Phil Ryan (entrepreneur)

Phil Ryan (right) and John Bird at The Big Issue office in Richmond in 1990

Phil Ryan is an English musician, writer and entrepreneur. He has toured with The Animals and is co-founder of The Big Issue and The 12 Bar Club.

Music

Ryan started his musical career as a session guitarist, recording with various well known artists and headlining at festivals all across England throughout the 1980s. The early 1990s saw him touring Europe and the United States, with performances in Stockholm, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Barcelona, Munich, Nuremberg and Berlin, among others. In 1992, Ryan joined The Animals as lead singer and performed with them at the 'Children of Chernobyl' benefit concert in Moscow's Red Square in front of an audience of 100,000.^[1] In 2001, he recorded his first solo album, Storm Warning, and toured European festivals, such as the Bardentreffen in Nuremberg, Germany, with it. He contributed the charity single "Thanks for loving me" to the Jack Brown Appeal.^[2] Ryan is a featured artist at Rooftop Records where he mentors aspiring musicians.^[3] He has published various novels and continued his musical career. Since 2015 he has been involved in the Save TPA Campaign group trying to protect the historic Musical and historical heritage soaked Denmark Street in London's West End street from complete destruction and re-development into Luxury Flats and shops. He is supporting the filming of a Documentary to try and capture its history and stories before it is gone forever. In 2016 he has been recording and filming a new collection of songs for release in 2016/17 and planning live performances across the UK and Europe in 2016/17. His website at philryanmusic allows access to his current musical projects. He is currently performing at London wide venues.

Business

Ryan was a co-founder of The Big Issue, a magazine written by professional journalists and sold by homeless people.^[4] Ryan was taken on in the early stages of the magazine's creation by John Bird, who founded the project with Gordon Roddick.^[5][6][7] In September 1994 Ryan started the 12 Bar Club with Lars Ericson. The music venue is located in central London and featured performances by artists such as Nick Harper and Boo Hewerdine as part of Ryan's music policy. The 12 Bar Club was awarded Live music Venue of the Year '95/'96 by Time Out magazine. Ryan also runs Storm Books, an online publishing platform set up in 2010 that intends to make the work of up and coming writers available to a wider audience.^[8]

Stage

Ryan also turned his hand to theatre: his first stage play, The Blessed was performed at Theatro Technis, Camden, London in 1989. His musical adaptation of George Eliot's novel Silas Marner premiered in London in 2000, also at the Theatro Technis. The Arts Theatre was the venue for The Phil Ryan Show, a show that featured selected acoustic musicians and singer songwriters including Peter Conway, Art Fazil, Evi Vine, Baby Sol, Dean Dyson and Chris Newland, which Ryan launched in 2007.^[9] In the following year Ryan wrote a song for And Then They Came for Me, an award-winning play which charts the lives of two of Anne Frank's friends who survived the Holocaust. Ryan himself has featured in John Bird's two-man show The Naked Bird, a critically acclaimed piece that has been performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2008 and most recently at the Theatro Technis in London in May 2013.^[10]

References

External links

• Ryan's online publishing platform Storm Books
• The Phil Ryan Band
• The Big Issue
• The 12 Bar Club