Carl Doy

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Carl Doy was born in Camberley, Surrey, England. At the age of six he fell in love with his grandmother's piano, and, through trial and error, plus a gift for playing by ear, he worked out how to play many of the popular songs of the day. Over the next ten years, he developed this talent, learning, unfortunately, many bad habits along the way. Two of his Grammar School music teachers, recognising his potential, gave him lessons, giving him the technique necessary to pass the Associated Board exams and also coached him for auditions at the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music. Their work, much valued and appreciated, paid off: at eighteen he won scholarships to both institutions. He chose the latter and studied piano, organ and composition there for two years, under Eric Harrison, Richard Latham and Herbert Howells.

Carl has worked with some of the biggest names in the music industry over the course of his career, including such luminaries as B.B. King, Shirley Bassey and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. Two years later, having achieved the highest possible grade for theory, he decided it was time for a change and joined the P&O Arcadia as resident pianist for a world cruise. He spent the next few years on various cruise ships, interspersing this with work in UK clubs and a six month stint in Greece and Turkey playing NATO bases.

In 1971, he was appointed Musical Director aboard the "Ocean Monarch", which was one of the first ships ever to have a full entertainment company aboard. Apart from conducting the orchestra, the job involved arranging new shows to add to the company's repertoire. After eighteen months of cruising in the Mediterranean and South Pacific, he and his wife, Kathy, decided it was time to leave the cruise ships and to settle down.

Moving to New Zealand in 1973, he very quickly established himself as a session pianist and arranger for Television New Zealand. For the next decade and a half he wrote literally thousands of arrangements for radio and television, finding time in between to arrange and play for such diverse occasions as the Royal Variety Performance, for HRH Queen Elizabeth II, and the Pope's Mass, which involved writing for two orchestras and a thousand voice choir. Also during that period, he played for and toured with a variety of visiting artists, including Shirley Bassey, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Seekers, Bob Hope, Rolf Harris, Dick Emery, The Four Aces, and Del Shannon. A full list of artists Carl has worked with is available here.

In the late seventies, Carl turned his hand to popular songwriting, finding success almost immediately with "Nothing But Dreams", which represented New Zealand at the Pacific Song Contest in 1979. The song, sung by Tina Cross, won the competition against eight other Pacific rim countries, including the USA, Canada, Australia and Japan. More success followed. He represented New Zealand again in many major international festivals, including the American Song Festival in Los Angeles, where he won the Open Section and the World Song Festival, also in Los Angeles, where he won the artistic prize.

In 1987, after a chance meeting with Murray Thom, ex head of CBS records, he and Murray decided to record a piano album. This became the first of the best selling Piano By Candlelight series, and it entered the charts at number one in its first week.

In 1992, Murray Thom licensed the first three albums to Time Life Music in America. The resulting 2-CD set became one of their best sellers ever, selling in excess of one million copies in the USA alone, and giving Carl the distinction of being the only New Zealand solo artist to have a certified platinum album in the USA. The albums have also sold in large quantities in most European countries, the Far East, South America and Canada.

Besides producing his own albums, Carl has also found time to arrange and produce many CDs for some of Australasia's most famous performers, perhaps the most notable of these being Derek Metzger, Rob Guest, Tina Cross and Sir Howard Morrison. He was also arranger and musical director of Kiri Te Kanawa's "Maori Songs", another platinum album. Dame Kiri sang his arrangement of "E Te Tarakihi" live from Gisborne in the first live broadcast of the New Millennium, to a television audience of over a hundred million people. Other production successes are the two Espresso Guitar albums, featuring Martin Winch. Carl arranged, produced and recorded these at his studio in Auckland's North Shore. Both were platinum sellers.

In 2000, Carl was commissioned to write the music for Buzz & Poppy, a 52-episode childrens' 3-D animated series. This is now showing in twenty countries and won Carl the award for best original music at the TV Guide TV Awards in 2002. For the first two years of the Millennium, his major project was to re-record the tracks that were on the first Candlelight albums. These were originally recorded using sampled instruments, as there was no budget for real instruments in those early years. Now they have been digitally re-recorded with members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and compiled into a ten CD set entitled "together". The production of this collection is one of the high points of Carl's thirty-five years as a professional musician.

Carl arranged and produced three more platinum-selling albums: Into The West (2005) and Montage(2006) for Russian singer YULIA, and ELIZABETH MARVELLY'S debut album, released in 2007. In 2004, he was appointed Musical Director for the first Television New Zealand season of "Dancing With The Stars", which, as in other countries, was the rating sensation of the year. Five series later, he has completed five series of the top-rating show.