Grant began taking classical piano lessons at the age of ten, however, the music that permeated the family home was everything from Chopin to Gordon Lightfoot, from Liszt to Leslie Gore and from Beethoven to Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Fats Waller. It wasn’t unusual to come home from school to hear his mother running the old vacuum around the shag rug while Johann Strauss blared from the Hi-fi at full volume, or to hear Glen Miller swinging out our front door and down the street.

Sunday dinners were spent together with both sets of grandparents at the dinner table and would always end with one grandmother sitting down at the piano and regaling us all with songs from the pubs of Sheffield, or the other grandmother playing us songs from Tin Pan Alley. Music was always the heartbeat of the Simpson home and that cacophony of music he grew up with has allowed him to create a career that renders him virtually unemployable in any other walk of life.