In the mid 90’s at the start of the Brit-Pop era, a 14 year old Derek McMillan and his friend Craig Connell developed an obsession for music and songwriting.  Together they spent all their time learning their craft for songwriting from many song books with the band of choice being mainly The Beatles.

From here Derek and Craig their first band with friends later became Exitpilot.  Writing songs together they enjoyed success in winning a battle of the bands competition at the Live at Loch Winnoch with bands coming from all over Scotland to enter.  They later recorded an E.P. at Central Sound Studios in Glasgow with Kevin Burleigh (currently front of house engineer for Glasvegas).  Kevin spotted Derek’s songwriting ability when playing some of his own compositions in the studio and suggested he should record some of his own material as a side project from the band.  Exitpilot enjoyed a reasonable level of success playing around the UK.  It was in London where they met their manager Martin Hanlin (formerly of The Silencers).  Through this they gained airplay on local radio stations, played countless gigs including T in the Park heats in Glasgow’s King Tut’s, The Barfly and The ABC, whilst also having their song “Circles Cycles Braincells” synced with EA Sport’s FIFA Manager 2006.

Derek felt a change was needed and made the decision to leave Exitpilot to concentrate on developing his own songwriting career, but soon after leaving, Kevin Burleigh got in touch and persuaded him to join a band he was working with.  Trap 6 had just signed a deal with Hungry Kid Records to release their single “The Cycle” but were looking for a new guitarist to play their newly recorded material.  Through this they embarked on a small UK tour and recorded more material with Kevin Burleigh at Central.  Derek played in Trap 6 for 5 years and enjoyed many musical highs including playing the Live at Loch Lomond festival with other acts including Feeder and Dirty Pretty Things.  They also had their song “Love Is War” synced with Sky Sports coverage of the Cricket World Cup.

All the time whilst playing in both Exitpilot and Trap 6, Derek was writing and developing his own songwriting, incorporating and learning from the different genres and musical experiences.  Derek decided after 12 years of playing in bands and performing either partial written or other songwriter’s songs, that it was finally time to concentrate solely on his own songwriting career.  He left Trap 6, bought some home studio equipment and recorded some of his own hook based melodic pop songs.  He then uploaded some songs to an old myspace page he had under the pseudo name Code Red Songs, which came from an old nickname his friend Craig’s brother had for him “Red”.