Who is Mike Wilbury?
Actually just a pseudonym …
because nobody in England could pronounce Michael Doering …
The Early Days
As a teenager I discovered the guitar and played whatever I liked. First came the Beatles, then nothing for a long time, then Supertramp. So I had to learn a little piano to keep up. That was my early singer/songwriter phase, in which I began to pour feelings into music.
The First Bands
During my apprenticeship at a music shop in Bielefeld, my colleague Thorsten Koehne showed me the ropes and demonstrated that you can do quite a lot more with electric guitars than I had previously imagined. I founded my first "proper" band and some original songs emerged that I can still actually remember decades later.
Since you generally couldn't make a living from your own music back then either, I spent several years touring the country with various Top-40 bands (Papermoon, Maraton …). Pretty much the entire repertoire of these bands later ended up as drum covers on Sina's YouTube channel.
Gibson & Epiphone Distribution
After completing a correspondence course, I had a proper job for a while at a large music instrument distributor in Marburg. I was assistant to the product manager, responsible for importing Gibson and Epiphone guitars — not uninteresting in itself — but I had to admit that I wasn't born for office life, and said yes (yeah..!) when my friend Johnny Silver called.
The Marburg interlude is the reason why Sina was born in Marburg.
The Silver Beatles
In the same year, 1999, I became part of the then young Beatles tribute band The Silver Beatles, and things got turbulent pretty quickly. With the Beatles musical She Loves You we played around 500 shows between 2000 and 2002 throughout Germany and parts of Austria and Switzerland. My stage role was "George, the quiet one". I also took care of the video technology for the shows.
Since we were spending more time in England than at home, I needed an English pseudonym. Since then I have used the name Mike Wilbury for my releases.
After almost exactly 10 years I left the band and devoted myself intensively to music production. My niche was the production of high-quality media introducing children to music. The collaboration with my British partner Ian Watts grew over the years, eventually developing into the Anglo-German musicians network ClassicRocks.
The ClassicRocks Musicians Network
The key to founding the ClassicRocks musicians portal was my collaboration with Ian Watts. Ian toured with the Silver Beatles on and off from 2002. For England, we conceived together with Johnny Silver the theatre show Come Together, which toured England in 2005. Ian helped me as a native English speaker in developing various concepts around the theme of "learning English for children through music".
He then had the idea of inviting all his musician friends to record English nursery rhymes properly — in different musical styles, with attitude and love. The result was the first Nursery Rhyme Collection, which was the best-selling English children's song album on Amazon UK for around two years.
Alongside Ian, Rick Benbow in particular shaped the sound of our portal. Rick is a gifted keyboard player, composer and arranger — he worked for bands such as Status Quo and toured as keyboard player with numerous internationally known tribute bands. He is well known to all Sina fans as the arranger and keyboard player on her original recordings. This also includes numerous covers we recorded with Jadyn Rylee.
Another colleague is folk musician and multi-instrumentalist Mat Williams. Together we recorded the folk album Full English. Later followed the first album by his daughter Briony Williams, which I produced together with Mat.
My work with the Lovac Brothers also falls around 2010. I wrote and produced their first album Teenage Queen — they were 11, 12 and 13 years old at the time. They were later signed by Peter Hoffmann (producer of Tokio Hotel) and released the album #wirsindhier for Sony Music under the band name 3A.
Sina Drums
When Sina started playing drums seriously at around 10 years old, her talent quickly became obvious. I very quickly brought her into my productions — she played drums on some of the Meisterwerke deutscher Lyrik, on Rap, Rock & Learn, on Mat Williams' folk album and all the drum parts on Briony's album.
In 2013 we decided to set up a YouTube channel for her: Sina-Drums. Between 2013 and 2023, building this channel was my main occupation. My early experiences as a Top-40 guitarist helped me select her classic rock covers. My time with the Silver Beatles gave me experience with Adobe Premiere and similar programmes — also useful.
All of Sina's recordings up to 2023 were essentially made in 8 square metres — but it worked somehow. With currently (2026) 1.9 million subscribers and more than 860 million views, Sina-Drums is one of the most internationally successful YouTube drum channels.
What Else?
All the areas I have mentioned above overlap in some way. Through the Silver Beatles I got to know Ian Watts and Rick Benbow — and somehow one thing led to another.
Although I had left the Silver Beatles in 2009, I stepped in as a stand-in from time to time. In 2016 I played another tour with the band, through which I got to know Uwe Müller, who had contributed some key compositions to Sina's channel. In 2017 Uwe and I played a tour with another Beatles tribute show.
Today I'm back playing all the Silver Beatles dates that come up — often again with Uwe Müller. I still help Sina with preparing old videos for new formats like TikTok. When Sina stepped in as "Ringo" with us in 2023 and one of Sina's most successful videos was "What makes Ringo a great drummer", the circle was complete.
I may well be releasing some new videos soon that are connected in some way to themes from the past. I still have hundreds of hours of previously unused recordings with Sina on old hard drives — there may yet be undiscovered material worth sharing.