A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
a1
Birthplace:
Worcester Park, London, England, United Kingdom
Born:
November 7, 1978
Read grew up in a very musical family; his father Keith was in The Wild Angels, a rock 'n' roll band. His mother, Pam, played piano and drums as well as being a singer/songwriter. Read began playing piano at the age of 2 and eventually joined the family band on keyboards at the age of 11, where he would regularly perform in pubs, clubs and hotels across the country. He attended Auriol Junior School and then went on to Epsom and Ewell High School. At the age of 15, Read joined the Songtime Theatre Arts group, where he received training and gained experience in acting. He subsequently took lead roles in several of their productions, including Guys and Dolls and Aladdin. Between the ages of 15 and 18, Read – along with his parents' band – performed onboard several P&O and Princess cruise ships. These concerts led took him all around the world, including aboard the liner Canberra as part of the D-Day 50th Anniversary Fleet in 1994. In 2009, he performed A1's hit version of the A-ha song "Take on Me" at Saint Edmund's Catholic School in Dover, Kent And Also The Astor of Hever Community School in Maidstone, Kent
Songs:
2000 A1 - In the Picture
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.