After beginning his career as a studio engineer in Birmingham in the late 1980s, Richard moved to the Real World studios in Box, Wiltshire in the heart of the English countryside. During his three years there as an in-house engineer and producer, he worked on such albums as Peter Gabriel's Us and and met the Colombian singer Toto La Momposina at Real World - the initial catalyst in his first visit to Bogota.

During his extended Colombian adventure he learnt the language, immersed himself in the local music scene and took in the nightlife. "In retrospect the ideas that would came to fruition in Sidestepper were forming then, although I didn't realise it," he says now. "At the time I thought I was a
producer and engineer. I had no money and no plane ticket home so I started working in studios. Peter Gabriel was a very good calling card."

Among those the calling card gained him employment with were the vallenato superstar Carlos Vives and pioneering Colombian rockers Aterciopelados, for whom he produced key albums.

Eventually in 1996, he returned to Britain with the intention of continuing his career as a producer. Instead, armed with his new-found inside knowledge of Latin music and inspired by the sounds of drum 'n'bass he was hearing at clubs such as Goldie's Metalheadz , Sidestepper took shape as a
groundbreaking fusion of the two worlds.

"Classic 1970s salsa was the starting point," Richard says. "The early Sidestepper tracks were an electronic homage to that. The bass lines in salsa are fantastic - Latin music had been doing that way before James Brown and funk and it took Anglo-American musicians a long time to catch up."

Developing the Sidestepper sound, he spent the next six years commuting regularly between Chiswick and Bogota, before returning to live permanently in Colombia in 2003, when he took the decision to constitute Sidestepper as
a band. Since then he has also continued to work as a producer, both in Colombia and outside. Recent projects have included producing on album by the Cuban singer Raul Paz at the famous Egrem studios in Havana and mixing the forthcoming album from acclaimed Spanish globalistas, Amparanoia.

"I see my role as taking this music and showing it to the rest of the world," he says. "In return Colombia has given me a life education. The country gets a bad press and of course there are problems. But I've found it's also one of the happiest places in the world. They do people really well - there's empathy in spades and they're totally non judgemental in their attitude. And of course, there's the music..."