So you want to know more about me? Let’s start at the beginning…

I was born ‘Dane Ashley Bygrave‘ at Good Hope Hospital in Staffordshire on June 11th, 1989. I spent the early years of my life reading Horrible Histories and Goosebumps books, playing SNES and watching my dad’s band perform at pubs on the weekend.

When I was six, my parents divorced and I started travelling between their houses, an irritating but necessary disruption to everyday life which continued until my dad kicked me out when I was at sixth form. He offered to teach me to play guitar when I was young (I also briefly owned a drum kit), but I didn’t pick it up properly until I was fourteen. At this point, he just taught me to read guitar tab and I taught myself from there.

At secondary school, I was in a number of short-lived bands with Rory Buckley, Sam Buckley and Daniel Sansome – we played covers of bands like Blur, Jet and The Hives and had dodgy names like Purple Dinosaur and Fibreglass Time-Bed. I also took up writing – I’d been writing songs since the age of seven, but I was now able to add music to the lyrics and melodies. I also began to dabble with poetry.

Young Dane was in to music, too

I dropped out of sixth form after a couple of months and took a year out, enrolling at college the following September. I began to study a BTEC in Computing (eventually earning a DDM), a subject I’d had an interest in since a young age. When my half-sister was at university, I used to help her write batch files in MS-DOS. I would have been 8-10-years-old at the time. I also did some freelance work as a PHP coder for web forum owners and became an active member of PHPBBHacks.com, submitting several ‘hacks’.

While I was at college, I started keeping a journal and finished work on my first novel, Annie. I also brushed up on the computing skills that would be needed at Sociabull, though I didn’t know it at the time. While I was at college, I legally changed my name to ‘Dane John Cobain‘. I initially planned to study Web Development at Manchester Metropolitan University, but a change of plan led me to study Creative Writing at Roehampton.

That was where I really began to develop as a musician and a writer, releasing three books based on my studies, a screenplay and a novella. I also started performing at the student open mic night and played at my first gigs in Central London. I also worked as an intern for Virtual Festivals, all of which prepared me for when I stepped out in the real world.

Which is where I am now! I currently work as a Social Media Executive for Sociabull, the social media division of a Public Relations company. There, all of my talents are pulled together in to a job that I love, and I also have the freedom to pursue my career as a writer and musician, as well as a web geek. Life couldn’t be better!

Outside Sociabull HQ in Wooburn Green, Buckinghamshire