Rich Chancefrom the beginning

A childhood deeply rooted in the arts gave Richard an education no school could provide. His father was a well-respected singer, active through the sixties and seventies, working with incredible musicians including Buddy Rich, backed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and managed by Don Black. From being a toddler, Richard was exposed to studios, recording sessions, and stages.

With his mum working as a theatrical agent, Richard was also in and around the backstage and administrative world of show business from an early age. From answering phones to sorting concert riders and contracts, he understood people up and down the chain. He wrote his first press release before he was in high school.

All through Rich's childhood, neurodivergence and creativity were ever present – perhaps under different names back then. Rich was an underachiever at school. Couldn't concentrate, didn't listen, and preferred the rush of entertaining people and drawing comic strips for his classmates to retaining information about tectonic plates and the plague.

Spellbound by the film scores of John Williams – a Star Wars kid, for sure – and equally enamoured by the vinyl in the cabinet at home, mainly Billy Joel at that time, Rich began a lifelong love affair with melody and harmony. At fourteen he joined a band with his mates, and the journey into the industry took hold.

By his early teens Rich had already experienced more than most. He'd seen his dad sing on television when there were only three channels. At eight years old he'd met famous Australian soap stars on the way down their career ladders, making demands in pantomime dressing rooms. And through his sister he encountered some of the most creative minds in British comedy and improvisation. His mind buzzed with the possibilities of it all.

Around the time Rich entered his early teens, his parents moved from personal management of up-and-coming TV stars into show production – and Rich followed them into the family business at sixteen. He moved quickly from photocopying band charts and answering phones to building production tracks on a four-track cassette recorder.

At the same time he enrolled at Wigan and Leigh College on a performing arts course, studying recording and production alongside his passion for performance. It was a vibrant time – away from the square peg, round hole of school life, Rich found his tribe. Neurodivergent, creative, and finally in the right room.

He left college at seventeen for his first professional tour. And rather than starting small, he went out on the road with Shooting Stars – Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – on a national tour of 4,000-seat venues across the UK, playing Manchester Apollo, Liverpool Empire, Birmingham Indoor Arena, the Brighton Centre, and theatres and arenas across the country.

Rich cut his teeth fast. From the kid at the stage door helping the band carry flight cases, he rose through band member, musical director, director and eventually producer of what became regarded as the biggest theatrical tribute production in the UK for several decades – Legends.

The show was no small operation. It completed two national tours, two tours of New Zealand, and sold out multiple seasons at holiday resorts across the country. It played to royalty, to sitting prime ministers, in places as far flung as Dubai and the Seychelles, regularly at society events and for major corporations.

In his early twenties Rich had to have answers to everything – what should the lights do here, where are the dressing rooms, how are we getting to Barcelona, which chord belongs in which bar, does this costume look right? The pressure on young shoulders was immense, the training ground like no other.

Those years also gave Rich something less visible but equally profound. Deconstructing hundreds of songs by the world's most popular artists – crafting arrangements, shaping productions night after night – he was absorbing at a cellular level what made a great song great. Not just technically, but emotionally. What raised a roof. What created silence. How light and shade, dynamics, and the careful rolling menu of an evening's entertainment could captivate an audience and keep them there, wanting more.

People management, filtering harsh realities, the burden of leadership on a creative, scattered soul – it took its toll.

In his early twenties Rich was also lucky enough to begin working with his sister Bev in a remarkable improv troupe called The Suggestibles – made up of former Comedy Store Players and some of the brightest improv minds in the country. The Suggestibles created entire West End-style musicals on the spot, shows almost completely improvised, selling out week after week to clever, excited audiences hoping to catch them out.

Among the highlights was performing at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London on Shakespeare's birthday, as part of Ken Campbell's Shall We Shog? – an improvised contest between regional groups of improv performers. Rich took to the Globe's stage dressed as a monk, beatboxing and improvising entire Shakespearean musicals on a 90s Korg keyboard.

It was a huge creative release – and it taught Rich something essential about fear and flow in equal measure.

With the family business still consuming most of his bandwidth and his responsibilities growing, Rich felt an aching need to express himself in music on his own terms. He began exploring his own songwriting, collaborating over the next five years with various writers and performers – some from Fame Academy, some from Pop Idol.

But Rich's music was never pop in the true sense. His ear was bending toward the cinematic and the orchestral, the weird and the wonderful. And it would be in his late twenties that that sound would catch the attention of people working in the television industry.

Throughout all of this – from his late teens through to his debut album decades later – Rich was quietly writing. Songs accumulating in private, away from the stage and the screen. A creative inner life running parallel to everything else, largely hidden, shaped in part by an overwhelming stage fright as a singer that would eventually lead him to therapy. But that chapter comes later.

Because of his position as director and producer, Rich was featured at twenty-six in a Channel 4 documentary, coaching a well-known celebrity through a musical performance. It opened a door.

By 2011 he was scoring his first primetime TV shows – an eye-opening, exhilarating experience that demanded he learn fast. The machinations of musical storytelling for screen, delivery to picture, revisions, royalties, publishing, working within larger creative teams – all of it new territory. He had to learn to recapture flow and the will to write with almost no delay.

It led to dozens more composing projects for clients including the BBC, Sky Television, ITV, and production companies such as Tiger Aspect, Spun Gold and Two Four. Rich became the musical voice for successful returnable shows featuring above-the-line talent including Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, John Thomson, Simon Day, Bear Grylls, and many more.

In the huge excitement of the 2012 Olympics, Rich was tasked with writing a song for the volunteers – the Games Maker Choir. I Wish For You the World, written with Alistair Griffin, debuted on Radio 2 with Chris Evans, was briefly tipped at 3-1 by the bookies for the Christmas number one, and entered a chart race that Christmas against two extraordinarily worthy contenders – the Justice Collective's Hillsborough tribute and X Factor winner James Arthur.

A brief deal with Decca Records followed, along with some great TV performances, and a memorable chapter working at Angel Studios with Grammy-winning engineer Steve Price, directing the choir through the recording.

While his studio life flourished, another world began to open up. In 2015 Rich returned to his roots as a session musician – on keys and guitar – for a slew of records and production shows, including Cream Classical with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, which led to further orchestral crossover shows including Club Classical and Gatecrasher Classical.

He worked with various ensembles up and down the country in venues including Liverpool Cathedral and Brixton Academy – high-pressure shows involving ninety-minute scores weaving dance music and orchestral music together for thousands of people.

In the years that followed, Rich became a sought-after composer for TV, radio, streaming and private commissions, while also beginning to understand the challenges of parenting a neurodivergent child. Then in 2021 he began working with composers overseas on a stretch of feature films that would see him level up as a film composer, score coordinator and instrumentalist – working at the highest possible level with some of the most talented collaborators in the US film industry, including work on trailer music for tent-pole Hollywood productions.

Alongside this, his production music catalogue had quietly become something remarkable. Exceeding one billion streams, it had placed his music in some of the most prestigious broadcast contexts in the world, including the Country Music Awards and Jimmy Kimmel Live, cementing his reputation as one of the most in-demand production music writers working today.

But alongside these great successes, Rich's mental health faced multiple challenges. Trauma from the industrial warfare of running a major production show – competitors, court battles, years of sustained pressure. A life in leadership without the self-awareness or language surrounding his own neurodivergence. And the realisation that the system, including the school system, was failing his own child. It created a need to stop, reflect, and rethink.

Richard entered therapy. What followed was a period of profound personal excavation – from 2022 to 2025 – in which he would learn more about himself than in all the years that came before.

Therapy is a huge catchall of a word. Not all therapy suits all people. Not all therapy is good. Rich was lucky. At the time things began to fall apart for him mentally and emotionally, his incredibly supportive wife Leanne was training to become a psychotherapist. The modalities and theories she was learning were making everyone in the family more literate, more self-aware. When it came time for Rich to see a therapist, he found someone willing to dig into his trauma, his shame, and his inner child – and the deeper reasons why someone with so much outwardly obvious talent and success still believed they weren't worth anything, and should hide their own self-expression from the light.

He and Leanne began home educating their son. Rich began to understand his own boundaries, his own strengths, the architecture of his burnout, and the reasons so many side projects had fizzled. He came to understand that as an ADHD creative, self-deception can dress itself up as momentum. That people-pleasing is a toxin, not a kindness. That healthy boundaries and right intentions are quietly extraordinary things.

In 2024, in his mid-forties, Rich began to do the work that would lead to releasing his own material. He created a strange, beautiful fusion of cinema and pop, editing together his own music videos with his own visual vision. It caught fire – in the smallest way, receiving tens of thousands of views online – but more importantly it caught fire in the deepest, most meaningful way for Rich himself.

He put together a band, rehearsed them, led them to the stage. He played twice. Sold out twice. Received remarkable reviews.

Rich had no great intentions of becoming a pop star or an influencer. But this entire journey was a profound message back to his inner child – the kid in his teens who always knew he had something to say. It was a self-actualisation that changed him. Forever.

At the present time Rich divides his life between film projects, a brand new theatrical project (TBA), and working with a trusted number of coaching clients. He looks for interesting conversations with other creatives and performers – whether they are at the start of their story, the weird and wonderful middle, or the close of a chapter.

He has been that kid carrying flight cases. He has stood in the wings of the world's great stages. He has written for orchestras and scored for screens. He has sat in therapy and learned to cry. He has sold out his own show and sung his own songs to a room full of strangers.

He knows what it costs. And he knows what it's worth.