Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 20
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 20: Music is Power
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
My new Rhythmix job came with an incredible amount of freedom to explore something I was really starting to believe in; that music has an extraordinary power for positive change. It changes lives for the better, improves society, brings communities together.
This view of the importance of music was naively founded solely on my own experience. When just about everything else let me down, there was always the new album by Echo and the Bunnymen to turn to. The thrill of sneaking into the back of the 100 Club at 16 to see The Sound, the first actual ticket purchasing decision I had made of my own choice, had solidified this feeling. Suddenly I was captured by a world of people who looked like me, had the same interests as me, sang along as loudly as I did to the obscure lyrics of Judgement and Sense of Purpose. Everything positive that had happened to me was somehow inextricably linked to a music escapade, whether I was balancing stolen pallets in the back of a van or trying to secure a life partner. Somehow music seemed to be the thing that could make it all happen.
Through the work of an organisation called Music for Change, run by an incredibly driven character who was absolutely determined to bring every musician in the whole of West Africa to Canterbury, for reasons which were apparent to only him, I had previously been exposed to the term ‘community music’. I knew very little about it, except that a surprising number of people involved in it seemed to smell of patchouli oil and have a strong attraction to hitting things from obscure parts of the world.
What I did know was that compared to the staid and old fashioned music being offered by a lot of formal music education, community music seemed to offer a hugely fun experience that was likely to be a lot more appealing and engaging to young people. Armed with a cheque book that had been pre-loaded with a quarter of a million pounds of local authority money, I therefore set about driving the length and breadth of the South East region meeting with all the various groups and individuals that were delivering work in this field.
The first surprise was discovering that this idea of an alternative to formal music education had been around and in development since at least the 1980s, exemplified by the organisation actually called Community Music, capital C capital M, a London based group of musicians and educators founded in 1983 who had begun to explore the boundaries of what types of music it was considered either appropriate or useful to teach young people. The second, and a real revelation to me, was how much of it didn’t involve what at the time was labelled ‘World Music’ but was actually using Rock, Pop and Electronic music as tools of engagement and learning.
My initial plan for the £250,000 was to hand it all over to groups like Music for Change and let them get on with doing what they were already doing, leaving me to take the credit for it and carry on having a jolly nice time hanging about with indie pop stars in dimly lit places in strange parts of London. I had made the point quite forcefully in the interview process that it would be wrong to ignore all the existing work going on, and that the best way to use the money would be to put some of it behind great work already taking place. I’d been careful not to mention that the other bonus of such a model was that it would require the minimum amount of work from me for the maximum output by everyone else. Across the first three months of meetings with community music groups, I quickly learned what a low level of ambition this was.
There were people building tech platforms so that young people could make music using video samples. There was a group making brand new instruments out of rubbish like some sort of Womble cult. There were DJs, producers, MCs, and Rappers running incredibly complex workshops on difficult estates and producing music that had genuine chart potential. These days I think many people reading this will be aware of such work, which has received a great deal more publicity and promotion since the late 1990s as a result of the existence of Youth Music, an organisation which came to core fund much of the work I would do in this field in the next twenty years. At the time, however, it was happening in an organic, underground, manner, the majority of it away from the public eye. It certainly hadn’t come across my radar.
This lack of public awareness of community music making resulted in part from a hierarchy in the community music scene, It had essentially been formed by a limited group of people united by shared ideas about interaction, engagement, and the increasing of the circle of ‘acceptable’ genres of music education. These people were all of a certain age, outlook, and educational standard. As a result, they tended to speak about the work within a limited and internalised vocabulary that wasn’t really seeking to engage the public, and was certainly failing to promote the work outside of a limited academic circle. This hierarchy were very interested in discussing a conceptual framework informed by anthropological and performance theory that allows for a deeper understanding of the connection between community music practices and processes of social transformation. They would ask if I wanted to chat about conceiving community music practice as a cultural performance, and call me up to draw attention to the complex relation between the meanings and relationships experienced inside the musical practice and how these affect and transform the relationships that constitute the broader social and cultural world of the participants. They wanted to ensure that I understood that the relationships enacted in community music practice involving socially marginalised groups are better understood as inherently ambiguous, while challenging the idealistic perspectives often encountered in community music research. By contract, I had a slightly simpler concept: I wanted to give some kids some guitars and see if they made an horrific punk rock noise which would upset their teachers and annoy their parents.
I decided to give some of the best community music groups I could find some money and get them to do what I wanted, while leaving them to get on with psycho-analysing among themselves the reasons why they had done it.
This win-win formula was an almost instant success. Suddenly, local authority music services that had been constantly berated by Ofsted for failing to reach all parts of the local youth community were deluged with good news stories about workshops happening in the most unlikely of places with the most unlikely of music. In the first twelve months of the project we delivered new music opportunities to over 10,000 young people who hadn’t engaged with music education before, creating hundreds of performances, recordings and, very importantly, press coverage. As a result, I started getting invited to things to ask how I’d done it, and the four local authority music services that had commissioned me to do it immediately asked if I would do it again.
Somewhere in the middle of this, Youth Music was created by the then Labour Government, who set it up with a very large, and I mean very large, budget that they didn't really expect to get and certainly didn’t know how to spend. Enter the hero of the hour, that idiot from the toilet in Tunbridge Wells, you know, the one who is literally the archetypal failed education system reject. The very amicable and agreeable head of Brighton & Hove Music Services and I are invited for ‘an exploratory chat’ in London one day, taken into a dark room, sat down, given a cup of tea, and offered half a million pounds to do what we are already doing, only this time with their logo on it. We graciously decide to accept, then run out onto the back of Bedford Square clutching a signed agreement before they can change their minds. I pause briefly outside the office where twenty years earlier I had spent eight months chopping out lines of speed for crazed not-quite-architects and wonder exactly what kind of life this is.
It being quite hard to spend half a million pounds in twelve short months on your own, I realised that I would need to spend some of it on some sort of office set up which would ideally feature more than just me shouting down a phone. I call up reinforcements in the shape of the tallest living singer in Kent, the Lanky Fop.
This fella and I have bumped around each other since I wandered into the Music Store Owner’s shop at the age of 14 demanding to be mis-sold an over-priced and wonky bass guitar. This was a task the Lanky Fop had set about fulfilling as, like everyone else in the Music Store Owner’s orbit, he had accidentally ended up working there for a bit. He and the Music Store Owner went all the way back to school days, a separate book of calamity, idiocy and misadventures which one of them should definitely write. Although I imagine it would be even less believable than this half-recalled nonsense.
The Lanky Fop was what I imagine a movie of the earlier chapters of this book might paint as my arch musical nemesis, which is to say that we were the only two people in the local area with relatively successful bands for a period of time and therefore apparently in competition for the interest of the non-existent record labels and managers that were imminently about to sign us both up. In our imaginations.
My musical opposition had taken a particularly serious, and in my view rockist, approach to his own stab at a musical career, busying himself learning how to play an instrument and writing some actual songs (or at least stealing ideas from some very solid and obscure sources, which, trust me, is almost the same thing). He’d not spent any time at all getting people to shows, which is just about all I’d done. The consequence was that while I was greatly annoyed by his technical ability and craftsmanship he was equally agitated by the large numbers of people I used to play to. Sometime after we had both abandoned any pursuit of our five minutes on Top of the Pops we had reached a very healthy and respectful truce, spending significant time together in which we bonded over a mutual agreement on the various appalling failings and positive attributes of the Music Store Owner.
The Lanky Fop agrees that getting out of his mind-numbingly dull factory work and coming and doing all my work so I can get back down to Shuttleworth’s would be a jolly good idea, so now I have a team. Well, a duo at least.
Across the next twenty years, this duo would expand and grow, with the organisation going from strength to strength, working with hundreds of thousands of people, delivering literally millions of music opportunities, and raising millions of pounds to do it. The work would expose me to an incredible range of the positive impacts that music can have, from the very simple task of simply giving a young person a chance to feel they have created something, through to its remarkable and life changing impact on those living with dementia. As usual with me, I had no idea what I was getting myself into I just thought that something looked interesting, would be good if I had a go at it, and might benefit from a slightly more punk approach to making it happen.
I wouldn’t ever be welcomed into the inner sanctum of the community music hierarchy. The outsider nature of my engagement with them was set in stone early on at a gathering organised by Youth Music in the Early Years Music Centre in Hull. Taking a set at the back with the ex-bass player in Ludicrous Lollipops, a man who had nearly lost a tooth when a wayward microphone smashed him in the face in the former strip club in which we had once hosted gigs before the days of the Holy Toilet, we had jointly worked out fairly quickly that we didn’t really belong here. This feeling was cemented within the opening half hour ‘warm-up’ presentation, when we were exhorted, at the ungodly pre-coffee hit hour of 9.30am, to ‘imagine we are dolphins encountering a human for the first time, what notes would you sing? Let your mouth and your heart make those notes now!” The Ludicrous Lollipop considered this option, looked at me, put his feet on the desk, leaned his chair back as far as it would go, and offered his forthright opinion that the speaker might wish to go elsewhere to see if that suggestion might get a better hearing. My raucous laughter at this suggestion placed the mark of the troublemaker onto my forehead where it would remain for the next 20 years.
I would, however, achieve a measure of respectability and recognition from this work that would result in an invitation for the pallet stealing king of Tunbridge Wells to meet the Queen. And Prince Phillip.
In 2002, the four local music authorities that make up the board of the Rhythmix project were invited to create a special event for the Queen’s Jubilee. As a result of all the brilliant press coverage the project had attracted, it was decided that this event should be organised by, and feature work from, our humble little project. To that end, from February I had been hauled into meetings with various people with titles like Sheriff and Sergeant while the teams of musicians working with young people in Medway, East Sussex, Surrey and Brighton & Hove busied themselves putting together a performance featuring carnival costumes and over 500 children and young people hitting drums, bells, gongs, djembe, and taiko. This had resulted in coaches from all across the south east converging on the Ardingly Showground to beat the crap out of percussion while the Queen and Prince Phillip had a walk about.
The performance was the sort of wild and chaotic event we thought it should be, and concluded with the organisers, that’s me and the Lanky Fop, stood at opposite ends of a semi circle of people from the local authorities waiting to do a meet and greet. Meeting the Queen is not strictly in my ballpark of things I’m comfortable with, but you do odd things in pursuit of charitable aims and things you believe in. I was assured that a photo with me and the Queen in it would persuade trusts, foundations, brands and commercial partners that we were the sort of organisation that gets asked to meet the Queen, which, apparently, is the sort of thing they look for in a charitable organisation before handing out their largesse.
So, my republican principles left at home on a shelf, here I am, wearing the suit I got married in, slightly slipping about in mud, waiting for the Queen to pop over so we can get that shot. Eventually the drumming subsides a bit and she appears, blue hat, rain coat, black gloves. I suspect you know what the Queen looks like. In real life she’s exactly the same only slightly shorter. She sticks out a gloved hand, so I shake it, which I’ve been told by the Sheriffs and the Sergeants is the acceptable thing to do, although apparently you should never, ever, put your own hand out before she offers to shake yours. Etiquette and Royal Protocols. They’d suggested I might like to call her Your Majesty or Ma’am, but I avoid calling her anything and she does the usual “what do you do” and “what a fabulous afternoon” bit and I do my “thanks for coming, sorry it was a bit loud” response. Take photo, job done.
(Note for readers: This isn’t a fact checked guide to the years of my life 1964 to 2024 inclusive with a set of detailed foot notes substantiating it’s validity. It’s what I remember and how I think I felt about it. However, it did all really happen. This is a genuine photo featuring the real me and the real queen. I think I have previously advised you that most of what you’re reading, while tremendously unlikely, is actually true. Even this bit, which definitely sounds like I made it up, even to me)
I introduce the head of Surrey Music who is stood next to me, then she starts working her way down the line towards the Lanky Fop who is determined to get a picture with her because it will make his mum happy.
I’m watching her process down the line, repeating the same things over and over again, when out of the corner of my eye, not quite in my line of sight, I become dimly aware of an advancing dancing figure in a long mac. It’s Prince Phillip and he is attempting a lose interpretation of something between a salsa shuffle and cockney dancing. He gyrates towards me, gets uncomfortably close, and then stares me directly in the face with a scowl. He points back at the 500 madly drumming people behind him.
“Did you do this?” he says with an accusatory edge to his voice.
“Er…. yes” I respond. He fixes me with a hard stare.
“Why? Why have you done it?” he leans in conspiratorially, then booms in the loudest possible voice “Awful. Absolutely dreadful. I mean, what’s it even supposed to be? A godawful row, that’s what. Dreadful! Don’t ever do it again!!”
He pulls back, grins, grabs me by the hand, then shakes it again as he seethes the words “Never. Ever. Again” through his teeth.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been told off by the Queen’s husband, I imagine I’m not the only one, but there’s not a lot you feel you can say in response without the possibility of being incarcerated in the tower flashing through your mind. I look at him, he grins again, then he moves on. The Head of Surrey Music is next in line, and is already shaken by the encounter he has just witnessed.
“What about you” says His Royal Highness, pointing. “Were you responsible too?”
“Er… well, I….er…. the thing is” mumbles my co-conspirator.
“Brilliant” snaps the Prince. “Absolutely marvellous. One of the best things I’ve ever seen or heard. Quite remarkable. You should get an honour!!” He shakes him vigorously by the hand and moves on to the Head of East Sussex, the American One who was already a bundle of ex-colonial nerves before this.
“What about you?”
“Me….. er, yes, I’m very proud to have been part of….”
“Proud!? Proud?!? My god man, have you taken leave of your sense? Proud of that stinking noise?”
The American One is reduced to a quivering mess. Prince Phillip, meanwhile, is having the best afternoon ever, going from one person to the next, alternatively, down the line, either claiming this to be the worst or the best sound he’s ever heard.
The Lanky Fop’s mum got her picture. Our potential partners got the one they apparently wanted of me. My belief in the magical ancestry of our heads of state were unmoved by the experience of being in close proximity to them. I already had my own religion, a set of beliefs, a cult of which I was, and am, already a fully paid up member. My faith in magical beings extends as far as wondering if Joe Strummer came from another planet. It’s founded on the very strong belief that you can make positive change with the power that is music. Especially live music enjoyed by a community of people.
Music and people. That’s what I believe in.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: