His musical career began in 1978 playing bass guitar in Winchester band The Big Figure.
At Oxford he continued as a bass player and vocalist in Ron and His Beat Busters (under the name Miguel Horton) and Communist Alliance.
These outfits played a combination of cover versions and original material with new wave, R&B and rockabilly influences.
Momtchiloff was a founding member of the seminal twee pop bands Talulah Gosh, Heavenly,[1] and its later incarnation Marine Research.
In 2014, he devised a band called Tufthunter to record an album of his songs, each sung by a different singer.