It was an amazing day (see the liveblog at amplified11.com/ArtWorksPHF ) and certain themes emerged, particularly as they relate to support structures for artists. The themes of sustainability and cross-disciplinary learning/practice came up a few times, which inspired me to think about how they relate to pop/rock musicians.

It seems that a lot of the infrastructural role that (often centrally funded) arts organisations play in the (broadly) non-commercial arts (dance/theatre/fine art) worlds are deferred in music to record labels – at least in the perception of the artists. When I asked on Twitter about where musicians get their support/encouragement/teaching/motivation from (all things that an arts organisation structure would supply in most other art environments), and whether it was ever distinct from the commercialisation of the end product, I got some really interesting responses from Mike Scott of the Waterboys, (@mickpuck on twitter), archived over on ExquisiteTweets. Click here to read that.

The conversation brings into focus some of the role of the Auteur in popular music – it’s great to read Mike’s response, he has clearly had a self-fed drive to produce music that is ‘great’ from an early age, taking the emotional inspiration of the great rock records of his youth and channeling the desire to connect in the same way into making his own music. (this article by Richard Curtis suggests he’s succeeded) – and the degree of success that Mike has had over the last 25 years shows that in his case, that innate drive was more than enough to produce great work.

But popular musicians in general have no culture – or indeed language – for ‘incubator’ spaces. Supported, mentored environments in which to make their art and think about what it means in the context of their own lives and their culture. We rarely consider what it would mean to do that, to do anything other than respond to that which we are most instinctively, viscerally drawn to in the music of our youth… Our incubator is the bedroom, the band practice room, and those who manage to introduce genuine innovation into their own practice are those who can self-motivate, whose innate artistic vision is already iconoclastic enough to push them to those ends.

What about the rest? What about the potential for such experimentation, for exploring what being human means through our music, that gets ignored because it’s never presented as a possible path, because the environment to do it in doesn’t exist? Because the words to describe it aren’t part of our music-learning experience. We’re either playing our instrument as a reaction to an unsatisfactory classical education, or via a handful of guitar/bass/drum lessons with a teacher that shows us how to play rock classics which most often stays in the realm of playing other people’s music, without much interpretation or recontexualisation, and certainly with little focus on creating something new and meaningful…

And of course, the converse is also, to some extent, true – there are entire fields of artistic endeavour where the creative iconoclast is seen as a maverick, a ‘threat’ to whatever establishment may exist. Rather than being resourced to share their experiences in self-motivation, in self-exploration, they are gently sidelined, often subservient to an easier-to-accredit educational path. Instead of becoming leaders, they are the exception that proves the institutional rule.

In his talk at the ArtWorks Launch, Sean Gregory, the director of creative learning at the Barbican and Guildhall School, highlighted a couple of things that feed into this. The need for cross-disciplinary work – both artistic practice and a project to find a shared language for what we do as artists, and it’s importance to our humanity, and our culture. The other was the importance of funding projects like ArtWorks. He highlighted the rarity of these opportunities particularly as they relate to cross-disciplinary work.

Fortunately, ArtWorks is – as we’ve seen from so many of the arts sector projects that Amplified has been involved with over the last couple of years – an expression of a shift in the perception of many arts organisations and funding bodies, towards a greater realisation that the combination of reduced government support for the arts and a vastly accelerated pace of change in art and technology points to an ever stronger need for spaces where artists can develop and explore their own practice, to learn from each other and to make sense of the world that we’re in. It’s not for nothing that the French government pledged an extra €100M of funding for the arts in response to the economic downturn, Sarkozy vowing to “make culture our response to the global economic crisis”.

I’m eager to see what kind of thinking and practice the ArtWorks project brings into being, but also anxious to see popular music pedagogy ‘grow up’ and start to absorb something of the spirit of open-ended research from projects like this, and see where that takes us…

August Bank Holiday Weekend IS Greenbel

• soaking up great music
• encountering some life changing thinking
• playing as many gigs as I can possibly find over the weekend.
• hanging out with the most inspiring people I’ve ever met.

The proportion of my Greenbelt time spent on each of those three things has changed over the years – in 1990, I went to 63 different gigs over the weekend (and thanks to the commensurate lack of sleep, dozed off at the wheel of the car before I’d even got off the campsite, leaving my mum to tackle the 300 mile drive home).

Then I gravitated towards the talks - as my view of the world expanded into my 20s, so my appetite for the challenging, inspiring, heady mix of politics, theology and justice issues shook me from whatever complacency the other 361 days of the year tried so hard to force upon me.

Having played at the festival with a range of artists in the 90s, the turn of the millennium brought with it an insane schedule of shows that seemed to increase year on year – Greenbelt was the place where I launched my first album (10 years ago this week), where the Recycle Collective first played a show, where many amazing and fun collaborations have been birthed and found a home. I think my record was 13 performances in a weekend…!

But this year – our first year festivalling with the baby, we have no gigs and have largely ignored the program (despite downloading the iPhone app to see what we’re missing) – so the question was ‘can you go to Greenbelt, do nothing, and still have that Greenbelt experience?’

The answer is – of course - ‘of course’. Greenbelt has always been about people. Whether those people are on a stage, or sat on the grass, in a band, writers, thinkers, politicians, vicars, believers, doubters, old, young… none of it matters. Greenbelt is a place where people mingle and mix, sharing ideas, lives and a constitution-rattling amount of caffeine (and organic beer) in the pursuit of the possible. We collectively breathe a sigh of relief that the Daily Mailification of the world has yet to breech Greenbelt’s fiercely guarded space to be excited and optimistic about the future while taking seriously the challenges that face anyone who chooses not to be complacent in the face of injustice.

So Lobelia, Baby Flapjack and I have wandered around, guided by serendipity into a never-ending series of life-affirming conversations with amazing people. It’s impossible to leave this place feeling like the world is screwed – there’s just way too much here to get excited about. To much, passion, hope and wisdom emanating from a field in Gloucestershire that has the potential to change everything. Again.

Right, time for coffee…

It seems that one of the many obstructions to the balanced discussion about resourcing talent development is the semantic gulf between the

The role of narrative in providing context for art (as distinct from any narrative – or lack thereof within the art itself) can be a crucial link between the progressive practice of the artist and the need for some kind of measurable, perceivable output for the resource body.

In his book ‘The Sacredness Of Questioning Everything’, writer and thinker David Dark talks about ‘the space of the talkaboutable’, and that concept – of spaces where active, progressive exploration of the language around a subject is encouraged as a way of deepening understanding and relationships – may provide great narrative media as well as a place where the project, the participants, stake holders and the culture that the art exists within or responds to are connected and allowed to enrich one another.

Social media can provide fantastic low-friction ‘spaces of the talkaboutable’ – where democratised space (like twitter) or curated space (like a blog or forum) can be used to throw ideas, descriptors and concepts around as well as sharing ‘small media’ introductions to whatever work may be emergent.

Have a listen to the following Audioboo where Xander and I explore some of the themes that have come up across the weekend:

So one thing I thought it’d be good to chat about is funding, and experiences with funding thus far. So, as the title says, have you ever been funded?

• Ever had money from the Arts Council, the PRS, any other grant body, in order to do your art?
• Ever been on a grant funded tour?
• What was your experience?
• Ever felt like you missed out on funding due to a lack of communication about where it was available?
• Ever been helped out by the Musicians Union in finding funding?

Would be great to hear your experiences, the good the bad and the ugly, and how things could’ve been done better…

Over to you, arty types:

Nope, this isn’t a brainstorm on the future of the music industry. Well, at least, not directly.

You’ve read my novel, right? If you haven’t, click here to read about it and download it for free. (probably best to go read it, then come back here to read the comments, as there may well be spoilers implicit within what people write…)

It’s about a band. They go through a bit of a crisis, and a change, and things happen.

I’m really proud of it, enjoyed writing it and enjoy reading it back. I like the characters, so am wondering what to do next with them.

So I thought it’d be fun to ask you lot what you think should happen in Vol II.

So, have at it – the comments are yours. If I end up using any of them in the book, I’ll send you a free CD.

We were joined at one point by another fabulous art thinker, Maggi Dawn, so that’s here as well, in the continuum of the conversation. Enjoy, and feel free to post your comments and thoughts on the conversation:

If you have, you’re on the way to understanding the importance of social media in the context of an event like Greenbelt. Greenbelt’s strength and weakness are largely the same thing – it’s an utterly unique event. Unlike anything else that I’ve ever been to, and as such, impossibly difficult to do justice to when explaining it.

It’s also such a varied experience – from the program to the people, the food to the weather, the music to the art, the politics to the comedy… and the many overlaps between them…

So how does a story like that get told?

• In aggregate
• in pieces
• with nuggets
• by accident
• through video and audio
• tweets
• blogs
• photos…

The more media we can throw out there that is in and of itself interesting, inspiring, funny, creative, the easier it is for people looking at that stuff to assemble a version of the Greenbelt story that makes sense to them. I can use other people’s photos and video to tell my story, and they can use my blog posts and audioboo recordings to tell theirs. We share, we talk about what interests us, we capture what we can, however we can, by being there and playing with gadgets.
It’s a wonderful addition to the festival experience, and will in coming years become an ever more vital part of the public face of Greenbelt – an event I can’t even begin to sum up adequately in a way that everyone who reads this will relate to. And now I don’t have to. I can point to specific things for specific people, I can tag the media to make it findable to those who might look for it, we can filter, stream, aggregate, embed, share and contextualise. And Greenbelt can aggregate it all to the front page of the website.

[EDIT] – here’s me talking to Jon Bounds (@ on twitter) about these same themes. He’s a very smart man:

Jon Bounds & Steve Lawson on social media, web technology & conversational psycho-geography from Greenbelt Festival on Vimeo.

I love living now.

As a 17 year old the importance of my first Greenbelt was almost entirely cultural – I saw 60 bands in 4 days in my first year here. The cultural importance was merely that they weren’t all shit, and some were even rather good. One or two were bands that my friends at school would’ve heard of. As a kid growing up with a huge social and cultural gulf between his school-life and his church-life in the late 80s, that was significant. It was the kind of place that I could’ve brought my friends, and not cringed at the supreme bogusness of everything that went on. It was also the kind of place where ‘bringing your friends’ wasn’t the aim. There was no clandestine intention to it, no need to proselytize, just ‘be’.

Over the next 10 years (’90-2000), Greenbelt, despite being one weekend a year, helped shape, inform and challenge my nascent political and spiritual development and exploration. The Evangelicalism of my youth was pulled apart and reconstructed without the mind-numbing anti-intellectualism and adolescent treatment of doubt and conformity. My innate discomfort with all kinds of fundamentalism – religious, anti-religious or that most vociferous of English fundamentalisms; football – was given a voice, a cogent argument and the reminder that the hatred of fundamentalists is its own kind of pernicious fundie-ism.

Everything was up for debate, but nothing was thrown away just because it wasn’t cool, or didn’t fit the latest intellectual fad. The debate was grown-up, the conclusions were almost always qualified with the terms of the ongoing debate, the route into a personal journey that could end anywhere, and the success or failure of that journey wasn’t defined by the desired outcome of any other ideological group.

The seminars I went to and the books I bought at Greenbelt were utterly pivotal to me ending up where I am now…

Where am I? That’s not really any of your business – it’s certainly not pivotal to whether or not Greenbelt’s role in my life has been overwhelmingly good. It has. And it has been in the lives of people whose conclusions about the questions they were encouraged to explore were completely different to mine.

It continues to occupy a place in my life that causes me to think, question, challenge and to lean ever more heavily on Grace, forgiveness and the ‘death of smug’.

A friend on twitter has the phrase on her avatar “Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow” – each of us is, as Wavy Gravy said, a temple of accumulated error, and Greenbelt is pretty much the only place I’ve able to consistently forgive my error-filled messed up self, and explore how to make better mistakes. Long may in continue.

But anyway, I was just thinking who I’d book if I was curating it (for those that don’t know, Meltdown is curated by a different person each year – in the past they’ve had David Bowie, Patti Smith, John Peel…)

I’ll give my own some thought, and then come back with it in the comments. Who would you choose? be as elaborate as you like – headline acts, support acts, free-stage, special one-off collaborations… get creative.