William Johnston was born in 1953. He studied languages at Trinity College Cambridge and since then has had a varied career as (briefly) a peripatetic brass teacher then variously: unemployed, road sweeper and local government officer. He now works as a freelance counsellor, digital sound editor and part-time cleaner, while studying for a diploma in counselling at Brighton University.
A brief composing career through his teens and early twenties was abandoned in favour of writing poetry until, some nine years ago, he met someone with a large orchestral samples library and the skill to use it. This re-awakened his interest in composition.
He is entirely self-taught, writing in a style which he describes as “stuck somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century”, though this may be an unjustifiably severe self-judgement.