Between the ideas.
Well into December, this end of the year feels eerily still and uneventful. Like being between somethings. Not sure whats. But significants.
December traditionally goes raving tonto as deadlines crawl out of every crack in the floorboards in a scurrying panic before the year crashes into the buffers of Christmas. Which is why I had the new Momo studio floor tiled.
Now, I still seem to be problem solving and trying to pull brilliance out of the brain in multiple ways every day, of course. Don't get me wrong. And Lord knows, every day seems to want to present a new mini crisis to have to smother with an old tea towel. But I do feel a bit limboid.
Limboid, yes. All the running around seems to be happening at some slightly opaque arms length. I'm not in Limbo – far from it's soporific rest, sadly. But a bit spaced out.
A bit empty of witty punchline-outs.
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Something I meant to post up weeks back is a debate that was going on last month in advertising circles, and I think of it again now after chewing through a little list of new creative work for Typo's clients. Whenever you're first at the layout pad, this issue should present itself rather pertinently.
What is the idea?
Now, though any proper ad man worth his salt will say: 'You gotta have an idea', I tend to think of it subtly differently. Slightly less scarily. And consequently more boringly.
What is the message?
Wake up. It may not sound as whizzy and artistic, but it's the more pertinent question for a paying client. Even if they don't realise it. Which they won't or they might not need you. The idea is really just the vehicle for delivering the message. So you'd better have a good idea, for sure. But you'd also better have the right message. Though everyone might take a while to notice you have the wrong message if your idea is really good.
I can't help feeling that redundancy meetings might go a lot smoother if management delivered them as part of a particularly theatrical standup routine, for example.
But anyway. The key thing there is THE idea. THE message. Singular.
The debate in question that some of us were tittle-tattling around concerned two high profile TV ads running more or less concurrently at the moment. Big budget campaigns by big name agencies for big name brands.
Müller and John Lewis.
You've seen the ads, right? Well, I think they serve to illustrate some principles of how to and how not to make a TV ad. As if you had so little going for you that you cared.
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Well, if you're in the business of blagging your way through making up stuff for a living and hoping to get paid for it, you might consider caring just a little. Because the job of advertising is, in a general sense, to reach people.
Both words need italicising – a blathering amount of cash being spent on TV time and production and creative thinking is all for the sole purpose of connecting with real individuals. Because a connection means stimulating some sort of response. Hopefully some embryonic version of the Ooh, I Identify With That response that eventually hopefully magically leads to the I Need To Buy Me A Bit Of That response.
The Müller ad is, in my humble and profoundly unqualified opinion a fine example of stimulating the What The Ruddy Hell Was That About response.
But not in a good way.
What is it saying, do you think? ..No, I didn't have the foggiest either. It was almost like a promisingly cryptic conundrum – guess the link between the car from Knight Rider, Dastardly and Muttley from The Wacky Races, The Mr Men, an anonymous ice cream van that Transformerises into an essentially terrifying and inexplicable giant walking grinning eating football monster, a suspiciously clean urban cityscape and… yogurt.
Now. I know. Hold your protesting. You and I both know. Saying this is like walking into Tate Modern and proclaiming your staggering, bum-faced cultural ignorance with the words: 'CALL THAT ART? MY RUDDY DAUGHTER COULD DRAW BETTER THAN THAT. AND SHE'S NOT OLD ENOUGH TO HOLD A SPORK. ART MY ARSE.'
I know.
Advertisers are going for Emotional Response. Famously. Apparently. But I ask sincerely, what emotional response are you supposed to give to this random soup of thrown-together things? Surely the obvious one is: What The Ruddy Hell's Just Happened? And possibly: Have I Just Suffered A Stroke?
I tried forming basic words after the first time I saw it, just to be sure.
And the sonic environment of the whole thing. The score. For it is a score, not a piece of music. A tightly to-picture bit of writing that takes particular clever skill on the part of a composer – sudden drama, quirky humour, suspense, action, happy resolve… all within 30 seconds. At what point am I supposed to care about these random things to 'feel' the sudden drama of a full orchestra? And at what time did ANY of these random items individually exist in the musical space of a bloody Hans Zimmer Pirates Of The Caribbean overture?
What, in short, were they thinking when they asked the composer to do this? Or the 3D animator when they commissioned the terrifying grinning eating football? Or the classic car company when they asked to borrow KITT and the voice-over actor who presumably lives in it? Or the Roger Hargreaves foundation when they asked to borrow the Mr Men? Or Hannah Barberra when they asked to borrow an athsmatic dog that can fly a biplane and NOT Scooby Do? Huh? What?
I mean, what?
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I gleaned a little when I read ad agency TBWA's briefing notes. "People don't realise how much good stuff goes into making a Müller yogurt" they said. Good brief. Good idea to chase. People will have no freaking better idea after watching this.
Eating an actual Müller yogurt feels much nicer. Simpler.
I personally think it's an example of a whole team's-worth of fantastic talent being used to do great bits of work for something without a single idea. It's entertaining. But it's something that's weirdly hard to love. It's lots of random things tossed into a yogurt pot in expensive desperation. The kind of thing that a clichéd representation of a telly ad agency's clichéd creative-blind account handlers will rave about.
"Look!" these unrealistic cartoons will crow: "We pulled out all the stops. CG, KITT, BIIIIG music. Everything. That'll be a few squillion by the way. Nice one."
I have not bought any Müller yogurts as such since. Don't know about you. I'm sure lots of people think they love it. I doubt they really do. Or have bought any yogurt.
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The John Lewis ad. By way of contrast.
Now, the point here is not to suggest you should be crying at an advert for a big shop that sells things for Christmas. I'd save your emotional energies. But it's interesting that a lot of people apparently couldn't.
Never mind that the corrosive fear and endless working hours of recession Britain has worn down most TV-viewing families' nerve to breaking point. This TV ad still connected with a lot of people.
I didn't cry. But the room of kids and parents I was in the first time we saw it did break out into applause and cheers. Slice it how you will, that's an emotional response. And a good bit of creative to prompt it.
Why? Because it is one single great idea. A very simple ad to shoot, but done nicely. Consistently. Blind-siding you into not caring about just another Christmas ad, but also wondering out of the corner of your bored eye what was going to happen – before a very cute swerve.
All, crucially I would suggest, setting up the last thing on screen; something I'd put money on them having written first, before any scribble of an idea for an actual advert. The message. An excellent tagline, delivering the brand's values and the point of the whole campaign beautifully at the very end: 'Gifts you love to give'.
John Lewis is for givers.
And isn't that kid adorable?
Clever. Single-minded. Not caught between the ideas; using what's between the ears to hit an audience right between the eyes.
Food for thought. Unlike a Müller yogurt, apparently.
The Müller ad.
The John Lewis ad.
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Wednesday, December 07, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
11.11.11, 11:11.
11.11.11, 11:11.
Everyone's seen this number a lot today, but I'm a sucker for symbolism, so here we are.
There is something about collective moments. The liturgical silence of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month may be one of the few times the majority of Britons share a reverential two minutes. Apart from waiting for the final lottery balls, perhaps, dunno.
Challenge the nature of the defense industry, harangue politicians for their strategic double standards, camp outside the doors of dodgy embassies, hate the very idea of violence and destroyed innocence and feel a bit uncomfortable at too much flag-waving jingoism – very please do. But very please do also stand with everyone else nearby in remembering and recognising striking moments of service. Especially if those acts of service helped clear the way for you – you at least, if not everyone yet – to realise the whole point of hard-won freedom – to be able and happy to be yourself. You cool cat.
Challenge the nature of the defense industry, harangue politicians for their strategic double standards, camp outside the doors of dodgy embassies, hate the very idea of violence and destroyed innocence and feel a bit uncomfortable at too much flag-waving jingoism – very please do. But very please do also stand with everyone else nearby in remembering and recognising striking moments of service. Especially if those acts of service helped clear the way for you – you at least, if not everyone yet – to realise the whole point of hard-won freedom – to be able and happy to be yourself. You cool cat.
At times like this, I think of a marvelous moment that great chum Chris shared with me from his uncle. This venerable veteran was apparently in a pub enjoying a quiet pint with a fellow ex-serviceman when in strutted a mohawked punk, stapled and starched to within an inch of his social life – it being the late seventies.
"Good god, man! Did we fight in the war so that young people could do that?" sincerely scowled Chris' uncle's old friend.
"That," replied Chris' uncle, calmly draining his bitter, "is precisely what we fought in the war for young people to be able to do."
..Love it. And may we together continue to reverentially say amen.
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In the spirit of this, at eleven minutes past the hour of armistice, I think it might be splendidly appropriate, precisely because it is so inappropriate, to declare the sessions for the uproarous, theatrical, undoubtedly camp, electro cabaret beats-and-melodies fest of Momo:tempo's new LP… officially open.
I hope I can make it a true celebration of creative freedom.
Watch this space. And start counting. x
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Adventuring by the book.
Adventuring by the book.
I wrote an album in the summer of 1991, just before I got married, called Tropical Thunder. It was called this, I think, because the imprint I 'released' recordings under at that time was called Rainforest.
Rainforest Studios was a shed in my parents' garden. It still just about stands there now, ravaged by an unkind, obviously temperate climate under a decidedly deciduous beech tree. While I continue to muck about with and daydream about making electronic musical epics in another, slightly more robust, shed in my own garden.
Rainforest Studios was a shed in my parents' garden. It still just about stands there now, ravaged by an unkind, obviously temperate climate under a decidedly deciduous beech tree. While I continue to muck about with and daydream about making electronic musical epics in another, slightly more robust, shed in my own garden.
The point in mentioning it is not to get thinking about the very very old days or to wonder where my four-track is now or why I still don't seem to own a decent piano or where in the hell twenty years went in the blink of a bleedin' red LED, but merely to say that I have now actually heard tropical thunder.
And probably that, twenty years on, I'm not sure what practical advice I'd give that young daydreamer in a shed. The plan hasn't, ah, well hasn't much fleshed out from there. Really. Apparently.
Tropical thunder, I should say incidentally, sounds pretty much like thunder anywhere else. Except you're almost certainly sweating more when you hear it.
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I've been interviewed a couple of times in the last couple of weeks and each time is an opportunity for me to refine Momo's elevator statement – the neat summation of all that you do in an easy, insightful, pithy moment in a lift. ..Should some weirdo ask you when the doors close what you like to do between floors.
When I get to hear or see the two most recent interviews in question, I wonder whether they will sound like the same person? If you ignore the sound of the obvious guffawing hoorayer doing the actual tedious talking, you understand – that idiot turns up everywhere. But the point is that the job description seems to sound different every time it comes out of his yawning great trap.
I think both nice journalists, Lenka and Jen, understood that I was claiming to be a music artist of some kind. Jen even called me out and told me, on mic, to compose a tune on the ruddy spot. I inched up to the keys, hands arthritic-lookingly tentative, played a Cmaj chord with a bum note and promptly ended the composition there, adding that the idea might need tidying up but that we could fix it in post. Or something.
The problem is my mouth. It lets slip anything in order to keep flow or to be funny. Sort of useful in broadcasting in a way, and sort of disastrous. No, I never actually let slip Anglo-Saxon profanities, even when they'd be the most precisely funny thing to say, though I did have to retake the odd 'arse' or 'ruddy'. But the main problem is sticking to story. The bits of it that should sound cohesive if carefully said together.
When Jen said to me something like: "So what have you been working on lately?" I blurted out: "I've just come back from Bali."
She blinked and said: "..Really? Doing what? An exotic musical commission?"
To which I replied: "No, no. >honking chuckle< I always do those from a shed in Southbourne. No, I was running an event for a petrochemical company."
..You see? How do I build a cohesive audience with that?
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Well, I mean it's all part of Momo's remit, isn't it? Freedom. Or something. The reason I haven't taken on a permanent team and gone hunting for big game – the freedom to take on random creative work, join other people's worlds for a bit, and still be able to come home to a shed in the garden and scribble feverishly in a book of grand musical concepts and make electronic keyboard tunes like a twenty-year-old enthusiast.
Sounds quite good put like that, I guess. And it certainly doesn't sound harsh to say that I have been working in a five-star resort on the Indonesian island paradise of Bali, either. I can see that.
The point is probably something to do with being fully wherever you are needed in any given moment. Would that I was frequently needed to do good work with great mates for a client it feels a little honouring to be working with in an exotic setting. Obviously. I mean, just obviously.
I would point out, though, that this particular creative assignment still illustrated an ignoble truth of my work – namely, that there is no conceivable setting, or hour of the day, or place on earth in which I may not be expected to interact with a rollerbanner. Hashtag: livingthecreativedream. Glamour has never given to me with both hands. If she ever does to anyone, of course.
It's the issue of service that is always the most pertinent one for any creative gunslinger – are you being the practical use your client needs you to be, despite the background notion dawning on you as you look up from your To Do list that you're wearing a suit on a humid beach front resort under palm trees to the sound of gently shushing waves and warmly ringing evening cicadas in the warm glow of a postcard sunset? The challenge is always the same, even if the eventual sunburn – ah – the brief, isn't. Or the cost of drinks.
It is a challenge.
I would point out, though, that this particular creative assignment still illustrated an ignoble truth of my work – namely, that there is no conceivable setting, or hour of the day, or place on earth in which I may not be expected to interact with a rollerbanner. Hashtag: livingthecreativedream. Glamour has never given to me with both hands. If she ever does to anyone, of course.
It's the issue of service that is always the most pertinent one for any creative gunslinger – are you being the practical use your client needs you to be, despite the background notion dawning on you as you look up from your To Do list that you're wearing a suit on a humid beach front resort under palm trees to the sound of gently shushing waves and warmly ringing evening cicadas in the warm glow of a postcard sunset? The challenge is always the same, even if the eventual sunburn – ah – the brief, isn't. Or the cost of drinks.
It is a challenge.
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I've long felt that Momo, even before it was Momo, may be a little ship – one small enough that breaking out the emergency oars and pulling for all you're worth can still make a difference in a high sea – but that it's with little ships that people travel the world. And found the New World. You can cover a great distance in a little ship, and discover some great things.
Of course, it helps if you have some great mates who are nice enough slash damn-fool enough to invite you on a great gig – and I owe an alarming number of these to the generosity of one of the oldest of friends, Julian. I think I still owe him for room service too.
The point may be, after all, that setting out on an adventure is not about getting from A–B. It's usually about surviving from A–Z. Your little ship will have to put into all sorts of unexpected ports and perhaps even get washed up on some very unexpected beaches. It doesn't necessarily mean that your story has veered off course. Even if chapters of it don't seem to fit the narrative you set out to explore. I'm sure the eponymous Odysseus would have something to say along these lines.
And so would a bloke called Homer, who compiled / made up most of Odysseus' epic adventures from the equivalent of a shed in Smyrna.
In fact, I think I've always instinctively known that, for many of us, it's the book of daydreams that inspires us to even try getting back in the boat each morning. Attempting to navigate. Hoping to survive. Fooling ourselves into trying to make it somewhere.
In fact, I think I've always instinctively known that, for many of us, it's the book of daydreams that inspires us to even try getting back in the boat each morning. Attempting to navigate. Hoping to survive. Fooling ourselves into trying to make it somewhere.
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From behind her little video camera, Lenka asked me: "What are you doing next?"
Feeling a little adventurous twinkle in the corner of my eye, I said: "I'm starting a new album. And I'm SO excited – I've been daydreaming about it for, like, ages – I have this book of scribbles and…"
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Friday, October 07, 2011
No script.
No script.
On the morning of my forty-first birthday, yesterday, I woke up to two things: A gift from the lovely first lady of Momo of a beautifully edited book of script typography and caligraphic design, and the news that co-founder and mentor of Apple, Steve Jobs, had died.
As John Stewart was to put it on that night's edition of The Daily Show, some industry leaders we seemed to wring dry, watching them die old and in increasing irrelevance. But it feels as if Steve had a lot more to share with the world yet. "Like a space alien landed and left us a new piece of technology and an instruction manual before shooting back off into space again, just as we're shouting: NO! WHAT DOES THE GREEN BUTTON DO?"
And you began to accept the idea that the iPhone was actually possible for humans to have developed. You gullible idiot.
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It is said that he wasn't an easy man to work with. A man with a drive for excellence. All I can say there is that I've always greatly appreciated the excellence and humanity in Steve Jobs' work. And also that I am very easy to work with.
My whole creative career, wildly unremarkable as it's mostly been, has been equipped and enhanced very largely by Apple. I still have no proper idea how to operate a PC; they are clunky tools of a bygone age to me, and have been since they were new. Macs are human, and always have been by comparison somehow.
I feel sure that many tech heads and devotees will be snapping on WWJD wristbands with the Mac start-up icon on them and frequently asking themselves in tricky situations, What Would Jobs Do, but I think the most duh-obvious thing he did always was think like a human. Like a squelchy bag of fluids and hormones and skin and bone that wanders around getting damn-fool notions into its head and responding to any number of often illogical 'impressions' and 'feelings' and lusts and fears.
Traditionally, engineers and IT designers seem willfully able to leave any such awareness at the door of the germ-vacuumed test lab.
You see, good design, boys and girls, always articulates a perfect equilibrium between form and function.
An engineer, so tradition goes, will problem-solve a new bit of tech in a brilliant way under the bonnet. But probably won't then be able to close the bonnet. Not without sawing a bit off it, five minutes before the glitzy launch presentation. And never mind finding a place for the driver's seat.
A creative, meanwhile, will design something highly intellectual and possibly beautiful – so long as their own sense of aesthetics isn't too highly intellectual as well – but don't expect it to have an engine in the first place. And don't touch that bit, because it's just for show and it'll come off in your… and now you've ruined it, look. You sap.
A designer, however, is a zen guru of balance. He or she understands that the tool they're designing should be transparent in its function – that it should not get in the way of the job one iota. They will also understand, though, that the simpler and more elegant that design is, the more secretly pleasing it will be for the bag-of-stupid-fluids highly impressionable shaved ape using it. The task may need to be done for objective, spread-sheetable reasons, but if the tool puts some unquantifiable joy into it for the tool wielder, he or she will oddly enjoy his or her work rather more – and so undoubtedly do it rather better. An ultimately bankable end result.
And let's face it, it's hard to think of bits of product design that embody this ideal more than some of Apple's.
Has any industry giant created more emotional response from its product launches? More devotion in its fans? More sheer wow factor in its innovations? And has any international CEO worth squillions elicited so much respect and reposted quotes from his speeches as Steve Jobs?
Whether you love or resent the Apple story, you'd be pretty churlish and silly to deny he seemed to know his app from his elbow in business.
..And that Apple's influence in changing the way humans do some things is frankly remarkable. Clever ideas are one thing, but in terms of Making An Actual Difference, delivery is everything.
..Though you may have to wait a devil of a time for shipment.
..Though you may have to wait a devil of a time for shipment.
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Plenty of folk were reposting Steve's Stanford commencement address from 2005. Most of it is quotable, it seems. Stuff about following your heart and other guff you'll dismiss in a cynical mood… except it's coming from someone who's belief in the way everything in life can help you learn more and do better actually lead him to become, well, Steve Jobs. Near legend.
..That being diagnosed with untreatable cancer after espousing a Death Focuses The Mind, Man philosphy for years, actually helped him focus the mind enough to go on and develop the iPhone and the iPad and beat the cancer.
..That being fired from his own company as a success-legend millonaire when he was still only thirty lead him to wander the Earth looking for new ways to follow his heart and rebuild it from being basically broken by the experience and so along the way found Pixar, arguably the world's most original, warm-hearted, intelligent and successful animation company.
..That dropping out of college right back at the beginning of his adult life lead to him 'dropping in' on a calligraphy and typography course which opened his eyes to the beauty of letterform to such a degree that he built the concept strongly into the design of the remarkable little Mac SE that I first sat infront of with my mouth open in 1988. And which essentially set the whole tone for Apple's game-changing cultural attitude.
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At forty-one now, I may have demonstrated beyond doubt that I am not able to leave the lovely first lady of Momo alone long enough to bother with the sort of drive that will one day change the way humans do things, but Steve Jobs' attitude has helped to change the way I do things.
I shall look at my wife's inspiring birthday gift and remember him and his inspiring desire to make things better. More effective, because they are more elegantly human.
And I shall try to remain encouraged that when life seems to forever be deviating from the script, it may be writing a better, even a more beautiful, story.
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Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Get out of the box.
Get out of the box.
I was intent on responding to something today that is oddly close to my heart. In that, this issue makes everything close to everything – the tiny state of British housing.
The RIBA has actually come out and criticised the design of new homes in the UK today, and it's surely about ruddy time. We are the only country on God's Earth, it seems, to value our homes on number of rooms rather than floor space, AND to have repealed the minimum standards for human living space in building control.
The RIBA has actually come out and criticised the design of new homes in the UK today, and it's surely about ruddy time. We are the only country on God's Earth, it seems, to value our homes on number of rooms rather than floor space, AND to have repealed the minimum standards for human living space in building control.
I've said it before, but the British can be a bloody backwards bunch of banana heads. We seem addicted to making life hard for ourselves. And to helping people make money out of substandard work.
There are at least a couple of essays in there for me, I feel – one about the eternal, instinctive clash of cultures between UK Planning and UK developers, and another about the whole point of design in everyday life. Something to do with human wellbeing or somesuch.
The thing is, much as I can only repeat incessantly that you should sit yourself down for three hours and watch all three episodes of charming metro architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff's wonderful, encouraging, wise series The Secret Life of Buildings, before preparing to rise up and take to the streets in very polite protest at the shocking shiteness of British policy towards the public realm… I'm now thinking about little boxes in general.
We seem to love them. Can't seem to think outside them, in fact. Something I felt again lastnight, at a little event in town.
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Did you know that there is a small ton of stuff going on in Bournemouth that's creative and forward thinking?
You did? .. No, I don't just mean whatever it is that you're up to. Though that would surely add to the south coast's cultural GDP on its own, I'm sure. No, I mean stuff outside. Out there. Where the others are.
You didn't? Not surprised. I mean, where would you look to find out?
Co-ordinating comms about anything in Bomo does seem a problem at the moment, and I've thought it for ages. But the truth is… well, the truth is two-sided, actually. One: there's a lot more interesting creative stuff starting to happen in Bournemouth these days than most people realise. And, two: most people still can't be arsed to make the most of it. But if there's a third edge, a rim, holding the two sides together, it is that truth about comms. I can't help feeling that if you build up the critical mass of publicity, it eventually fullfills its own prophesy.
But still. There's work to be done to really change the culture down here by the seaside in our comfy town.
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Lastnight I pottered along to the first of Strawberry Lantern's B:Reel events – a networking event for any creatives interested in film. And to pull together a decent excuse to get together, the chaps behind the initiative had also incorporated the franchise for Future Shorts – the now-international groovy short film screenings nights, of which we've enjoyed a few in Bournemouth over the years. You never know what's going to come on screen next, which is wonderful.
Interestingly, the setting for the night was the now almost-one-year-old Pavilion Dance, overlooking the lower gardens in the belly of the Pavilion Theatre building.
I say interesting, because for me the symbolism of having brand new creative space in the heart of the town is significant. Encouraging. Kind of exciting. And so is the news that Arts University College Bournemouth is taking over the next door unit to do something else interesting; they're refurbing it now. This seems like very good news to me.
Perusing the itinerary for Bournemouth Arts By The Sea fest as I drained a perhaps ill-advised free glass of Merlot on an empty stomach after a frantic circuits class, I was also reminded, as I reached for a chair, that Carol and Kerry and Councilor Lancashire have actually made an arts event happen all over town, with some mighty interesting things all over its schedule. Meant to say this to Carol, who was there, along with many other familiar creative faces and chums who I've been getting to know in a growing myriad of crossing-over arts and business events this year.
Thing is. I had two separate conversations with dynamic local creative forces lastnight, as we waited to wander into the auditorium. And they both made me think the same thing.
Each of them is in the process of bringing in to land a creative media event right in Bournemouth town centre. Both are about to happen at the same sort of time. And each one involves some really significant names in their industries – coming all the way to Bournemouth to share knowledge and insight about what they do. Coming right to us.
Each of them is in the process of bringing in to land a creative media event right in Bournemouth town centre. Both are about to happen at the same sort of time. And each one involves some really significant names in their industries – coming all the way to Bournemouth to share knowledge and insight about what they do. Coming right to us.
That these events are happening here should be big news on the local arts calendar. The crucial, if trivial sounding, credibility of them is a huge thing to add to what individual musicians, film makers, writers, digital creatives and performers are already doing here.
The problem is, we don't have a cultural calendar here yet. So almost no-one knows these things are happening.
And yet that's not the problem each of these good champions of art and business coincidentally relayed to me. The problem is with so many who DO know. ..They can't see the value in the opportunities.
And this is the real malaise of Bournemouth; the culture it has to overcome: Life here is too comfy for many people. It's sleepy and well fed.
Except it isn't. One of the problems may be an issue of diminished expectations. And Mark Kermode's blog post on the subject, taken from his new book, is as erudite a take on the issue as I have read, discovered only this morning. His passion for the problem of it all over the film industry is exactly the feeling I've had for so long. And I shall probably write about that separately too, crucial as creative conviction is over brainless business.
The point is, that people need to think outside their little box to make a difference. Or a dollar. And Lord knows I understand comfy little boxes; who wants to leave the warmth of the airing cupboard and the cotton wool bedding for the visceral uncertainties of the garden? I mean, it might be raining out there. And all I want to do is play on my wheel.
Maybe we're all safer and happier being hamsters. Or kittens. But I don't know about you, I feel the call of the wild every now and then. And I think most people do.
Shouldn't we want more – more adventure from our lives, more life in our comfy lifestyle town?
Shouldn't we want more – more adventure from our lives, more life in our comfy lifestyle town?
If we want to further our experience, our skills, our outlook, our reach as artists, we need get out of the comfortable little boxes we live in. Jeepers, our job as artists is to lead the way in thinking outside the box, in exploring, in taking risks.
But I can't help feeling that while kings and queens of innovation and encouragement feel discouraged by the same-ol' same-ol' of local lazy thinking, they are actually to not give up. There is something about building critical mass about this, I feel. About keeping going yet. About saying we made some shet happen.
I feel it for Momo. I feel it for Bomo: Too soon to give up, somehow.
Stepping out of things can require extraordinary amounts of faith, but I think we should demonstrate it. We should raise our expectations, and live by them.
Here, grab my hand.
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Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Off.
Off.
I think I am back. Back on it. The floor. The schedule. The lonely road. Whatever. ..But it took a while.
Because, though this is just a quick check-in and not a comprehensive account with diagrams and video and chalk outlines and holographic charts, I can at least report that Saturday night appeared to go actually, appreciably, right ruddy off. And it caught me off guard.
If you're going on at 11.15pm anywhere, I think it's fair to say that you'll have had a long day by the time you're sauntering into the lights with a finger-pistoling wink; how DJs get up to start sets at three in the morning I'll never know. I guess they are, at least, not expected to say much from behind the turntables or the Ableton screen. I was frankly a bit spaced out after a day of last-minute arrangements, and rehearsals and lugging things about and the general levels of nervous energy needed to be of any use on a live project day. I think we all were.
So I was, in the end, fairly disasterously wrong-footed for a few moments as I finally reached for the trackpad on the Macbook that night. A delirious state of mind is easily giddied further when two frames of reference suddenly jerk out of place around you. Two reasonably fundamental things for a performing musician.
Suddenly-screwy sound levels. And a suddenly-euphoric crowd.
What exactly happens to a sound set-up you leave in buoyingly good shape after a lengthy soundcheck with the very capbable, calm, likeable sound chap for the night, goodness knows. What we ask of a set-up – what we ask of ourselves – when Momo:tempo's Electro Pops Orchestra gets up to blast four-part brass and two-enormous-part percussion over a digital mix with a chap-rapping tit expecting to be heard over it all is not simple. So as we ambled off for a late bite that early evening with the sound sounding pretty great, I was a very happy bunny.
It is then that the pixies come and turn things off and turn things down and pull things out so they can ultimately dangle you in front of people helplessly like a time-filling talentless buffoon.
..And yet. Those pixies were, it seemed – certainly from where I was standing – shooed away rudely by the crowd that night at Sixty Million Postcards.
As the good people of Bournemouth's weekend reveling crowded right in and I was left, once again, struggling in my delirium and my sudden spinning gimbal of reference to not trip over, like, everything, and high-kick over the laptop stand and the keyboard and the monitors and the band… the noise in the joint rose absurdly. As each tune we belted out concluded, the place went, well… beserk.
It was a bit of a wild ride. I'm just not used to a room full of people who appear to be showing all the signs of totally getting what I do. I thought for the first twenty minutes it might be a crowd conspiracy to take the pee. I did.
But you have to admit, that band behind me is pretty ruddy awesome.
But you have to admit, that band behind me is pretty ruddy awesome.
John, Pat and Dave were joined this time by Nick who together kind of blew the house away as the horn department at the back. When they jammed over Momo's new track, revealed on the night, and I impressively lost all frame of reference including my name and which way on my underpants were, they just made the whole thing sound Very Cool Indeed, while I mixed a drink and filled in the Times crossword at the front or something. Amazing.
And when Mark rolled in authoritatively with the live beats on slightly expanded Golden Age micro favourite Up in the party and Simon rocked in with the congas, the place just went wild. They greeted our playing and Momo's tunes and my berking about like old friends. I was hoarse by half midnight. The boys worked their talents and professionalism crowd-pleasingly hard that night.
It must be said too that the chaps at Sixty Million were very nice to us and thanks must go to Alfie for his hard work ensuring we could play and keep playing that night. Props too to Suzy for wearing down The 'Mill to let us in and for giving up the evening to helm the Momo merch stall.
But biggest thanks to you, if you were there and took part. Quite apart from all the lovely Momo amigos who made the effort to come out and stay up just to see us, if you'd not heard of us before that night and chose to encourage us by making very loud appreciative noises throughout our tiny show, you should know I am very grateful.
Ruddy nora, eh?
Still. Momo has me back at the lathe with no time to luxuriate in the success of one seaside bar knees-up, fab as it felt.
Time to get on.
---
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Shiny, dead good work.
Shiny, dead good work.
Thought I'd check in as an excuse to stop, collapse in a chair, mop my brow, beg a cuppa, and fain looking dead busy and important. ..Any of this worked so far?
In the week running up to a little Momo show, everything does inevitably get a little telescoped into too little time, and Momo does tend to dish out various other random creative things to deal with at the same time. So that I have to pause carefully every ten minutes to think of my name.
Typical would be this afternoon's itinerary, I suppose. Starting with a precursory website design analysis for a possibly nice new client running a successful art gallery business, I am now prepping mixes for the show on Saturday. I shall then be popping to good ink management partners The Print Room to stroke some extremely, almost absurdly, nicely-specced print for a high profile international (no-pressure) mailer, before wandering the industrial estates of Walisdown to find The Bay 102.8 to possibly boob about on air for ten minutes aroud 6.00pm, talking about myself annoyingly. And at undoubtedly great odds with their normal playlist. Before then wandering the same industrial estates looking for tonight's rehearsal rooms I secured only this morning for a bash through with the beats boys tonight.
Don't think I'll get time to finish sanding that hall wall we stripped in a wild-eyed, unplanned frenzy at the weekend.
Of course, blogging out a list of pretty tediously small-time chores in an attempt to look busy and important so feeble that you might actually want to hold me and cry for me and then hold me out at arms length and look at me squarely and then through tears and with a shake of the head ask what happened to me and then hold me again MIGHT appear to be an un-smart choice on my part. Even reaching the FOOTHILLS of credibility has taken, like, SOOOOO LOOOOONG, Tim; stop acting like such a desperate loser. Which is sweet of you.
But have you stopped to think, eh, that MAYBE, just MAYBE, yeah, I couldn't help myself and then took such a long time to type it all out as I thought it / think it all through out loud on the keyboard here that by the time it's obvious and incriminating I have not only lost the time to go back and correct it and fabricate indifference but also the will and the memory of where this was going and of how to use punctuation Oh, >?<
Huh?
Huh?
Well look. So I'm on the radio apparently. And then we're doing a live music show on Saturday or something and someone's told me that we're actually sharing a BRAND RUDDY NEW RUDDY TUNE at it and some very nice chums are actually traveling half way around the planet to be there and to fill our home and the little Momo studio with merriment at it all so, y'know… I'm just trying to keep up and keep enjoying it. Fnaffle condescendingly all you want. You can still come along. Like you have anything better to do.
But while you're there, could you confirm that 'condescending' does actually mean 'ascending'? Because it should, come to think of it, shouldn't it?
But yes. A new piece from Momo if you make it down to Sixty Million Postcards this Saturday and are actually prepared to stay up for it. This is actually true. You WILL hear it and it WON'T be online any time soon afterwards.
The usefulness and scale of my creative career may be unbelievably limited, but I can at least promise something on Saturday night that will be dead good.
Especially if you're there.
PS: And all the more because some nice man has just delivered a very shiny new pair of classic Oxfords for my get-up. Good work.
---
---
Monday, August 22, 2011
Red, white and blue.
Red, white and blue.
I saw them twice this week. The Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, The Red Arrows. I must have seen them nearly fifty times in my life, of course.
I can picture a much littler me waiting on the clifftop somewhere along the long sweeping coastline of Bournemouth's Poole Bay, perhaps holding dad's hand or watching mum scan the skies impatiently – as least as much a child as her offspring in such moments. Waiting. Waiting for the minute-perfect arrival of the nine Gnats, then Hawks – WHAM! – suddenly streaking overhead in awsome precision and control, as their engines scream unrestrained excitement.
Or standing in the rain at one of the Hurn air shows, hoping the clouds would clear just enough for the chaps to do their magical stuff, hanging off eachother's wings with the most exacting trust, to show faithful crowds what human skill can do.
It's been said that the Red Arrows team have always enjoyed flying at Bournemouth. They're very polite chaps, so I doubt they'd tell us it was high time we got them a new portacabin to sleep in at the airport anyway, but still. I can say from various experiences that, at least from very very low aeronautical speeds and from the more reassuring vantage point of Always The Right Way Up, this neck of the woods is a pretty one from the air.
And this weekend it seemed to be a perfect amphitheatre for aerial action as ever it was. Unprecidented rain and flooding and terrible visibility broke dramatically after Bournemouth Air Festival's first apocalyptically washed-out day on Thursday, and Friday dawned bright and clear and warm – the bay twinkling blue from Needles to Old Harry's, and clouds receding to the very roof.
That Friday afternoon I watched the team from Chris and Laura's splendidly front-row vantage point in town, close to the very cross-over of the Lunatic Flying Straight At Each Other that they do, to bottom-twinging applause every time, and directly under the heart they draw a mile high in the sky for everyone with their smoke trails. Never else does burnt diesel bring a tear to the eye quite like this.
Then on Saturday, we took my aeronutty but currently house-bound mother out to our collective back garden on Southbourne Cliffs – on another day of impossible meteorological changearounds from miserable low cloud to glorious summer skies. And seeing the exact same display from the Arrows as the day before but from the edge of it was even more thrilling; when they peeled off across the town at the end of a wide manoeuvre, they were roaring right over our heads. Seeing the lead four start their Strip The Willow, or whatever country dance thing it is they do, from underneath was a lesson in flight precision – those chaps moved in such harmony it looked like CG. Unbelievable. Inspiring. Thrilling. Every time.
---
Someone behind us received a phone call. She was not the sort to hold in news, it seemed, and she leaned into our little gathering as we played festival radio and said simply: "One's crashed."
We looked at eachother. Then up at the clear blue sky again.
---
By now, you know the story. As much as we do. Red Four, Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging, came down in the pretty riverside fields along the Stour, just south of the airfield. Turning back off the runway as he peeled away in a final sunburst for the hardcore fans waiting to see the team land, his Hawk T1 just didn't stay in the air, losing altitude fast as it arced towards the ground. Jon didn't eject. He did put out a mayday, so he knew something was wrong. He appears to have instinctively stayed with his aircraft to ensure it went down safely away from the houses of Throop and Castle Lane.
The Red Arrows don't do crashes. Flying since 1965, there have been only a handful of fatalities – and only in 1971 was that in an actual display. The loss of a pilot at the controls of a Red Arrow display aircraft is a shocking piece of news. Across the UK people are feeling it, and here in Bournemouth, flowers have been left piling up against the lion outside the town hall. Up the slope in the entrance of the old hotel building, the council has had to double the number of books of condolence opened to Flt Lt Egging's family and to the Arrows' wider family. People care about these people.
And it's because they aren't simply entertaining, of course, they're inspiring.
What they do is about endeavor – about the pinnacle of human skills. We can't imagine ourselves doing what they do, even as we daydream about it. And, as the primary marketing front end of the Royal Air Force, they are impressively effective brand ambassadors – those red white and blue trails do more to make people feel quietly proud to be British than almost anything these days. They are, in short, a comfort.
What comfort there is for Flt Lt Egging's widow, Dr Emma Egging, must surely be partly found somewhere in that – in her husband's skill, professionalism and bravery. In his service.
Every time you hear of another young life lost in the front line of our armed forces' work, you probably find yourself thinking the same as me – why did we have to lose another life of that calibre? Of that self-control. Of that knowledge. Of that commitment to service. We need these people in society. Some might be tempted to say now more than ever.
We do need them. And no matter how bloody unjust their premature loss when it happens, nothing can stop them doing one of the most important things they do and can't help but do. Because it's precisely that calibre of person that will put themselves in harm's way in order to serve, and in order to live life to the full. And in so doing, they do indeed inspire.
It's cruelly ironic. Paying such a high price for being prepared to step up. But it's these people who we will remember.
Red Four, you have certainly made your mark. On the sky, and on the mind's eye.
Amazing. x
---
I saw them twice this week. The Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, The Red Arrows. I must have seen them nearly fifty times in my life, of course.
I can picture a much littler me waiting on the clifftop somewhere along the long sweeping coastline of Bournemouth's Poole Bay, perhaps holding dad's hand or watching mum scan the skies impatiently – as least as much a child as her offspring in such moments. Waiting. Waiting for the minute-perfect arrival of the nine Gnats, then Hawks – WHAM! – suddenly streaking overhead in awsome precision and control, as their engines scream unrestrained excitement.
Or standing in the rain at one of the Hurn air shows, hoping the clouds would clear just enough for the chaps to do their magical stuff, hanging off eachother's wings with the most exacting trust, to show faithful crowds what human skill can do.
It's been said that the Red Arrows team have always enjoyed flying at Bournemouth. They're very polite chaps, so I doubt they'd tell us it was high time we got them a new portacabin to sleep in at the airport anyway, but still. I can say from various experiences that, at least from very very low aeronautical speeds and from the more reassuring vantage point of Always The Right Way Up, this neck of the woods is a pretty one from the air.
And this weekend it seemed to be a perfect amphitheatre for aerial action as ever it was. Unprecidented rain and flooding and terrible visibility broke dramatically after Bournemouth Air Festival's first apocalyptically washed-out day on Thursday, and Friday dawned bright and clear and warm – the bay twinkling blue from Needles to Old Harry's, and clouds receding to the very roof.
That Friday afternoon I watched the team from Chris and Laura's splendidly front-row vantage point in town, close to the very cross-over of the Lunatic Flying Straight At Each Other that they do, to bottom-twinging applause every time, and directly under the heart they draw a mile high in the sky for everyone with their smoke trails. Never else does burnt diesel bring a tear to the eye quite like this.
Then on Saturday, we took my aeronutty but currently house-bound mother out to our collective back garden on Southbourne Cliffs – on another day of impossible meteorological changearounds from miserable low cloud to glorious summer skies. And seeing the exact same display from the Arrows as the day before but from the edge of it was even more thrilling; when they peeled off across the town at the end of a wide manoeuvre, they were roaring right over our heads. Seeing the lead four start their Strip The Willow, or whatever country dance thing it is they do, from underneath was a lesson in flight precision – those chaps moved in such harmony it looked like CG. Unbelievable. Inspiring. Thrilling. Every time.
---
Someone behind us received a phone call. She was not the sort to hold in news, it seemed, and she leaned into our little gathering as we played festival radio and said simply: "One's crashed."
We looked at eachother. Then up at the clear blue sky again.
---
By now, you know the story. As much as we do. Red Four, Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging, came down in the pretty riverside fields along the Stour, just south of the airfield. Turning back off the runway as he peeled away in a final sunburst for the hardcore fans waiting to see the team land, his Hawk T1 just didn't stay in the air, losing altitude fast as it arced towards the ground. Jon didn't eject. He did put out a mayday, so he knew something was wrong. He appears to have instinctively stayed with his aircraft to ensure it went down safely away from the houses of Throop and Castle Lane.
The Red Arrows don't do crashes. Flying since 1965, there have been only a handful of fatalities – and only in 1971 was that in an actual display. The loss of a pilot at the controls of a Red Arrow display aircraft is a shocking piece of news. Across the UK people are feeling it, and here in Bournemouth, flowers have been left piling up against the lion outside the town hall. Up the slope in the entrance of the old hotel building, the council has had to double the number of books of condolence opened to Flt Lt Egging's family and to the Arrows' wider family. People care about these people.
And it's because they aren't simply entertaining, of course, they're inspiring.
What they do is about endeavor – about the pinnacle of human skills. We can't imagine ourselves doing what they do, even as we daydream about it. And, as the primary marketing front end of the Royal Air Force, they are impressively effective brand ambassadors – those red white and blue trails do more to make people feel quietly proud to be British than almost anything these days. They are, in short, a comfort.
What comfort there is for Flt Lt Egging's widow, Dr Emma Egging, must surely be partly found somewhere in that – in her husband's skill, professionalism and bravery. In his service.
Every time you hear of another young life lost in the front line of our armed forces' work, you probably find yourself thinking the same as me – why did we have to lose another life of that calibre? Of that self-control. Of that knowledge. Of that commitment to service. We need these people in society. Some might be tempted to say now more than ever.
We do need them. And no matter how bloody unjust their premature loss when it happens, nothing can stop them doing one of the most important things they do and can't help but do. Because it's precisely that calibre of person that will put themselves in harm's way in order to serve, and in order to live life to the full. And in so doing, they do indeed inspire.
It's cruelly ironic. Paying such a high price for being prepared to step up. But it's these people who we will remember.
Red Four, you have certainly made your mark. On the sky, and on the mind's eye.
Amazing. x
---
Monday, August 15, 2011
Back to real life, please.
Back to real life, please.
How are you feeling? Back to the same old routine? The comfortable numbness slowly warming back through you? Me too. Great, isn't it?
Only, I'm now not sure if you get it from keeping your telly box on or turning it off.
..I think maybe I'm a dispassion native now; I can Not Really Care About Stuff all on my own, with or without headphones in or TV blaring. Look at me, a media age child all grown up.
For a few nights last week, however, I fear I may have caught a glimpse of real life.
I know! Me! ..I confess it here because I trust that you're broad-minded and will understand; better out than festering away in, eh. But I did. Even as Twitter blazed away with hysterical headlines about London burning and I instinctively poured the cold water of anti-hysterical scorn on the dramatic language, I could not tear my attention from the live pictures of what appeared very much to be homes and livelihoods actually burning to the ground in London. For no apparent proper reason at all. Other than that we appeared to be all suddenly climbing into that handcart that we'd all been repeatedly told we would be taking to hell one day – like some prearranged geno-suicide signal had finally gone out. ..But, I mean, who sent that memo? Or tweet. I didn't get it. DId you? I'll bet you did. You get everything.
I wasn't ready at all. There was no orientation for this Armageddon team challenge – I had no idea it was scheduled for last week. Yet – bang! – last Saturday people were kicking things in in Tottenham and by the middle of the week England was apparently efficiently destroying itself, and dancing on the smoldering debris. All apparently gone like clockwork, just as in the practices. Which I'd also missed.
I felt like such a fool, not knowing what my tasks were. This is JUST why I always get voted off teams pretty soon after the jokes start to wear thin.
---
But ACTUALLY, it turns out that Mad Max: Beyond Millennium Dome is not reality after all. It is, apparently, too soon to tear the body panels off our cars and strap dead cats to our heads and start wheel-spinning in circles in the NCPs waving spears. Which seems a shame.
True, we can't seem to get our economy to grow at all, perhaps slightly because the world economy is shaking apart with tremours that just won't stop rumbling away underneath its current foundations. True, there is still a bigger gap between the wealthy and the poor here in the UK than anywhere else in the always-claiming-to-be-developed world. True, there are still groups of people all over the country that feel so disconnected from the idea of owning a part in the country's life that it looks like they feel disconnected from owning their own lives. True, no politician in Westminster seems to have words to come anywhere close to connecting those people back to the rest of us. True, this is true in cities all over the world. True, poverty eventually degrades dignity and hope back to animal fears – especially when it is also of education and mental empowerment. True, some people get very used to pissing about and taking stuff sooner than making stuff.
And true, when you feel that you have nothing to lose and nothing to work for, you find a certain kind of bitter freedom lurking in the limbo of it – one that might enable you to give riotous thanks when that limbo is actually at long last broken when something – anything – kicks off down the street. The thrill of change can be intoxicating. Especially when it involves free stuff.
But it's not the only truth.
What is hearteningly truthful is that most people in Britain do own their own lives. Of course they do. They do value their freedoms. Do pick up a broom to not just clear up and start again but to help each other clear up and start again. And you can bet your future on the truth that most young people get it too. In fact, an awful lot of them know the wisdom of the streets a lot more than you do. If you're tempted to use phrases like 'generational moral vacuum' you're not just a bit wordy, you've also been watching too much telly. It's probably you that's disconnected. And by you, I obviously mean me.
Because something else I've realised this week that seems to be unshakably true is that I am a reasonably useless arse who knows very little of the real world. It's no revelation, you understand, but a reaffirmation.
---
You may have done your own version of this during last week, but I spent much of it expending emotional energy pacing in circles declaring things uselessly at the TV, the computer screen and the radio. The riots made me feel a lot of stuff and think a lot of stuff and shout a fair bit of stuff but not do a lot of stuff. Which at least involved not nicking a lot of stuff either.
I want to teach some kid to read. Some kid who could end up leaving school without the ability to analyse themselves and their world if someone outside the self-defeating bureaucracy of the education system didn't step in and help. But who. And how? I'm no teacher. Teachers, I thought, would make excellent teachers.
I want to hug Tariq Jahan for appealing for calm mere hours after his son Haroon had been murdered by hit and run in the riots in Birmingham. And so do you, and so do so many people of all communities up and down the country – a fact that doesn't just validate his inspirational courage, it illustrates it. He shouldn't have had to demonstrate his character under these circumstances, it's clearly just who he is – as a man, as a father and as a British citizen. We cheer him on because he represents values that are important to us. Which is why we want to sob for him and for the family of the two brothers killed with young Haroon that night. But he doesn't need me echoing more empty praise when his son is dead. He needs the justice of free, peaceful streets where he lives.
I want to go to a police station and tell them they're bloody heroes for stepping up to serve their communities in the most thankless of roles, doing it so often as they do with such heart and intelligence. Even as I want to beg them to not give in to the emotional pressure to feel that their job is some sort of military front line – a place with the strategic imperative of Them And Us. Tottenham's gun crime might feel like the front line on some Tuesday nights I guess, same as Baltimore or who knows, but the army's terrifying challenges under fire are fundamentally different to those of the civil police service, even when you have to wade into petrol bombs and bottles and fight – with your life and all your wits and discipline to protect our free streets. But why would your average experienced copper need a flimsy-limbed oaf like me to helpfully point out any of this to them?
I want to go to every kid in the nick after the weekend and drag them by their prison tag to a mirror and shout over their shoulder in their face: 'Don't you realise what you're capable of? You're a freaking human being – you're amazing, you bloody idiot. You're unique in the sodding universe. Stop acting like you don't give a shit and that you're not part of the rest of us – own your own life. Stop acting like a victim everyone wants to punch'. But, as they might politely point out, what the flying fuck-a-ding-dong do I know?
Because I really most want to stand in front of that mirror alone and shout in my own face: 'And THIS is how you're going to make a practical difference to the people around you', and know what it is.
But I can't, it seems. Not yet. Can you?
I'll bet you can. You live in the real world. You're already doing it. But feeling a bit useless when you've already been given all the essential tools you need for independence and confidence that so many youngsters are fighting to find is also part of real life across the UK. Loads of us feel uselessly disconnected from each other. We don't know how to connect our values and hopes to people who appear to act so differently. So angeringly differently to us.
This feeling, in all its different expressions across the British classes, is something that unites our kingdom. But I think there may be a way out for every one of us from that entrapment of feeling:
True freedom is having the confidence to serve.
..I know this. I just don't know where I could or should serve effectively.
When you appreciate the profound value of service – the ultimate respect that it is – you are likely to love the person you notice serving you. And when you demonstrate that gratitude with returned service, they may love you back. Because, after all, love is service. It's something you do. Something you build society with. But it's only real and true and effective when you do it as an instinct, or at least decision, and an end in itself, expecting nothing back directly.
The geniously simple truth, though, is that respect, service, love, all start with the conscious use of two very powerful everyday words – powerful precisely because of their easily-overlooked modesty – 'please' and 'thankyou'. And don't you dare laugh.
This is essentially all I learned from my parents, boiled down into two words. And, as the riots unfolded on the TV in the background, my mother was having her knee replaced for free by the UK's National Health Service and was being calmly served by indefatigably caring professional medical staff, helping her to recover into a chapter of new freedom for her, after years of painful limitation. She spent most of her time in there saying thankyou.
The challenge modern Britain is really presenting us with, even as so many of us give thanks, is how to use our freedoms to serve eachother's.
I shall ponder this some more as I slip back into the comfortable oblivion of responding to my own life's little fires to fight.
---
How are you feeling? Back to the same old routine? The comfortable numbness slowly warming back through you? Me too. Great, isn't it?
Only, I'm now not sure if you get it from keeping your telly box on or turning it off.
..I think maybe I'm a dispassion native now; I can Not Really Care About Stuff all on my own, with or without headphones in or TV blaring. Look at me, a media age child all grown up.
For a few nights last week, however, I fear I may have caught a glimpse of real life.
I know! Me! ..I confess it here because I trust that you're broad-minded and will understand; better out than festering away in, eh. But I did. Even as Twitter blazed away with hysterical headlines about London burning and I instinctively poured the cold water of anti-hysterical scorn on the dramatic language, I could not tear my attention from the live pictures of what appeared very much to be homes and livelihoods actually burning to the ground in London. For no apparent proper reason at all. Other than that we appeared to be all suddenly climbing into that handcart that we'd all been repeatedly told we would be taking to hell one day – like some prearranged geno-suicide signal had finally gone out. ..But, I mean, who sent that memo? Or tweet. I didn't get it. DId you? I'll bet you did. You get everything.
I wasn't ready at all. There was no orientation for this Armageddon team challenge – I had no idea it was scheduled for last week. Yet – bang! – last Saturday people were kicking things in in Tottenham and by the middle of the week England was apparently efficiently destroying itself, and dancing on the smoldering debris. All apparently gone like clockwork, just as in the practices. Which I'd also missed.
I felt like such a fool, not knowing what my tasks were. This is JUST why I always get voted off teams pretty soon after the jokes start to wear thin.
---
But ACTUALLY, it turns out that Mad Max: Beyond Millennium Dome is not reality after all. It is, apparently, too soon to tear the body panels off our cars and strap dead cats to our heads and start wheel-spinning in circles in the NCPs waving spears. Which seems a shame.
True, we can't seem to get our economy to grow at all, perhaps slightly because the world economy is shaking apart with tremours that just won't stop rumbling away underneath its current foundations. True, there is still a bigger gap between the wealthy and the poor here in the UK than anywhere else in the always-claiming-to-be-developed world. True, there are still groups of people all over the country that feel so disconnected from the idea of owning a part in the country's life that it looks like they feel disconnected from owning their own lives. True, no politician in Westminster seems to have words to come anywhere close to connecting those people back to the rest of us. True, this is true in cities all over the world. True, poverty eventually degrades dignity and hope back to animal fears – especially when it is also of education and mental empowerment. True, some people get very used to pissing about and taking stuff sooner than making stuff.
And true, when you feel that you have nothing to lose and nothing to work for, you find a certain kind of bitter freedom lurking in the limbo of it – one that might enable you to give riotous thanks when that limbo is actually at long last broken when something – anything – kicks off down the street. The thrill of change can be intoxicating. Especially when it involves free stuff.
But it's not the only truth.
What is hearteningly truthful is that most people in Britain do own their own lives. Of course they do. They do value their freedoms. Do pick up a broom to not just clear up and start again but to help each other clear up and start again. And you can bet your future on the truth that most young people get it too. In fact, an awful lot of them know the wisdom of the streets a lot more than you do. If you're tempted to use phrases like 'generational moral vacuum' you're not just a bit wordy, you've also been watching too much telly. It's probably you that's disconnected. And by you, I obviously mean me.
Because something else I've realised this week that seems to be unshakably true is that I am a reasonably useless arse who knows very little of the real world. It's no revelation, you understand, but a reaffirmation.
---
You may have done your own version of this during last week, but I spent much of it expending emotional energy pacing in circles declaring things uselessly at the TV, the computer screen and the radio. The riots made me feel a lot of stuff and think a lot of stuff and shout a fair bit of stuff but not do a lot of stuff. Which at least involved not nicking a lot of stuff either.
I want to teach some kid to read. Some kid who could end up leaving school without the ability to analyse themselves and their world if someone outside the self-defeating bureaucracy of the education system didn't step in and help. But who. And how? I'm no teacher. Teachers, I thought, would make excellent teachers.
I want to hug Tariq Jahan for appealing for calm mere hours after his son Haroon had been murdered by hit and run in the riots in Birmingham. And so do you, and so do so many people of all communities up and down the country – a fact that doesn't just validate his inspirational courage, it illustrates it. He shouldn't have had to demonstrate his character under these circumstances, it's clearly just who he is – as a man, as a father and as a British citizen. We cheer him on because he represents values that are important to us. Which is why we want to sob for him and for the family of the two brothers killed with young Haroon that night. But he doesn't need me echoing more empty praise when his son is dead. He needs the justice of free, peaceful streets where he lives.
I want to go to a police station and tell them they're bloody heroes for stepping up to serve their communities in the most thankless of roles, doing it so often as they do with such heart and intelligence. Even as I want to beg them to not give in to the emotional pressure to feel that their job is some sort of military front line – a place with the strategic imperative of Them And Us. Tottenham's gun crime might feel like the front line on some Tuesday nights I guess, same as Baltimore or who knows, but the army's terrifying challenges under fire are fundamentally different to those of the civil police service, even when you have to wade into petrol bombs and bottles and fight – with your life and all your wits and discipline to protect our free streets. But why would your average experienced copper need a flimsy-limbed oaf like me to helpfully point out any of this to them?
I want to go to every kid in the nick after the weekend and drag them by their prison tag to a mirror and shout over their shoulder in their face: 'Don't you realise what you're capable of? You're a freaking human being – you're amazing, you bloody idiot. You're unique in the sodding universe. Stop acting like you don't give a shit and that you're not part of the rest of us – own your own life. Stop acting like a victim everyone wants to punch'. But, as they might politely point out, what the flying fuck-a-ding-dong do I know?
Because I really most want to stand in front of that mirror alone and shout in my own face: 'And THIS is how you're going to make a practical difference to the people around you', and know what it is.
But I can't, it seems. Not yet. Can you?
I'll bet you can. You live in the real world. You're already doing it. But feeling a bit useless when you've already been given all the essential tools you need for independence and confidence that so many youngsters are fighting to find is also part of real life across the UK. Loads of us feel uselessly disconnected from each other. We don't know how to connect our values and hopes to people who appear to act so differently. So angeringly differently to us.
This feeling, in all its different expressions across the British classes, is something that unites our kingdom. But I think there may be a way out for every one of us from that entrapment of feeling:
True freedom is having the confidence to serve.
..I know this. I just don't know where I could or should serve effectively.
When you appreciate the profound value of service – the ultimate respect that it is – you are likely to love the person you notice serving you. And when you demonstrate that gratitude with returned service, they may love you back. Because, after all, love is service. It's something you do. Something you build society with. But it's only real and true and effective when you do it as an instinct, or at least decision, and an end in itself, expecting nothing back directly.
The geniously simple truth, though, is that respect, service, love, all start with the conscious use of two very powerful everyday words – powerful precisely because of their easily-overlooked modesty – 'please' and 'thankyou'. And don't you dare laugh.
This is essentially all I learned from my parents, boiled down into two words. And, as the riots unfolded on the TV in the background, my mother was having her knee replaced for free by the UK's National Health Service and was being calmly served by indefatigably caring professional medical staff, helping her to recover into a chapter of new freedom for her, after years of painful limitation. She spent most of her time in there saying thankyou.
The challenge modern Britain is really presenting us with, even as so many of us give thanks, is how to use our freedoms to serve eachother's.
I shall ponder this some more as I slip back into the comfortable oblivion of responding to my own life's little fires to fight.
---
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Du vingt.
Du vingt.
Content.
An interesting word to see written down; how do you imagine I'm saying it?
As a noun its meaning can, in one very specific context, be strangely at odds with the same word pronounced as an absolute adjective – for when it comes to internet marketing, content may be king but it's also a killer for feeling content. Internet marketing is never content with the amount of content you feed it – it's voracious.
Are you in any way at all still with me?
My convoluted point is simply that Momo's marketing is basically starting to pile up an implied world of things I need to apparently start putting my back into creating. It's daunting. And every current independent music artist feels it. There's so much opportunity out there. But it is, as ever, opportunity to do, like, WAY more hard work.
I have most recently responded to this imperative in the only way I instinctively know how: By doing the opposite of that and clearing off – vacating the grid for a couple of weeks and creating very little content at all.
I have, in fact, been con-tent. Or avec tente, if you will – for we have been enjoying a few smooth roads, bon-marché campsites, and plus-swank hotel rooms of France.
---
The lovely first lady of Momo and I have been celebrating something special. But the ubiquity of modern news is such that we could not escape some awareness of events that were at the opposite pole of human experience to ours in that moment. Shocking, heartbreaking stories of tragedy. ..How are any of us to respond to such things? Ever. But especially when you are in mid-toast of something brilliant.
Perhaps, I think, with judicial use of sober reflection and mental compartmentalising.
If there is ever a time to give thanks it is the moment you are aware of just how good and how precious your current moment is. For wolves will steal it at any opportunity – even in apparently safe places. In the foothills of the Alps, or the island woods of Norway, or an expensive London flat.
---
We have been celebrating an anniversary. Ours. Twenty frankly gobsmackingly gone-fast years since our wedding day, on an August Saturday in 1991 in Sussex. Everything I do by Bryan Adams seemed to last as long that summer. And many of the friendships already so well underway then and showing support on the day, are still amazingly on-going today and supportive today.
I suppose a marriage is like any other business; you have to create the very best content you can for it. And guard it jealously. We reinforce the brand idea of our marriage all the time in countless goofy ways. Brands are, after all, built on behaviours. But we've mainly been very lucky. And the best thing I know to do in the face of another day of good luck is to be grateful. And to try to show it.
After twenty years of successfully convincing a frankly remarkable woman to keep living with me and being incredible nice to me, here at the little dawn of a new chapter of new opportunities for us both, I have felt okay about stealing a few moments together – to toast our current and past happinesses, to remember but keep at a sensible distance our sadnesses, and to feel, for at least a short while, something to be cherished indeed.
Content.
x
---
Content.
An interesting word to see written down; how do you imagine I'm saying it?
As a noun its meaning can, in one very specific context, be strangely at odds with the same word pronounced as an absolute adjective – for when it comes to internet marketing, content may be king but it's also a killer for feeling content. Internet marketing is never content with the amount of content you feed it – it's voracious.
Are you in any way at all still with me?
My convoluted point is simply that Momo's marketing is basically starting to pile up an implied world of things I need to apparently start putting my back into creating. It's daunting. And every current independent music artist feels it. There's so much opportunity out there. But it is, as ever, opportunity to do, like, WAY more hard work.
I have most recently responded to this imperative in the only way I instinctively know how: By doing the opposite of that and clearing off – vacating the grid for a couple of weeks and creating very little content at all.
I have, in fact, been con-tent. Or avec tente, if you will – for we have been enjoying a few smooth roads, bon-marché campsites, and plus-swank hotel rooms of France.
---
The lovely first lady of Momo and I have been celebrating something special. But the ubiquity of modern news is such that we could not escape some awareness of events that were at the opposite pole of human experience to ours in that moment. Shocking, heartbreaking stories of tragedy. ..How are any of us to respond to such things? Ever. But especially when you are in mid-toast of something brilliant.
Perhaps, I think, with judicial use of sober reflection and mental compartmentalising.
If there is ever a time to give thanks it is the moment you are aware of just how good and how precious your current moment is. For wolves will steal it at any opportunity – even in apparently safe places. In the foothills of the Alps, or the island woods of Norway, or an expensive London flat.
---
We have been celebrating an anniversary. Ours. Twenty frankly gobsmackingly gone-fast years since our wedding day, on an August Saturday in 1991 in Sussex. Everything I do by Bryan Adams seemed to last as long that summer. And many of the friendships already so well underway then and showing support on the day, are still amazingly on-going today and supportive today.
I suppose a marriage is like any other business; you have to create the very best content you can for it. And guard it jealously. We reinforce the brand idea of our marriage all the time in countless goofy ways. Brands are, after all, built on behaviours. But we've mainly been very lucky. And the best thing I know to do in the face of another day of good luck is to be grateful. And to try to show it.
After twenty years of successfully convincing a frankly remarkable woman to keep living with me and being incredible nice to me, here at the little dawn of a new chapter of new opportunities for us both, I have felt okay about stealing a few moments together – to toast our current and past happinesses, to remember but keep at a sensible distance our sadnesses, and to feel, for at least a short while, something to be cherished indeed.
Content.
x
---
Friday, June 24, 2011
After School Dance Club.
After School Dance Club.
When I was fifteen, there was a place in town that I might well have considered a kind of mythical land of adventure; an exotic place of fabulous willowy creatures and strange ancient sporting customs. All for reasons that would have been obvious at the time, twenty-five years ago.
Sitting in Bournemouth School For Girls yesterday, however, I felt decidedly odd. Not because I'd blindly followed a faulty Satnav into the middle of the playground or anything – little as I know the backroads of anywhere north of the Cooper Dean, you understand – or because I didn't spot one lacrosse stick while I was there.
No. It was at least partly because when you don't have kids of your own, schools become weird places to walk around out of hours. ..Or any hours.
You know there's a whole industry of community normally swarming around the corridors of the place, swilling up the walls in sudden buzzing torrents of scruffily-branded pupils when bells ring out of the blue; a place as active and familiar to its thronging inhabitants as anything they've ever known of the world. A world in itself; self-sufficient and self-referential.
A ritual, diurnal chaos that parents navigate like harassed ambassadors of other countries – people who constantly roll their eyes and proclaim their adult homeland far away and how this isn't where they belong, yet move as fluently through the cultural rites as any four-foot native.
But by four in the afternoon, the same space is an almost-instant ghost town. Haunted by just the occasional uniformed small person, looking as spooked as you to find themselves in the unnerving netherworld of After School.
---
It also partly felt odd, as I sat on a very school-ish stacking chair in some new arts wing of BSG, because at four in the afternoon on a Thursday I should be making stuff I can sell. Not sitting in some new arts wing of something, listening to other people's kids talk about building 20-meter revolving mushrooms in the Lower Gardens.
Now. I told myself that Momo's whole remit is to be open to apparently-daft random opportunities and that the invitation from little local think tank Conurbation 2050 to pop along to their presentation to council members at the local girls' grammar was just such an on-brand random O for my business. Most especially because I do seem to have a thing in my bonnet about the town and its future, and the chance to shoot my mouth off about What I Reckon was too vainly tempting to pass up.
---
The first couple of hours saw presentations from two levels of ages from local schools about what we should do with Bournemouth. To anyone with any passing knowledge of the local press it will come as precisely zero surprise that every single project proposed for the future of our seaside town by its represented young people was to be built on the site of the Imax, or Waterfront building.
To anyone with a slightly longer knowledge of the local press it will come as no surprise – and, in fact, serve to illustrate well the likelihood of being able to build a metro system under East Dorset – to have heard one old town servant tell the room later that at the 25th birthday of the Bournemouth International Centre this week, someone actually turned up to complain that the BIC should never have been built in the first place. (I believe this chap's wise political response was something like "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET IT GO.")
The point in this time together was, however, really to see what the current generation of school folk really think of where they live. And I was heartened, as much as anything, by how much I recognised those young people. As cybernetic and otherworldly as media portrayals of post-internet age tweeners seem to be, I saw the same bunch of sincere and ordinary young humans I went to school with up there. Except the ones I went to school with were now sat in the audience, feeling as secretly bemused as me to be apparently responsible for everything now.
And I must say that one or two of those ideas presented by my generation's offspring were rather tempting to possibly just pinch.
---
Then came our presentation as a loose association of local ne'er-do-wells – or in some cases, rather-done-wells – to reps from the Bomo chambers. Most of whom had been inexplicably 'warned off' by the famously open-minded and community-spirited leader of Bournemouth Council for some political reason or other. "Will make for a slightly more interesting film version of this" said co-organiser Brian Jenner to me with a grin.
We would be sharing some essentially loony ideas about flying cars and space tourism or similar with a handful of weary, largely apparently elderly councilors – attempting to get chaps who have been serving the local community's pressing village green dog poo issues since the 1970s excited about the practical plans for Bournemouth's monorail system and hydroelectric offshore energy farm and sub-oribital space ladder attraction planned in earnest for 2050.
When I got up at the very end and, just slightly demented from fatigue, began to extol the virtues of community drumming and how dance can unlock business innovation and – most importantly – my Branded Bomo Artz! Smock For Every BH Citizen initiative, I could see I was possibly losing one or two of them. Which, in one or two cases would have had me feeling for my mobile and the emergency services speed dial.
---
No. Of course, distorted comedy vignette aside, these guys are committed public servants and have a thankless, gradually exhausting task. I get it. And lord knows I respect it. It takes a hardy and committed soul to step up to public life and the spread of members who gave up their time to listen lastnight included some personalities you'd be grateful to have on your side in any issue. It's just that some of them have been in the local political groove for a committedly long time and have certain peccadillos of perspective. Some of the fresher council faces who joined us in that half-empty school hall I thought represented some heartening new outlook.
I mean, I'm really only good for shooting my mouth off with no qualification. I get that too. But my hard-earned experience at doing anything whatsoever in public is the ability to do it with gusto to almost nobody in an empty school hall somewhere. Which must count for something, right?
Sometimes the creative road takes you to odd places and claps its metaphorical hands to get you to sometimes literally dance. And when it comes to the creative life of this neck of the woods, I am prepared at least to do the odd unco-ordinated jig if it will have some kind of effect as a fertility dance to the seeds we're trying to sow in people's minds about the possibilities around us as we ponder the future.
I think there's a lot of potential to unlock in this part of the world, and I'm happy to turn up and drone on about it if kindly asked.
---
Below is my little speech about the cultural hopes for the future of our inspirational but politically annoying part of the world. A very-much work in progress that barely touches the issues. I will write a full manifesto about it soon, no doubt. Mean time, many thanks to local innovation legend, Matt Desmier, for furnishing me with a few uncharacteristic Actual Facts and to Brian Jenner and local MP Tobias Elwood for foolishly inviting me along to hear a bad example of speech writing.
See what you think. And feel free to read out loud in my slightly pompous over-sincere faux-posh Southbourne accent.
---
Inspiration and innovation:
Re-imagining the heart of the south coast.
How arts and business can encourage a clear vision for Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth.
As we consider all these ideas and plans and exciting thoughts for the future of where we live, I often feel quite encouraged that so many people have so many big ideas for the place. Over the sumptuous breakfasts we've shared at Conurbation 2050 gatherings, I can feel quite inspired.
But I think there is one issue that ties all these different things together; that presents itself as a fairly immediate challenge, but also as a potential solution.
The one question that I believe hangs over everything we’re thinking about today is: What is Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth’s vision?
Now, to ask such a question is not to question all the hard work and ideas already going on in all our local authorities to address that every day. But, you see, I don’t believe that it is my local authority’s job to give me a vision. I think it’s our local authorities’ job to cleverly facilitate and focus and amplify and encourage my vision. Your vision. To tap into what’s already true about where we live – the resources, the people, the potential. To help it work better.
And I think the way to unlock our vision for the heart of the south coast is to champion ways to bring together business and the arts. And do it obviously.
--
The challenge I think we really face is one of branding. Now, branding is a fairly soulless media word that media types themselves shy away from because it can confuse – but branding is none-the-less the challenge we face because it is concerned with perception; how people see us. And how we see ourselves.
A brand isn’t a logo. It isn’t a typeface or a tagline or a tee shirt. It isn’t a product – it isn’t even an initiative. A brand is simply an idea in someone’s head about you. About your business. When someone says the name of your product, what’s the first impression to drop into the mind of the listener? That’s your brand.
So the question is: What do you think of when you hear Christchurch, Poole, Bournemouth? And just as importantly, what do potential customers hear?
..It matters, because it’s silly human impressions that guide our decisions. It’s my daft romantic notions about a place that make me want to go there on holiday, or not.
Our job as local stakeholders is to clear the way for the very best ideas and impressions of our part of the world to connect with its audience.
And I think the very best people to help us do this are the creatives.
--
This is already a place of great creativity and media work – did you know that? A place where arts and business are already working together. For example:
Right in the heart of the area, on the busy borderland between Poole and Bournemouth, we have two world class universities. Bournemouth University is home to the National Centre for Computer Animation which provided more CGI artists for the film Avatar than any other single country (54 in total). It’s also home to the Centre for Digital Entertainment and the country’s only Centre for Excellence in Media Practice.
Earlier this year, Bournemouth University and the National Centre for Computer Animation was held up as a prime example by Ian Livingstone OBE in the government-backed NESTA report into skills for the visual effects and computer gaming industry.
Last year the Academy Award for Visual Effects in a Motion Picture went to BU graduate for his work on the film Inception.
Meanwhile, Arts University College at Bournemouth graduate Simon Beaufoy won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Slumdog Millionaire. One of Simon’s previous films, The Full Monty, was written whilst he was a student at the institute and only narrowly missed out on an award.
Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tilman is also an AUCB graduate, as is internationally renowned rock photographer Andy Earl.
Significantly too, the Academy Award-winning visual effects studio, Framestore CFC, who have produced effects for all of the Harry Potter movies, Avatar and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory amongst others and have studios in London and New York, are so enamoured with the graduates being produced by these two universities, they are opening up a third location here in Bournemouth.
And David Sproxton, Founder and CEO of Aardman Animation, employs more graduates from the two Bournemouth universities than any other location in the world.
Meanwhile, the more than 100 creative and digital agencies locally boast some of the best in the business – award winners in their fields, from web, to advertising, from games to marketing.
Dance SouthWest based their exciting new school, Pavilion Dance, right in front of the pier approach in Bournemouth’s historic Pavilion Theatre – creating a dynamic new facility drawing dance students and other creatives from across the south right down to our seafront to learn and share their art.
And while The Lighthouse attracts and encourages arts coverage to the area like no other venue between Southampton and the West Country, the BIC has placed itself firmly on the big name music and comedy grid, bringing audiences in to see some of the biggest names in pop and TV – even as the Christchurch Regent Centre does more to champion local theatrical talent and independent film throughout its packed schedule than perhaps
anywhere else in the region.
But besides the media talent here in Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth, the area is also home to a burgeoning creative scene for practicing artists of all disciplines – painters, poets, writers, sculptors and musicians, with new bands and music acts searching for venues locally all the time. Between the music hubs of London, Brighton and Bristol – right in the middle is our conurbation. With a lot of creative people trekking past it.
People are meeting in upstairs rooms, cafes, empty retail space, small live venues and in front of big stages to celebrate and invest in the arts right here, where we live. And a lot of people from beyond the area already know this.
The trick is to realise its potential, and do all we can to make it obvious. To enable it to bring our brand alive.
---
The practical truth is that brands are built on behaviours. If we say we are an area ideal for business, we must provide an effortless, well-connected transport and business infrastructure. If we say we are a tourist destination, we must provide the very finest hotels across the age and budget markets, and we must give tourists ample reason to spend time and money here.
But it is the arts and culture that hold the key to this. It’s the writers, designers, artists and performers who will create the buzz about being here – not simply by providing more of the attractions themselves, but by having the skills to articulate the idea of the area to potential investors – from family tourists, to international business. To help us speak in the right tone of voice to the right audiences.
If we realise this – and the potential of it – then we must behave accordingly. We must let it feed our vision, let it make our vision obvious. We must provide facilities that not only encourage big creative business to relocate here, but which encourage the creative individual to work here. And we must build those facilities in symbolic locations – purposeful, obvious and proud. A place very obviously friendly to innovation.
We have a vision for the area as the creative heart of the south coast.
A vision not for an elitist niche, but for everyone. A cultural reputation that would inspire business and tourism across the board. An eminently deliverable vision – because it would be tapping into something already happening here, already true. Built from the ground up – from the individual pixels of people practicing their art, being who they are, professionally and personally, right here in the colourful crossroads of the south.
A vision of our area as one where anyone can find ways to tap into their potential. Find inspiration. And more than that, something vital – encouragement.
We believe that throwing strategic weight behind arts, culture and media would bring the heart of the south coast into focus as internationally as it would locally – the outlook we should be aiming for as we look ahead to 2050. Or even 2015.
---
When I was fifteen, there was a place in town that I might well have considered a kind of mythical land of adventure; an exotic place of fabulous willowy creatures and strange ancient sporting customs. All for reasons that would have been obvious at the time, twenty-five years ago.
Sitting in Bournemouth School For Girls yesterday, however, I felt decidedly odd. Not because I'd blindly followed a faulty Satnav into the middle of the playground or anything – little as I know the backroads of anywhere north of the Cooper Dean, you understand – or because I didn't spot one lacrosse stick while I was there.
No. It was at least partly because when you don't have kids of your own, schools become weird places to walk around out of hours. ..Or any hours.
You know there's a whole industry of community normally swarming around the corridors of the place, swilling up the walls in sudden buzzing torrents of scruffily-branded pupils when bells ring out of the blue; a place as active and familiar to its thronging inhabitants as anything they've ever known of the world. A world in itself; self-sufficient and self-referential.
A ritual, diurnal chaos that parents navigate like harassed ambassadors of other countries – people who constantly roll their eyes and proclaim their adult homeland far away and how this isn't where they belong, yet move as fluently through the cultural rites as any four-foot native.
But by four in the afternoon, the same space is an almost-instant ghost town. Haunted by just the occasional uniformed small person, looking as spooked as you to find themselves in the unnerving netherworld of After School.
---
It also partly felt odd, as I sat on a very school-ish stacking chair in some new arts wing of BSG, because at four in the afternoon on a Thursday I should be making stuff I can sell. Not sitting in some new arts wing of something, listening to other people's kids talk about building 20-meter revolving mushrooms in the Lower Gardens.
Now. I told myself that Momo's whole remit is to be open to apparently-daft random opportunities and that the invitation from little local think tank Conurbation 2050 to pop along to their presentation to council members at the local girls' grammar was just such an on-brand random O for my business. Most especially because I do seem to have a thing in my bonnet about the town and its future, and the chance to shoot my mouth off about What I Reckon was too vainly tempting to pass up.
---
The first couple of hours saw presentations from two levels of ages from local schools about what we should do with Bournemouth. To anyone with any passing knowledge of the local press it will come as precisely zero surprise that every single project proposed for the future of our seaside town by its represented young people was to be built on the site of the Imax, or Waterfront building.
To anyone with a slightly longer knowledge of the local press it will come as no surprise – and, in fact, serve to illustrate well the likelihood of being able to build a metro system under East Dorset – to have heard one old town servant tell the room later that at the 25th birthday of the Bournemouth International Centre this week, someone actually turned up to complain that the BIC should never have been built in the first place. (I believe this chap's wise political response was something like "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET IT GO.")
The point in this time together was, however, really to see what the current generation of school folk really think of where they live. And I was heartened, as much as anything, by how much I recognised those young people. As cybernetic and otherworldly as media portrayals of post-internet age tweeners seem to be, I saw the same bunch of sincere and ordinary young humans I went to school with up there. Except the ones I went to school with were now sat in the audience, feeling as secretly bemused as me to be apparently responsible for everything now.
And I must say that one or two of those ideas presented by my generation's offspring were rather tempting to possibly just pinch.
---
Then came our presentation as a loose association of local ne'er-do-wells – or in some cases, rather-done-wells – to reps from the Bomo chambers. Most of whom had been inexplicably 'warned off' by the famously open-minded and community-spirited leader of Bournemouth Council for some political reason or other. "Will make for a slightly more interesting film version of this" said co-organiser Brian Jenner to me with a grin.
We would be sharing some essentially loony ideas about flying cars and space tourism or similar with a handful of weary, largely apparently elderly councilors – attempting to get chaps who have been serving the local community's pressing village green dog poo issues since the 1970s excited about the practical plans for Bournemouth's monorail system and hydroelectric offshore energy farm and sub-oribital space ladder attraction planned in earnest for 2050.
When I got up at the very end and, just slightly demented from fatigue, began to extol the virtues of community drumming and how dance can unlock business innovation and – most importantly – my Branded Bomo Artz! Smock For Every BH Citizen initiative, I could see I was possibly losing one or two of them. Which, in one or two cases would have had me feeling for my mobile and the emergency services speed dial.
---
No. Of course, distorted comedy vignette aside, these guys are committed public servants and have a thankless, gradually exhausting task. I get it. And lord knows I respect it. It takes a hardy and committed soul to step up to public life and the spread of members who gave up their time to listen lastnight included some personalities you'd be grateful to have on your side in any issue. It's just that some of them have been in the local political groove for a committedly long time and have certain peccadillos of perspective. Some of the fresher council faces who joined us in that half-empty school hall I thought represented some heartening new outlook.
I mean, I'm really only good for shooting my mouth off with no qualification. I get that too. But my hard-earned experience at doing anything whatsoever in public is the ability to do it with gusto to almost nobody in an empty school hall somewhere. Which must count for something, right?
Sometimes the creative road takes you to odd places and claps its metaphorical hands to get you to sometimes literally dance. And when it comes to the creative life of this neck of the woods, I am prepared at least to do the odd unco-ordinated jig if it will have some kind of effect as a fertility dance to the seeds we're trying to sow in people's minds about the possibilities around us as we ponder the future.
I think there's a lot of potential to unlock in this part of the world, and I'm happy to turn up and drone on about it if kindly asked.
---
Below is my little speech about the cultural hopes for the future of our inspirational but politically annoying part of the world. A very-much work in progress that barely touches the issues. I will write a full manifesto about it soon, no doubt. Mean time, many thanks to local innovation legend, Matt Desmier, for furnishing me with a few uncharacteristic Actual Facts and to Brian Jenner and local MP Tobias Elwood for foolishly inviting me along to hear a bad example of speech writing.
See what you think. And feel free to read out loud in my slightly pompous over-sincere faux-posh Southbourne accent.
---
Inspiration and innovation:
Re-imagining the heart of the south coast.
How arts and business can encourage a clear vision for Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth.
As we consider all these ideas and plans and exciting thoughts for the future of where we live, I often feel quite encouraged that so many people have so many big ideas for the place. Over the sumptuous breakfasts we've shared at Conurbation 2050 gatherings, I can feel quite inspired.
But I think there is one issue that ties all these different things together; that presents itself as a fairly immediate challenge, but also as a potential solution.
The one question that I believe hangs over everything we’re thinking about today is: What is Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth’s vision?
Now, to ask such a question is not to question all the hard work and ideas already going on in all our local authorities to address that every day. But, you see, I don’t believe that it is my local authority’s job to give me a vision. I think it’s our local authorities’ job to cleverly facilitate and focus and amplify and encourage my vision. Your vision. To tap into what’s already true about where we live – the resources, the people, the potential. To help it work better.
And I think the way to unlock our vision for the heart of the south coast is to champion ways to bring together business and the arts. And do it obviously.
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The challenge I think we really face is one of branding. Now, branding is a fairly soulless media word that media types themselves shy away from because it can confuse – but branding is none-the-less the challenge we face because it is concerned with perception; how people see us. And how we see ourselves.
A brand isn’t a logo. It isn’t a typeface or a tagline or a tee shirt. It isn’t a product – it isn’t even an initiative. A brand is simply an idea in someone’s head about you. About your business. When someone says the name of your product, what’s the first impression to drop into the mind of the listener? That’s your brand.
So the question is: What do you think of when you hear Christchurch, Poole, Bournemouth? And just as importantly, what do potential customers hear?
..It matters, because it’s silly human impressions that guide our decisions. It’s my daft romantic notions about a place that make me want to go there on holiday, or not.
Our job as local stakeholders is to clear the way for the very best ideas and impressions of our part of the world to connect with its audience.
And I think the very best people to help us do this are the creatives.
--
This is already a place of great creativity and media work – did you know that? A place where arts and business are already working together. For example:
Right in the heart of the area, on the busy borderland between Poole and Bournemouth, we have two world class universities. Bournemouth University is home to the National Centre for Computer Animation which provided more CGI artists for the film Avatar than any other single country (54 in total). It’s also home to the Centre for Digital Entertainment and the country’s only Centre for Excellence in Media Practice.
Earlier this year, Bournemouth University and the National Centre for Computer Animation was held up as a prime example by Ian Livingstone OBE in the government-backed NESTA report into skills for the visual effects and computer gaming industry.
Last year the Academy Award for Visual Effects in a Motion Picture went to BU graduate for his work on the film Inception.
Meanwhile, Arts University College at Bournemouth graduate Simon Beaufoy won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Slumdog Millionaire. One of Simon’s previous films, The Full Monty, was written whilst he was a student at the institute and only narrowly missed out on an award.
Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tilman is also an AUCB graduate, as is internationally renowned rock photographer Andy Earl.
Significantly too, the Academy Award-winning visual effects studio, Framestore CFC, who have produced effects for all of the Harry Potter movies, Avatar and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory amongst others and have studios in London and New York, are so enamoured with the graduates being produced by these two universities, they are opening up a third location here in Bournemouth.
And David Sproxton, Founder and CEO of Aardman Animation, employs more graduates from the two Bournemouth universities than any other location in the world.
Meanwhile, the more than 100 creative and digital agencies locally boast some of the best in the business – award winners in their fields, from web, to advertising, from games to marketing.
Dance SouthWest based their exciting new school, Pavilion Dance, right in front of the pier approach in Bournemouth’s historic Pavilion Theatre – creating a dynamic new facility drawing dance students and other creatives from across the south right down to our seafront to learn and share their art.
And while The Lighthouse attracts and encourages arts coverage to the area like no other venue between Southampton and the West Country, the BIC has placed itself firmly on the big name music and comedy grid, bringing audiences in to see some of the biggest names in pop and TV – even as the Christchurch Regent Centre does more to champion local theatrical talent and independent film throughout its packed schedule than perhaps
anywhere else in the region.
But besides the media talent here in Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth, the area is also home to a burgeoning creative scene for practicing artists of all disciplines – painters, poets, writers, sculptors and musicians, with new bands and music acts searching for venues locally all the time. Between the music hubs of London, Brighton and Bristol – right in the middle is our conurbation. With a lot of creative people trekking past it.
People are meeting in upstairs rooms, cafes, empty retail space, small live venues and in front of big stages to celebrate and invest in the arts right here, where we live. And a lot of people from beyond the area already know this.
The trick is to realise its potential, and do all we can to make it obvious. To enable it to bring our brand alive.
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The practical truth is that brands are built on behaviours. If we say we are an area ideal for business, we must provide an effortless, well-connected transport and business infrastructure. If we say we are a tourist destination, we must provide the very finest hotels across the age and budget markets, and we must give tourists ample reason to spend time and money here.
But it is the arts and culture that hold the key to this. It’s the writers, designers, artists and performers who will create the buzz about being here – not simply by providing more of the attractions themselves, but by having the skills to articulate the idea of the area to potential investors – from family tourists, to international business. To help us speak in the right tone of voice to the right audiences.
If we realise this – and the potential of it – then we must behave accordingly. We must let it feed our vision, let it make our vision obvious. We must provide facilities that not only encourage big creative business to relocate here, but which encourage the creative individual to work here. And we must build those facilities in symbolic locations – purposeful, obvious and proud. A place very obviously friendly to innovation.
We have a vision for the area as the creative heart of the south coast.
A vision not for an elitist niche, but for everyone. A cultural reputation that would inspire business and tourism across the board. An eminently deliverable vision – because it would be tapping into something already happening here, already true. Built from the ground up – from the individual pixels of people practicing their art, being who they are, professionally and personally, right here in the colourful crossroads of the south.
A vision of our area as one where anyone can find ways to tap into their potential. Find inspiration. And more than that, something vital – encouragement.
We believe that throwing strategic weight behind arts, culture and media would bring the heart of the south coast into focus as internationally as it would locally – the outlook we should be aiming for as we look ahead to 2050. Or even 2015.
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Monday, June 13, 2011
Showing off local talent.
Showing off local talent.
It was a good headline from the Echo this week, as they previewed Tell And Show in Wednesday's edition. For, it seems, there was indeed a lot of local talent showing off at Champions at our little event lastnight.
Now, almost a day later – and already into rather different and pressing creative Momo challenges – I essentially just want to pass on much love and thanks to all for a joyful evening, and for how everyone's love for the vibe made a weirdly wet Sunday night very warm.
Firstly, to Suzy of Strawberry Fields Represents for creating such a madcap night. A highly original rosta of arts and music on one night's poster our seaside town has not perhaps seen before – and she made it happen for everyone. Her enthusiasm and encouragement for so many creatives seems quietly superhuman sometimes.
But a swiftly-following and sizeable thanks too to you if you made it down. Or even just made it obvious you wished you could have joined us.
The enthusiasm from everyone was immense and wonderful. I can speak for the whole gang, I feel, when I say that we loved giving you a blast – and that you felt it. To all the Momo amigos in particular who turned out to cheer on a chum – it's unlikely I didn't tell you in a soppy delirium that I love you at some point lastnight, but if I didn't, I meant to. ..Which doesn't make you less special than you thought if I did, you silly sausage.
Props too of course to all the artists I met and was able to introduce to everyone. To Sally and the big-hearted vowels of the Funky Little Choir; to demure young songwriting talent Adam Dupree and the immense family of his, believing in him so much they've secretly been building him a web presence to help market his obvious talent; to the consummate entertainment professional Ishmael and the thought-provoking word-dextrous talents of the Poets Republic, for opening up the night's imagination early; to the impressive, synth-geek brothers Newport, Neil and Dave, who felt like instant comrades, inviting us on stage to muck about all over a new tune of theirs – a huge, adrenalin-goggle-eyed, multi-drumming high for everyone to end the night on. Class. I must say thanks to Paul for helming the sound so coolly with a tricky mix to say the least, and to Tony at Champs for letting us in in the first place.
And a special thanks too to one of the key people in the line-up – Rupert Southcombe, for DJing just the right tone and segueing together the whole warm, groovy, quirky personality of the show from behind the decks. A legend.
Yet, among my sincerest thanks must go to the boys. The gentlemanly talent on stage with me lastnight was a humbling comfort for an undisciplined show-off:
To Simon Mellish – for adding an incomparable percussive extra dynamic to the whole groove of the show. A drumming legend, serving our sound on an exciting new level.
To Pat Hayes – slide supremo, for not letting his international trombone talent be phased by a fool flailing his arms just to his right.
To Tom Walsh – for making it through hail and storm and broken tree all the way to Bomo from the capital, to still blow the horn with such infectious enthusiasm.
To Mark Crowe - for stepping in on sax as a pro so seasoned, he simply rode with the madcap attempts to combine electronic daftness with real musical skill.
And then, of course, to John. Mr Herbison is the talent I lack – the horn band leader, not merely sourcing and then guiding the ensemble, but slaving over interpreting the parts – bringing them to life with the harmonies and dynamics of a world-class talent. A demur one it is a privilege to feel able to rely on on stage, and in studio.
But lastly, to Mark. If Mr Adkins were any more encouraging to Momo, I'd have to salary him to try to assuage my sense of grateful indebtedness to him. Over many years of playing together, I have always felt safe in his sense of groove and style behind the drum kit. That he and Sharon and Beth want to cheer on Momo:tempo quite so enthusiastically is just an honour. His excitement, as a cynical old brummie, is an essential fuel to my enjoyment of what we've done with Momo so far. And hearing those beats come alive… Amazing.
---
I said to someone lastnight that I think I honestly felt as much enjoyment having a legitimate platform to introduce and encourage other people as I did having one to introduce and encourage me. What a thing – to be handed the opportunity to stand in front of a few folk and say: Have you heard about this?
Forgive me for being an emotional booby for a moment, but how many times can any of us say that we find ourselves in the most natural of places – right where we are most being ourselves and feel most at home? In this life, perhaps not often.
I can at least say that I know what it feels like, however. Because, in our random little show on a rainy Sunday night in Bournemouth, I felt it lastnight.
And I think it showed.
---
BHBeat: Momo, Funky Little Choir and more of Bournemouth's creatives 'Tell and show'
Strawberry Fields Represents: Music, poetry, film and art – huge success for Tell And Show with Momo.
It was a good headline from the Echo this week, as they previewed Tell And Show in Wednesday's edition. For, it seems, there was indeed a lot of local talent showing off at Champions at our little event lastnight.
Now, almost a day later – and already into rather different and pressing creative Momo challenges – I essentially just want to pass on much love and thanks to all for a joyful evening, and for how everyone's love for the vibe made a weirdly wet Sunday night very warm.
Firstly, to Suzy of Strawberry Fields Represents for creating such a madcap night. A highly original rosta of arts and music on one night's poster our seaside town has not perhaps seen before – and she made it happen for everyone. Her enthusiasm and encouragement for so many creatives seems quietly superhuman sometimes.
But a swiftly-following and sizeable thanks too to you if you made it down. Or even just made it obvious you wished you could have joined us.
The enthusiasm from everyone was immense and wonderful. I can speak for the whole gang, I feel, when I say that we loved giving you a blast – and that you felt it. To all the Momo amigos in particular who turned out to cheer on a chum – it's unlikely I didn't tell you in a soppy delirium that I love you at some point lastnight, but if I didn't, I meant to. ..Which doesn't make you less special than you thought if I did, you silly sausage.
Props too of course to all the artists I met and was able to introduce to everyone. To Sally and the big-hearted vowels of the Funky Little Choir; to demure young songwriting talent Adam Dupree and the immense family of his, believing in him so much they've secretly been building him a web presence to help market his obvious talent; to the consummate entertainment professional Ishmael and the thought-provoking word-dextrous talents of the Poets Republic, for opening up the night's imagination early; to the impressive, synth-geek brothers Newport, Neil and Dave, who felt like instant comrades, inviting us on stage to muck about all over a new tune of theirs – a huge, adrenalin-goggle-eyed, multi-drumming high for everyone to end the night on. Class. I must say thanks to Paul for helming the sound so coolly with a tricky mix to say the least, and to Tony at Champs for letting us in in the first place.
And a special thanks too to one of the key people in the line-up – Rupert Southcombe, for DJing just the right tone and segueing together the whole warm, groovy, quirky personality of the show from behind the decks. A legend.
Yet, among my sincerest thanks must go to the boys. The gentlemanly talent on stage with me lastnight was a humbling comfort for an undisciplined show-off:
To Simon Mellish – for adding an incomparable percussive extra dynamic to the whole groove of the show. A drumming legend, serving our sound on an exciting new level.
To Pat Hayes – slide supremo, for not letting his international trombone talent be phased by a fool flailing his arms just to his right.
To Tom Walsh – for making it through hail and storm and broken tree all the way to Bomo from the capital, to still blow the horn with such infectious enthusiasm.
To Mark Crowe - for stepping in on sax as a pro so seasoned, he simply rode with the madcap attempts to combine electronic daftness with real musical skill.
And then, of course, to John. Mr Herbison is the talent I lack – the horn band leader, not merely sourcing and then guiding the ensemble, but slaving over interpreting the parts – bringing them to life with the harmonies and dynamics of a world-class talent. A demur one it is a privilege to feel able to rely on on stage, and in studio.
But lastly, to Mark. If Mr Adkins were any more encouraging to Momo, I'd have to salary him to try to assuage my sense of grateful indebtedness to him. Over many years of playing together, I have always felt safe in his sense of groove and style behind the drum kit. That he and Sharon and Beth want to cheer on Momo:tempo quite so enthusiastically is just an honour. His excitement, as a cynical old brummie, is an essential fuel to my enjoyment of what we've done with Momo so far. And hearing those beats come alive… Amazing.
---
I said to someone lastnight that I think I honestly felt as much enjoyment having a legitimate platform to introduce and encourage other people as I did having one to introduce and encourage me. What a thing – to be handed the opportunity to stand in front of a few folk and say: Have you heard about this?
Forgive me for being an emotional booby for a moment, but how many times can any of us say that we find ourselves in the most natural of places – right where we are most being ourselves and feel most at home? In this life, perhaps not often.
I can at least say that I know what it feels like, however. Because, in our random little show on a rainy Sunday night in Bournemouth, I felt it lastnight.
And I think it showed.
---
BHBeat: Momo, Funky Little Choir and more of Bournemouth's creatives 'Tell and show'
Strawberry Fields Represents: Music, poetry, film and art – huge success for Tell And Show with Momo.
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