Rachel Hayward as been hailed as "Europe's Top Pan Woman" due to her unique achievements as a pan - player.

Rachel started playing pan over twenty years ago with the highly successful school steel band - The Radcliffe Rollers, where she was encouraged and inspired by her teachers Richard Murphy and Neil Davison and tuner Michael "Natsy" Contant to create her first arrangements and compositions for solo and ensemble steel pans.

After leaving school she continued her classical conservatoire training at the Guildhall School of Music And Drama and she holds an MA (music performance) from the City University, London, where she is currently researching towards a doctorate in steel pan. For the last thirteen years she has focused exclusively on pan. Her unparalled credentials include winning the UK Soloists Competition, and performing throughout Europe and the Caribbean, most notably in Trinidad (the birthplace of steelpan) when she was the first, and to date, only, Briton to compete in the World Steelband Soloists Competition 1996 and was placed fourth overall.

She has since performed with such prestigious emsembles as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta. Media credits include Meridian TV's "Three Minutes", "Woman's Hour " and Dave Gorman's "Genius" (BBC Radio 4). She was a featured soloist on the contemporary music series "Hear And Now" and "Music Matters" (Radio 3). She has played with top British and Trinidadian steel orchestras, including Starlift and Hummingbirds Pan Groove, in the London and Trinidad Panoramas, and she was the first European pannist to arrange for and conduct a top Trinidadian steel orchestra - The Skiffle Bunch - in their "Feeling the Classics" concert series. She arranged for Eclipse Steel Orchestra (London) - they played her arrangement of excerpts from Khatchaturian's Masquerade Suite at the First European Steelband Festival in Paris 2000.

Rachel's latest CD, Priestess of Pan is now available to buy via this website.

She lives in Brighton with her husband, author Robert Rankin.