviews music equipment in a totally unbiased way. He even goes and buys the gear under review in exactly the same way you might yourself, checks it out just as an ordinary user would and tells it the way it really is. On the way Tony will often strip the gear down, go in to finer details and generally offer a score at the end of the review before often playing what he has just reviewed so you get a good all-round review. No manufacturers bluffing there! Visit his YouTube channel.

Tony also has a website at www.tonymckenzie.com where there are also loads of reviews and other useful stuff for musicians as well as his guitar and amplifier collections on show.