So I am coming to the end of finishing my second book, Creative Spheres, and as well as the relief and excitement there is also a slight feeling of loss. The work is done. Now, though, comes the tricky task of finding a publisher. Who will release a book that crosses academic and commercial arenas? It is the next mission, to find the place in the world for my latest baby. Here are the chapters…
So its 2024, another year over, another year starts, but really its just another day, sunrise, do stuff, sunset. The mid winter break (if you get one) allows the chance to rset, to think about those things which you want to concentrate on, to change old habits, bring in new ideas, start afresh from a Blank Canvas (™). I am lucky in that I am happy with my life so my main wish is for continued health and happiness, some resolution to world conflicts, action towards halting climate change, a Labour government, new patio (not like Fred/ Rose), the chance to go to conferences in Copenhagen, Philly and Porto, travel to Vietnam, see more of my kids and be just a little bit more famous.
New Years Day started well on my mission, with the Lyme Lunge, a beautiful site of 1200 people in fancy dress dipping into the ice cold water of Lyme Regis, Dorset. The local press loved taking pictures of friend Steve and myself, our outfit garnished with 2024 futuristic glasses. An easy image to summarise the new year. So far this year I am having an article written about my first book (Blank Canvas), have had some music played on Radio Wigwam and have finalised some amazing acts for the Sidmouth International Jazz and Blues festival. Exciting times ahead. I hope everyone has had a great start to the year, enjoy the increasing amount of daylight and the opportunities a new dawn brings.
Ok ok so it’s another day, another year. Excellent stuff and thanks for everyone who has read my posts, my books, listened to my music or looked through my photographs. Next year is time to release book number 2 into the world, an exploration of music scenes through my eyes.
Have a great New Year and hope the world can finally get its act together in all ways.
So its that wonderful time of the year when top 10, 20, 50 lists are compiled by all and sundry, books, albums, tracks, exhibitions, TV programmes, films etc.. Culture laid bare by the usual protagonists. In my world of popular music culture the lack of diversity and retrospective nature of the so called music books of the year I find staggeringly depressing. Topping the Times list is the alternative mainstream funk of Sly Stone, sound interesting to me, but the rest include tombs on Madonna, Bowie, the BeeGees and Barabara Streisand. OMG. Surely music books of the year should not be so biographically in the past and mono cultured. There is a whole other array of music writers and publishers that the regular mainstram of White Rabbits, Faber, Rough Trade have a slightly more eclectic mix, including Jeremy Deller’s Art is Magic, although it does include Rick Rubin’s rambling rough ruminations on creativity. He aint no Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi that.s for sure. Too many male authors too, lads talking about lads in bands. Boring. Atleast Audrey Godden’s reconstruction of Factory Records hits many a list. Whatever year final retrospective you view there is a lack of black identified music genres including grime, jungle, reggae, or global music outpourings around South American, Asian, or African music cultures. Music is also of the hear and now, not just for getting back to the Beatles and their ilk.
Gradually we descend through the blustery moments of autumn hoping to arrive within the warm embrace of log fires, nights in and out, fluffy socks, pipe and slippers. A time to dive into creative pursuits to fight off the dark (k)nights. About a year ago I excitedly released my first book Blank Canvas, containing musing on creative development alongside a wonderful array of interviewees such as Brian Eno, Pauline Black, Bill Drummond, Stephen Mallinder, Gina Birch, Helen McCookerybook, Lester Square and the dearly departed Keith Levene. It has been great seeing its journey into the world.
Every morning through 2023 I have woken by 6am at the latest and furiously tapped away for an hour each day, conjuring up my next book Resonance. It is a semi autobiographical frolic through music scenes, using the concept of scenius (collective genius) as a lens. It’s currently a mash of ideas, thoughts, pages of autonomic writing, exploring individual to collective creativity. I always get over excited as I develop creative products, so I need to calm down and take a steady path to the finish line.
Here is a little snippet:
Resonance is a story of collective success through individual failure, where my own role petered out but the collective force continues to resonate and scenes run on. The genius of the Love – did did, do do did did. I’m going to have some fun. Fun lots of fun. And I did fail many times. Pulling apart the bellows of accordions through over vigorous activity, desperate to be heard. Playing a battered trombone which had more dents than tubing. Spending a month in a Southern Spanish villa where there was only local English cuisine available, rehearsing diligently parts for a new album which would all be completely scrapped on our return to Paris. Trying to synch multiple ADAT digital tape machines, time stretching over night, selling dodgy grey market synths on Charing Cross Road. I was working for a camping company based in Hemel Hempstead when I saw a small advert in the middle of a page in Loot, the ads paper of choice, looking for a hi-fi installer. I whizzed down to London, got offered the job, given a brand new silver Astra van, and was soon installing tech stuff for the rich and famous. Sultan of Brunei, Rodney Trotter, Bros, Pamela Bordes and Princess Diana. I am terrible at DIY and managed to place a Bang and Olufsen flat speaker on one of her walls, walk gently away and it crashed to the floor, ripping its brackets out and leaving a great gash. We quickly left. The company (Le Set) went out of business soon after. Hi-Fi was big business in the 1980s. People bought high quality boxes and spent fortunes on ever shorter cables, hoping to experience every nuance of sound that recording studios imparted. Listening for pleasure, placing your favourite seat equidistance between your KEF or Quad Electrostatics. The Linn Sondek, imperfect perfection. Sound quality was universal, something to seek out and aspire to. I’m not sure our latest mp3s can remember those times.
Blank Canvas can be purchased directly from the wonderful people at Intellect publishing or through all good retailers.
Watching Top of the Pops at 7pm on a Thursday evening in the 1980s. There were only 3 channels, or 2 if you were from a strictly English middle class background and banned from watching the sin of ITV, where adverts and common accents prevailed. Friday mornings saw avid discussion of the latest fashion, moves, sounds, tribes drily piped into our homes by John Peel or his overly smiley fellow presenters. Peel was an instigator, someone who broke the norm but was high profile, someone you could get behind and follow.
There were other Radio 1 DJs in the UK such as Annie Nightingale, David “Kid” Jensen, and Janice Long who were also important but less resonant. Without Peel these DJ’s might not have successfully traversed mainstream and underground arenas. One person centrifugally centred, orbits spinning right round baby right around his beloved Liverpool.
On 25th October 2004 John Peel died at the same moment that my youngest daughter was whizzing into the world, catapulted out and almost immediately tying herself in knots by an overly long umbilical cord. as is tradition, I kept a copy of the newspaper from her birth day, splashed with news of Peel’s untimely death. An icon who had informed the music tastes of millions, defined genres, was gone at the same moment my lovely new daughter was born. I’m sure she will have as much impact but in a different way.
Music connects to our worlds, what we perceive as life as A Tribe Called Quest extol in the brilliant Black Noise by Tricia Rose’s (1994, p.68), suggesting ‘the rhythmic instinction to yield to travel beyond existing forces in life. If you want to get rhythm then you need to join a tribe’. Natural cohesiveness that transcends our world, both imagined and real, featuring a collective consciousness that pervades and sweeps through the music. Modern Western cultures struggle with the concept of collective consciousness because there is often a negative impact that occurs. Within a scenius (a scene containing unusually high levels of genius) the group think supports positive elements, such as in the London Jazz scenius where places such as The Total Refreshment Centre and the Tomorrows Warriors school help people on a group path, showing value in nurturing communal musiking. Stories told within mainstream media rely on collective consciousness to push ideas, generally in a negative way. Get Brexit Done, Covid-19 lockdowns, the Middle East situation where a lack of historical knowledge is used to sway arguments. Which side are you on, the Palestinians or the Israelis, when the situation is much more nuanced, non linear. Chaos Theory is utilised to confuse and subvert populations. Obvious 20th Century examples include Stalin, Hitler, Apartheid, Anti- black racism, Trump, Johnson, Berlesconi. Dominic Cummings sadly slumped at a desk on live TV lying, needing an eye test to confirm that he was driving a car. If you can start to move the juggernaut of the group down one path then it is unstoppable as there is no room to turn around and the vessel is so large that it would take forever anyway. Brian Eno demonstrated Chaos Theory with his 2 handed pendulum, where simple motion on the first one creates infinite non repeated movements on the second. So a little nudge one way can send all kinds of confusion across the next, thereby subordinated populations. Collective consciousness came through in punk, hip hop, techno, jungle etc.. through commonalities of fashion, style, music, art, taste, lifestyle, place, rhythm, dance. There are instigators, those key people who lead the collective in a certain direction. We are all swayed in some way, which can be a positive in cultural scenes but have global destroying effects in political spheres.
When Femi Koleoso from Ezra Collective collected the Mercury Music Prize for 2023 he thanked the support and inspiration of Tomorrow’s Warriors. They are an education organisation, not a school or college, who support underrepresented jazz musicians, nurturing them from early teens through to mid 20s. They have had 9 Mercury Music prize nominees including Moses Boyd, the Comet is Coming, Sons of Kemet, SEED Ensemble and Nubya Garcia. All musicians who come through TW have a free education, supported by crowd funding and sponsorship.
A couple of current projects include combining electronic producers with jazz musicians who breakdown silos of music style and thought. They are also interested in bringing jazz to rural areas across the UK, having just completed a successful project in Devon. In 2024 we are hoping to bring TW to the Sidmouth Jazz and Blues festival to bring the story of jazz to the countryside. All hail the warriors.
Article in the Observer paper which uses Blank Canvas and art schools in the title. Is it plagiarism or just obvious? Anything which discusses their importance and inter connection is great
