From Composer of a Cameron Mackintosh Musical in the West End, to a member of The Flying Pickets, to playing a drunken tramp in a Tom Robinson rock video (which he insists wasn't type-casting!), Hereward has worn many hats in his time, but never the one he was supposed to wear.

Hereward Hilken Swain Kaye, to give him his full moniker, was brought into this world in Middlesbrough in 1953, for the sole purpose of taking over the family business: Kayes Tools, established in 1827 and passed on remorselessly from father to son ever since. And so it might have happened, if The Beatles hadn’t come to town on November 22nd, 1963; the date when – less importantly – President Kennedy was assassinated.

Twisting and shouting in his seat in row J, flanked by two screaming, wailing big sisters, Hereward discovered exactly what he wanted to do for the rest of his life – and it didn’t involve Kayes Tools!

Hereward formed a band in London with Raphael Doyle and Tom Robinson, called CAFÉ SOCIETY. Whilst playing at The Troubadour in Earls Court, they were discovered by Ray Davies of The Kinks, who produced their debut album.

A single was released, a song of Hereward’s called ‘Whitby Two-Step’. It came out the same month as Chris Rea’s first single and sold six hundred copies, after Hereward’s mother went out and bought the last eight. Chris’s song: ‘Fool If You Think It’s Over’ did rather better. It went straight to Number One in America. Er…cancel that bet.

Café did what bands do best – broke up. Hereward and Tom went on to record for E.M.I., Tom with his band T.R.B. (and the hit single 2-4-6-8- Motorway), Hereward as a solo singer/songwriter. But despite the fact that he was now as close to being a Beatle as he would ever get, recording at Abbey Road and signed to their old label, global domination simply refused to follow.

Moby Dick went through a name change and expanded from pageant to full-on musical for its second incarnation, at a gay roller-disco in Clapham. A benefactor had donated a backdrop of Venice that simply had to be incorporated, and so, at the stroke of Robert’s pen, the spittoon-rattling sea dogs of Melville’s classic instantly transformed into the genteel ‘gels’ of Muriel Spark’s Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, arriving in Piazza St. Marco singing Hereward’s hastily concocted school hymn and preparing to perform – MOBY DICK IN VENICE!

A third production followed, on a Swedish grain carrier moored in Bristol. But the backdrop wouldn’t fit and so Venice was ditched, though not the school uniforms. Miss Brodie’s ‘crème de la crème’ transmogrified into the hellish belles of St. Trinians. Thus was born the show that Cameron Mackintosh - eight years later - bought and took into the West End.

In 2003 Hereward helped re-vamp Moby Dick for the U.S. market in conjunction with Cameron Mackintosh and Russell Ochocki, via a workshop production in New York and a new cast album to accompany the hire script (available from www.mtishows.com).

SEX, CHIPS AND ROCK ‘N ROLL by Debbie Horsfield (Creator of T.V.’s ‘Cutting It’ and ‘Making Out’), set in the Sixties and based on Debbie’s award-winning BBC TV series. With Hereward on guitar in the band, the show ran through June, July and August of this year at the Manchester Royal Exchange, having opened to excellent reviews. More productions are planned for 2006, and it was nominated Best Musical in the T.M.A. Awards 2005, with one of the cast, Coronation Street’s Tracie Bennett, winning the award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical.