The world is f***ed. So what.

I’ve only been back to art school a few times since leaving.

This week I went back to one I’d not been to before, but it was familiar. The first thing you see and smell when you walk through the front door of Kingston in Surbiton is the art supplies shop. I immediately wanted to buy paper and magic markers.

I also immediately wondered if I know anything at all about creativity.

It’s how I felt about everything except music when I was 18. Which I shared with the students as I stood in front of them a while later.

Soul sister Rina Atienza had invited me up to guest lecture in one of her classes. She’d set her class Unsee The Future as a theme and I was a bit weirded out by seeing interpretations of this phrase that had fallen out of my head by a group of young strangers. She’d sent me their initial poster designs before Christmas, but now they were working on vision boards towards a three-episode media experience.

What does Unsee The Future mean?

 

A designer doing standup.

Standing in front of them, I felt more conscious of needing improv skills. I was there to listen and interpret, so we’d kept it entirely loose for me. Young people can smell truth and fakery with heightened awareness, I think, and I wanted to be useful to them. Unpracticed as any kind of teacher. Rina has always said her forays into standup comedy have stood her in very good stead to manage an art philosophy class.

Truth and fakery were just some of the themes that came out of the students’ vision boards. Money, ritual, religion, faith, conspiracy, ancient prophesy and techno destruction panned around us by the time we’d met the groups and placed their work together on the walls.

“How does it make you feel, spending time with all this doomy imagery?” I asked. They gave a collective inevitable shrug to my rhetorical seeming question.

Someone had commented on the whiteboard by one of the boards: Optimisim. Haha. That’s a good one.

“We all recognise this, right?” I said. “I think it’s interesting how you’ve drawn out different themes of doom from across centuries – very interesting how you’ve intersected across that” I noted, “but we all recognise this world we’re in. This story we think we’re in.

“The world is f***ed” I said. “So what?

They all watched me.

“I think you have two jobs here now. One is practical and one is philosophical” I began. “Philosophically, so what if you know the world is ending?”

“We’re all so bored of that!” Rina interjected.

“We’re all so bored of that,” I echoed. “Now how are you going to help your audience unsee that future? Unsee the story that seems inevitable?”

“The second job is the mechanics of storytelling. How are you going to tell it and keep anyone’s interest?”

 

A generation wishing it could stand up.

Now, I may be wantonly uncommercial. I express my blogs and and writing as I do my music – personal, idiosyncratic, not precisely audience-driven. It feels like me and it’s made me wildly obscure and unheard of.

But, as a creative, I am still a pilgrim of storytelling. And I know good storytelling when I see it.

I asked them what they’d watched recently that grabbed them. That they couldn’t scroll past.

It unlocked a number of examples. Stories of unseen lives, from across cultures. Audio books and TV and film alike. Documentaries of truthful experiences, told compellingly in honesty. Honesty that could feed the way the story was shot, edited, paced, produced. And intriguingly, not one TikTok was mentioned; the shortform film platform may be the very school of efficient narrative engagement but when people feel hit by a deeper connection, they flow into long-form reads and listens and watches without thinking about it.

Intriguing was watching them as I threw up last week’s Global Goals Music Roadshow – #37, in which AY and I simply presented edits of our interviews at COP26. I had the sound off and was talking over the imagery of him and me bantering silently across the big screens in the lecture theatre.

While I explained a bit about some basic tricks to keep things moving, they clearly found two blokes laughing at each other across the Atlantic engaging. I told AY this later that evening, after we’d filmed the first fully live show of the new series and he was touched.

Our GGGuests find hope an optimism in each other. But that is because they so easily feel alone in wanting to stand up for positive change.

They’re not alone. Far from it. As Rina said to me over a later evening drink: “I see an image of individuals all around the margins feeling alone. But strategically placed as they may turn out to be, the whole middle could suddenly seem to flip.”

I came away from this reminded. That trying to unsee the future is a lifetime’s thing. To undo all the habits of our expectations, our systems of valuation, our hopes and clear lack of them.

But the doomsroll of the now of fearsome unrealities IS a construct in our heads. Oppression, violence, political intransigence, systemic prejudice – they’re all real. They may all wreck and defeat fragile lives, yet the culture driving them, causing them, maintaining those political systems, unchallenging those stifling robot bureaucracies, encouraging those fear-driven behaviours… that’s all a story we think we’re in.

If we can’t change that, we can’t change the way the world impacts us.

But we can.

And we must.

And if every artschool had a Rina in it, an oracle of sensemaking as a metamodern world flowers, we might begin to believe in different futures.

And not simply believe that another world is possible, but it was unstoppable.

Optimism? Yes, as truthful feelings go, that is a good one.

The F word.

This is a hard post to share. But one with a gift at the end, here at the end of the year. And a story I shall begin with a hard-won creative truth.

To give a convincing performance, you do have to commit.

There is undoubtedly a lethal extreme sports example to be found that illustrates this principle; I dunno, maybe something like: Timidly half falling into a base jump is more likely to bash your breakfast all down those jagged limestone crags below than launching out off this cliff edge with the majestic eyeball buzzing certainty of a flying squirrel. Show no fear – arch your back and really leap, Brad. The single bead of sweat can be a lethal tell. You get it.

I could talk about this in lumbering masculinity terms, of course. The need to parade confidence and be always prepared to do it at someone else’s expense if you really really have to.

But I’d rather talk about it in the purely personal terms of just trying to live with it. A shameful kind of grief. A trickster haunting, ready to undermine confidence at any moment and have you fumble that cliff leap. You might know it.

The F-word.

Failure.

I sort of live with an infection of it in my marrow. One that could quietly turn Momo’s gossamer-thin confident nano brand to ash flakes like doves leaving a fashion funeral, were I to broadcast it as I am about to. But a recent unpleasant big hit of it makes me wonder how to face a new year’s plans with it trying to surface. And how any of us are supposed to, in such an age of over inflated and collapsing expectations.

 

Expecting the worst.

Listening to a podcast recently about this very topic, in snarky mood I was unkindly tempted to call it Articulate chats between people with no real problems; “So, after Cambridge and your third sell-out stand-up tour you began to feel a little disaffected with success…”

By which I declare my recognition that this is how I might be about to sound to you.

But bear with me in this last rather personal post of the year, because failure is a pertinent topic for our times. It does seem tied to clunky ancient world mandom kind of problems, in the centuries old and still boringly ongoing crisis of masculinity. But I’d be more interested to hear people of differing gender experiences compare ideas of failure right now, in this seemingly failing world of ours.

Gang culture around the world has young male victims of economic failure pushing themselves through violent initiations and clandestine incantations like they’re still fighting the Roman Empire or something, while obviously really still working for it. But this cultural failure squeezes at least as much resource out of female bodies as anyone’s, and women are still comparatively rarely invited to choose any deal of complicit power in the transaction.

Back in the somnabulent mental shopping malls of old globalisation that I might know more about, at least a cosmetic step or two nearer to the middle classes, the more precise word to analyse that’s implied across literature and screen in post-modern times I think is simply: “expectations”.

Of economic democracy, of individualism, of progress – again, you know. It’s the humdrum root of many towering toxic chatrooms of flammable misery, I think. An apparent stockpile of fuel for short-term populism, all those undelivered promises of state and business, but ultimately an uncontrolled burn getting us nowhere new.

Especially since your last fig-leaf of self respect, worldly cynicism, does say back to you quickly when state and people and laughable private dreams alike fail you: “Well, what DID you expect?”

Stoked as you might feel in less beaten moments for explosive releases of reaction to the way your world is, I honestly feel the unfussy wisdom in Grayson Perry’s view, that: “revolutions that really affect lasting change happen thoughtfully in peacetime.”

For you and me to not have our lives consumed by a sense of failure, should such bitter temptation make you look up from ineffable privilege of living, the trick facing us poor vulnerable saps is to calibrate our expectations. Generally. Just staring out at our lives mutely, wondering what story we really are in.

But what are we to expect? Set sights low, and be comforted in our cynical un-ambition with how basically rubbish everything turned out to be? Or continue to feed the anxiety industry with goals to have it all?

I dunno. I’m always saying life is a series of impossible balances, so there’s a big fat wobbling one, mate.

But somewhere in there is the basic truth that failure, flip side to success, is always relative.

 

Taking a punch.

What are you trying to achieve? Now dial back that question to why are you trying to do it? By which I basically really mean: Do you want to do that? By which I actually really mean: “What do you want to do?”

The Great Resignation is an ironic title to have fallen out of 2021. It means the opposite of what it says; we’ve been living in the great resignation for generations, pal – it’s time to finally do something about it and walk out.

Which sounds like a very empowering big step towards success, taking back some control of your life and side-swatting the fear enough to leave a role you realise you hate or isn’t serving you without having a new one lined up. But if you did manage to break free, work out what you really wanted and then took a swing at doing it… what will happen when that fails?

Damn. That’s on you, old thing. Listening out for debt collectors at the door or not, you can still light a candle in the window for our old lodger Shame.

Now, I can’t work out quite whether Shame is renting a room in my little life hotel by the hour or just squatting in the parlour at night but recently it has done more than present itself as occasional footsteps in the loftroom and missing vintage cheese in the fridge. One nice summer day it jumped out in the garden and punched me hard across the jaw.

I didn’t go down. I barely caught my breath, truth be. But it might have grazed me with an infected knuckle duster.

Because I’ve always felt my life calling, like a weird cosmic gift lighting my creative pilot light as I came of age, was making music. And, ignoring for a moment the life-wide reality that I’ve never found a sizeable looking community to call home with my musical work, this year I had an experience as a media composer that is the main experience no composer wishes on any other composer – having your entire finished feature film score cancelled and recommissioned to someone else.

God. And it was my first ever.

Will it turn out to be my last ever?

It’s like being dumped and someone else being invited to the film premier. After you’ve bought your dress.

 

Beating the gen(r)es.

All confidence is an illusion.

Wait, don’t lose heart.

That is, all confidence is a performance. And in two key ways: A ton of work goes into presenting just the stage view of it, but doing it six nights a week really helps you embody the part.

I trivially marvel at anyone gifted with the Cool Gene. I can’t help it, because it’s a kind of spell they cast like pheromones that I wish I understood. They are people we can all spot who embody in style the core tradable element of fashion and cultural commerce and really any business at all – credibility. Perhaps niche, perhaps universal, but something an audience feels it can bank on as wantable and strangely authentic. Even though fashion seems empty. A trade-up association for most of the rest of us, feeling the pressure to lash together our own creds.

Rewatching some of Madonna’s performances over Christmas, I was reminded that she’s a global star because she has that core Cool Gene as much as any of the great fashion icons, but she seemed to combine it with sheer graft driven by big ambition. She’s cool and she applied it. Expressing it in a lot of cool, confident performances. She embodies a female dream of it like a fairytale in the film Desperately Seeking Susan – and in it she’s called Susan, for goodness sake!

Even True Blue is kinda cool. Who can manage that? An empress.

I realise you have to worry about slightly more significant seeming things than this.

But I think I am heading towards a point with my playground culture wars philosophy here.

Counter-culturally, I think it’s easier to be a bit cooler when older. I mean, I wish my fashion faux-pas and early four-track demos demonstrated someone more wholeheartedly lost to trend than I ever was as a surprisingly sensible creative lad in Bournemouth – my fashion victim pals have much cooler images of themselves from younger than I awkwardly do, much as we might titter at them. They’re making somehow more certain marks of tribe and intent with those more radical hairstyles and, I dunno, artschool disco tutus.

But most of my friends are a damn-sight cooler in their forties and fifties than they were at 20. Because they’re more themselves. Say it with me: Duh.

I know my music took years to mature. For me because I was no fashion chaser; I felt my only currency was me, and believed, not completely unwisely, that if I just kept playing that card confidently it would eventually come good. The truth would out. The marks would at least become much more confident. Which they did.

What I had from the technically and emotionally and stylistically naiive beginning was a central confidence of belief in the work, and love for it. I might have not found an audience to support me enough in this, which is a big contextual question mark for any artist, and I may even have had some disastrous live gigs technically, but I’ve managed to keep a veil of dignity over my modesty by still being an obscure artist.

What I’ve never been before is fired.

 

Just doing business.

When working as a creative gun for hire, there is a kind of spectrum of talent approaches between the chameleon and the auteur. The auteurs more often become the icons, because they stand out – and then end up in the possibly envious position of being hired to be them. Some actors might moan about typecasting but there comes a point in your career where you realise it’s a damn-site easier day at the office.

The skilful chameleons paint stories less noticed, donning costumes like character actors, or perhaps more so mo-cap performers – disappearing into the work. I have long believed neither is formally “better” than the other, they each reflect honest artistic character.

I’m obviously no creative chameleon and have known it from the beginning. Approaching me for creative support, you’re always hiring Momo, adaptable and intuitively good as I am within this. My innate theatrical confidence has me brazen this out well enough to take big leaps and swings in the work itself at least; not flinching in writing a strong tune, not trying to couch an idea in a genre but follow its own flow. Aim for the sweet spot in the idea always to hit resonance.

But when you are naturally a freelancer with a more distinctive auteur’s voice, you had better make sure you graft your arse off to get seen so that people get an opportunity to want a piece of this. And frankly, if you don’t fit any communicable genre at all how do you expect to sell any work, Peach?

It will also help your career if you’ve simply been beaten about the everything with the Cool Gene.

The new producer of the feature I spent years scoring felt none of this applied to my work or me. After final tweaks to a new edit earlier this year, having first laid down the themes and style four or five years ago, the new producer essentially said: “I can’t live with it.”

Weirdly, I wasn’t totally surprised. But a score binning is an extreme scenario I told myself wouldn’t actually happen.

In the fights for the things we believe in, our loves and values and communities, experiences like this at work give us a debilitating personal kicking.

 

Nice breakfasts.

I didn’t envy the directors making that phone call to me. They’re mates of mine from the modest and lovely local film scene and two nicer professional creatives you will not work with. They’re also grown-ups, talking straight about what they want. I had a dream schooling in feature scoring by working with them first, you might say.

But work has to be sold. And attracting a new producer to the project, some way into production, was to do that one vital job – sell the picture. And in his opinion as salesman, the Momo:tempo score to this picture wasn’t going to work. I didn’t really hear why, just that he never liked it.

Now. I’ve not really known how to take swings big enough in life to get serious criticism. I may have been laughed at a fair bit by the cool kids at artschool for being so uncool – and not in the now-cool nerdy way but the aren’t-you-supposed-to-be-at-drama-school-or-evangelical-college kind of way – but I have always had a handy un-need to be liked by everyone. It’s given me the ability to walk into rooms and be myself, knowing there is usually likely to be at least some relaxed souls who’ll rather like me. It’s probably fuelled more by Victorian male privilege than I ever realised, but one problem at a time.

The swing I took at the score for this charming and very British children’s feature film was the one I was commissioned to take – be very electronic and imagination filling, in an inevitably very Momo way. The end results as musical storytelling seemed to do the one job any composer is hired to do – tell the story correctly. It just seemed to fit, to my ear. And, at every stage it seemed, to my directors’ ears.

I think it was charming, bold, evocative and happened to be rather Momo.

Sort of Beverly Hills Cop meets Stranger Things via, I dunno, Ghosts. Which, go on, sounds brilliant put like this.

Yeah, and so maybe unsurprisingly, put like this, none this was credible enough for the producer.

I mean, this was never quite going to be Bladerunner 90210 or Dune – gorgeous mature moods as those scores are, this children’s feature felt like it needed motifs and character around the sound design. This made it effectively quite 80s – a hybrid score but with a tinge of nostalgia. Much as I see nostalgia per se as a bone-eating culture disease right now, a sprinkling of it can work magic – and kids as much as their parents love a big retrowave tune. Which is also surprisingly fashion of me, given the enormous reach of 80s synth music across games and films and TV, er, everywhere.

Like, e v e r y w h e r e.

The boys took me for a nice breakfast. One of them said to me: “I once had to do this to another composer. Let me say, there were no nice breakfasts that time.”

A fig leaf they threw me was that perhaps the new score was less interesting. Not sure I can bring myself to learn a lesson and listen to it. To hop in at the last minute will have been quite a feat for the new person. My directors also assured me they did not consider the Momo score in any way sub-standard professionally – I feel sure they’d have said early on.

And so, a film’s worth of music is floating free.

What does one do with this?

Moving on.

In getting closure on all this, I have produced a kind of private viewing playlist called Futureverses. And you can hear the whole phantom album below, to see what you make of it.

It’s a heck of a curio. A lost score sounding very definitely like adventure and story are happening quite specifically somewhere… but who can know from this strange sequence of audio artifacts what is going on. I leave it as an evocative testimony to the work and heart I put into it all. A marker for a hard lesson, and some splendid musical storytelling fun. Music written for picture or show is specific somehow, and I rarely find it recyclable, so consider this a hidden chamber in the treasure vault of Momo. I feel okay about it, and retain my warmth for what fell out of my first ever feature score, quirky and un-Holywood as it is.

The main final theme of Futureverses I do rather love – the final movement of part 15, The Legends. I have clearly fallen foul of going to work for my portfolio this time, but there’s no denying that final tune, only hinted at as motif throughout the story but sassing off the screen over the closing credits, is a big confident swing that not all composers would be uncool enough to take. Sort of Streethawk with a brass section. As usual, I love what I do. Will I never learn?

The real question is what to do with the experience? What have I learned?

It’s a big commitment. Emotionally – digging into the ether to score a film. What do you do when you’ve really arched your back and leapt… but the chute fails?

How does one brazen out the walk of shame to everyone else out for dawn jogs and seeing you? Tights laddered. Parachute tangled around your head. Breakfast down your front.

Referring to my other especially personal Testimo post recently, what is the guided life leading me to here?

The most obvious lesson is to get up off the matt quickly. But I didn’t go down with that big right cross of this fail, I kept moving and ducking and weaving, so it doesn’t feel as easy to know how to clear my system of the infection in the cut. I do still feel a little ill.

I think, for me, it connects to a weird wider truth of failure – that it looks like I didn’t really want to be a media composer after all. The successful composer’s life I didn’t seem to commit to going for – something made me hold back from slugging it out with the other incredible talents on the scene, I am only slowly realising. But what? If not this, then for what am I creatively fighting?

Where does my ability and instinct to write to picture take me if not to being a media composer? It’s been a component significantly there from the very beginning of my calling. A recurring motif at significant nodes of my life. First art school, scoring a friend’s film project; design degree, splitting as soon as I’d put up my degree show to go home and score a friend’s animation degree short. Tutors on my Music For The Media course, years later, telling me I could do some things not all composers naturally can.

Then this fail. On a scifi film, for goodness sake.

In keeping with the sobering theme of Articulate chats between people with no real problems I want to mention something for perspective. On Annie Mac’s Changes podcast, the glorious Billy Porter said: “For such a time as Kinky Boots.” Star of the Broadway version of that story and of the beautiful frankly required viewing that is Pose, he’s a man who’s embodied the fight to overcome opposition in a dazzling display of charisma and determination against the foundations of our toxically skewed modern culture. I know nothing of being black, queer and HIV in Holywood. But of the many lessons Billy can minister with today, exactly my age as he is, his acceptance that there is timing about success and failure I feel sure he’d be happy for me to learn from as a limply untested straight white boy.

There is a time for everything. Perhaps everyone. And all is learning and healing towards that.

One smack across the jaw for me is nothing.

Listening in, if I can, dusting myself off, I can feel an excitement at something that will never be the career of Hans Zimmer but is partly equipped by some of those type of filmic skills – coming back to the total storytelling experience. I’m no Broadway guy like Porter, but something may still be leading me towards the full musical, to launching the lessons learned from my epic folly Chaser, if you caught my little Christmas Eve Memo and piano session. For if there is one thing I feel the heat of passion about now it is finding ways to help tell the new stories of us. I’ll give my life to this as meagre ministry of my own if I surely can.

I think, working into writing the Unsee The Future book and new podcast series, I’m most excited about making The Shape of Things To Hum in its totality at long last. And something – something – in all the home made TV lessons I’ve learned in 2021 seems to be giving me component practices of working up planet cabarets on the road to this. That’s me letting you see me fumble with a creative sextant. Has every wind blown me to here?

AY on an Italian street the autumn and an old client over good wine at Christmas both said to me: Just take a big swing, mate. You don’t need to think it out any more.

But what big swing? And how do I swing it?

After all the swearing it’s time to commit. To the truth of who you are, and what makes you feel truly alive.

At personal or planet scale, the F-word is left spinning by such bold leaps.

—-

Listen to the complete private lost score >

How big do I want to be?

Hey, if you tuned in… thank you.

I’m not super experienced at live stream things. I mean, I’ve been doing them all year with AY, and building out the GGShow into three rather different geographically live specials (one yet to finish being edited, from COP26) I learned the possibilities of combining live performance as a music maker and speaker with pushing it through a sort of telly format. It was an experiment. And as much a finishing of one year as a starting of another.

As I said in the Promo article, I’ve been sitting on How Big, the new single, for ages. It could have been in Five Songs but sort of didn’t fit that particular flow; needless to say I can’t freaking wait to introduce it to a live Momo set ASAP. Gosh-me, but how I’ve missed performing the tunes.

But that TEDx Southampton talk. I wanted closure with it, essentially. Which can be a troublesome urge, bending the resolve of any truly mature artist to edit what is right to put out. But containing the key thesis to Unsee The Future as it does, it seemed like something to still have put out there, with a few recent accents. And doing it could create a slightly unusual but in the end very Momo little sort of show experience to present the tune. To say nothing of trying out how to make some more TV.

Making that TV suddenly seemed so natural with Michael Hancock, after wondering for years how we might combine our creative ambitions for both sustainability issues and for where we live, then finding ourselves making some lovely pieces to camera for Bea at World Of Love festival this summer. Tonight’s (as I write) little livestream event was a pushing into reality of chats we’ve had to build a very portable live rig for shooting and broadcasting.

Blimey but Michael made it happen. Getting to grips with great free live editing software OBS, having used it not much more than I have so far, trying to sync sound and vision through two phones and it into my YouTube channel with a new field router was frantically laying the track infront of the steaming headlong train, as Tom from Treehouse put it to me tonight.

And Tom epitomised Treehouse Digital in his help for us tonight. Staying back to help us plug into their space and big screen to do our little telly experiment. Such help and welcome from them to try things in, I suppose, a modest but similar version of their own creative attitude. They are a wonderful family. So is Michael, as part of those making moving pictures here in my home town. Shown on my way home when he dropped me and our lovely two young helpers, Jaan and Arianna, at this year’s final B:Reel social in Bomo. They were connected to us via Adam at White Lantern and catching up with him for a christmas drink half way home from a shoot felt like a bonus treat after a successful bit of work. Carefully, around masks and social distance and the quiet gathering gloom for other friends in the events business this winter.

The livestream and talk essentially worked, as a test case. I will tinker with an edit to align a few audio glitches in the coming days, and add a little behind the scenes film too, so you can see a bit how we did it.

And so yes, as I announced in the event, How Big is out January 14, hopefully with a nice B-side I have in mind to finally make available. Plus, I am going to regularly share chapters from the new book – UTF: How to think like an artist and change the world. And as soon as I can, launch the Unsee spin-off interview series I’ve been planning all this year, The Hopeychattybits.

I don’t know where all this work is taking me. Still trying to engage richly and hold lightly. It’s not been an easy ride in recent years, for all the things I seem to have easy. I know the lovely first lady of Momo and I are hungry for change, but to follow it in our flow to here.

And that video, eh? That tune. Worth waiting for? I owe much to Caroline for helping me shoot all of it and encouraging me to keep on it through a very busy autum on the move. But huge props to David Waller for the outstanding drums work on the piece, in a lovely Sunday morning out at Room With A View in Steve’s capable hands a fortnight back. And enourmously too to Pat Hayes for turning around a world-class horn session with 24 hours to go. He helps How Big land in the end with real Momo swagger. And a joy to do a tiny something together again.

How big do I want to be? After tonight’s metaphysical thoughts, I don’t think that question is thinking big enough.

Oh, and did I say thank you?

Here indeed is to seeing the future differently.

X.

 

Stop shovelling coal: It’s time to set out on a guided life.

 

Listen, engage richly, hold lightly. Have I finally found something smart-arse sounding enough to share with my younger self? If your own worthy roadmap or absent plans for the future are driving you crazy, is it because you still think you are supposed to be driving everything?

So stop shovelling coal into the boiler for a moment. I think I learned something in my travels this autumn.

 

Nico and AY brief the tour at Rome Central and the lovely first lady of Momo and her husband take a tourist moment. Momo surveys Lake Guarda in the morning before the jetty was jetwashed, and Raine and AY act natural later that evening for Danny.

 

Trains are becoming beloved symbols of eco travel. And why I don’t hate them by now is a bit of a mystery to me.

Fourteen months without a car and I feel I should be writing guide books and doing very very low octane BBC4 travel documentaries about life on rails. Which would be an ironic title for any series, given that my most intense period of transportation research this year seems to me now to have been about derailing some of my expectations.

Especially environmental ones. For at least two of those train journeys I had to fly.

Coal-powered steam trains maybe a romantic symbol of travel, but splendidly efficient high-speed electric versions across Japan or Europe feel more symbolic of a clean, public transit future.

Now, I know you’re a bit of a conshy ponderer yourself. But you’re also sensible, and secretly wonder which bits of any revolution are really for you. So I have three travel tips for you if, like me, you are foolishly considering journeying into the future. On some rainy Tuesdays you might be tempted to avoid the future all together, but on the bold Mondays you are determined to forge into it, declaring your reputation as a Changemaker on Linked In, pull up your decentralised underwear, solarpunk voyager, here are my three tips:

Expect to ask for help a lot, expect to look less than your best much of the time, and don’t expect to know which of all the extra documentation you’ve been asked to decode and prepare you will actually be asked for at the border.

Oh and, four: Learn to get zenly comfortable with uncertainty. Because while us individualists are all privately obsessing about power, life is all much more about transition, man.

 

Timo and AY plan the Rome GG Supershow
 

Joining the Battery Tour.

 

My birthday isn’t the reason I love autumn so much. Especially this autumn, because I spent my entire birthday in a brooding mood waiting for various types of bus – taxis, planes, monorails and coaches.

I’ve bored you enough about it over the years. About how I’m grateful to my sometimes dumb, wet little island nation for giving me so much different weather to enjoy, often in one day. Meteorology that transitions obviously all the time. But generally in a temperate part of the globe – this side of the collapse of all the climate systems we’ve ever known – autumn seems to me to be a helpful mental refresh after languid summer moods. The healthy death season that is all about rebirth. A time of change and possibly new shoes.

But this autumn shook up my perspective with more activity than normal, forcing me out into the still Covid-clagged world, ostensibly to drag kit around Europe but really to reset my view of my own world.

For a year’s work with changemaker and music artist AY Young lead me to Italy and Glasgow and to some contrasting examples of how to get things done.

You may have seen me talk about The Global Goals Music Roadshow. God bless you, you may have even seen a bit of it. But you may be wondering why I seem to have paused the work and reputation of Momo to spend time doing it. Well, I can only say that it felt like everything Momo:tempo and Unsee The Future and the emerging Momo:zo have lead me into lead me very suddenly to AY, to his Battery Tour movement, and to helping him make a goofy show about changing the world. Because it simply felt like values and jokes were in alignment, with energy.

Momo sneaks into the press area of M4C while the Rockin'1000 players practice. AY in a Momo tee. For real. On the streets of Milano. In a music video. Showbiz.
 

Developing storytelling skills

 

I can say most practically that I’ve spent this year practicing up some presenting skills and very home-made TV production. Flexing muscles as a live sense maker. This has, yes, paused the central calling and grand plans of Timo Peach to make music as an artist. In fact, music for me has suffered its own little deaths this year, but that is for a forthcoming post.

But, really, I think this is absolutely part of the same journey for me as an artist and human future storyteller. Because it’s hard to imagine many others meeting an imposing figure like AY and understanding a bold alternative vision for human planet business, as well as music making and how to goof off on Saturday Night Live, in anything like the instinctive combination he does. But, yeah… hi.

You’ll know if you followed any of our 34 shows leading up to it that our crazy trip to Italy in October was to be the first time he and I actually met IRL. What would we make of this? Would it break the spell of chemistry we’d worked up so magically, with such confidence of creative generosity on his part, purely over the four-and-a-half-thousand mile wire up till then?

You can see the actual moment in our Live Showbiz Supershow for the World Food Forum in Rome, if you’ve not watched it yet. The genuine actual moment, cheekily a bit stage managed by me. But our whole ten days taking the Battery Tour on the road did shake up everything for us as as this chapter’s team. It has indeed been a bit of a learning transition.

—-

AY and Raine conclude the opening of the Music 4 Climate concert with BRANDING.

 

Seizing a moment, to seize a few more.

 

AY might be the most genuinely star-quality person I think I’ve met. His presence in person is somehow a bit larger than ordinary life to begin with. I actually felt like a bit of a normie in the first hours we were in a room. Me. Such projection of professionalism, goals for getting things done, warm listening to each member of the team, a brief prayer circle – the works. It took me a while to tune into him in the very normal way I had done online for two over thirds of a year as a mate. It might simply be that he had that thing so different to me – the presence of someone training to be a prize fighter. I can guess that growing up black in America gives everyone a headstart in this over the entitled meanderings of a whimsical white bloke.

Whatever combination of talents and experiences AY might bring together in his intention, I grew to observe that he’s not just a street performer-level hustler – the highest, in other words – he thrives in emergency mode.

I thrive in cafe on an evening street in Rome mode. As per the night before.

Now, of course no one is meant to live in emergency mode, even my showbiz changemaker brother AY. You can do it for a project and get things done – like an event schedule with a clear end date. But you can’t live in a hunt & attack  state of mind and not be eaten by adrenalin in the end. I think it’s a big part of global trauma in our era of crisis – how many millions of us are lethargic from helpless drama fatigue?

Which is why doing the GGShow has always felt like an injection of life.

Presenting our live little video podcast always seems to leave me, AY and all our GGGuests feeling better than when they joined an episode. And so I must suppose, our tiny beta audience. Right the way through my travels, not only with the Battery Tour but as a creative host to more corporate events also, I’ve felt some echo of our show with me, talking to us about where the value is in our work.

Looking back, it’s clear that AY knew this was a coming out, or coming together moment for him, the crazy schedule of events he knew was ahead of him around the world, across September, October and November. After ten years of playing, planning, getting out there, developing his vision for the Battery Tour, this was a long series of moments, planned or seized on the go, that he knew he had to throw himself into. To me, this felt like an opportunity the road had led me to, to join in for a bit.

I expected graft. I can do it when the plan is clear. I didn’t expect to show part of my worst self all of a sudden. But I’ll get to that.

The Terme Di Caracalla is imposing even on a Monday afternoon, but transformed for showbiz at night.
 

Building a path as the plans kept morphing.

 

We went to Italy simply because AY was invited, as UN Young Leader and music artist, to open the World Food Forum in Rome. An event produced by the Food & Agriculture Organisation which is based in offices the size of a city block in Rome. But as the dates approached, it became clear that we could possibly make more of getting a whole Battery crew together than show up to film that one event. More even than convince the team at the WFF that doing a live GG Supershow in the incredible Terme Di Caracalla would be awesome and add value to AY’s cache, though we somehow managed this too.

A rail ride away in Milan, Youth 4 Climate was holding a big event. Badged as “Youth COP26” because Italy and the UK were actually co-hosting the upcoming hugely anticipated Conference Of Parties, the few days of speakers and events was culminating in a concert – a concert we blagged our boy AY into.

Hosted by the Rockin’1000 movement, the concert was to feature an evening of famous songs, epically covered by a very big multi-band – ie: a band made up of many bands. This is Rockin’1000’s thing, originally devised as a hell of a stunt to get the Foo Fighters to play in a modest Italian venue off the usual tour trails. It involves a literal “pledge to the click” to deliver everyone in sync, but the sound live is admittedly impressive, and the generally slick production was broadcast by Sky and one of the big Italian telly networks. A big bash of famous Italian music artists I didn’t know, all milling around the portacabins of the VIP zone with us, for which AY opened everything, the sole performer to get a slot sharing his own original music.

And in so doing, to me at least, looked like the only artist there really doing anything.

Except, of course, he wasn’t. Not simply because it is fairer to say, and more fundamentally sustainable to say, that we are all at different stages of awareness and work as we try to face what the climate crisis means to us. But because he was literally on stage with another remarkable music artist known as much for her passionate understanding of environmental and social challenges, Raine Stern. And he was there with me, editing his backing video in my pants in my hotel room the night before. And he was also there with poet, activist and leader shaper Nico Olivieri, who had worked magic to even see this opportunity, never mind negotiate it into our crazy schedule through the Covid haze over all live re-emerging events this year.

The point being, all of us in the crew could see the opportunity in helping AY do a job of being seen in these moments, and we took on less central looking creative roles to seize them together.

If we hadn’t been working in a spirit of listening and collaborating, we would have missed them. And that was not simply an example of energising generosity set by AY’s global perspective, but a philosophy taken gently beyond the clouds by Nico.

Very few event views look like this one in Dubrovnik.
 

Learning from events.

 

What did we get out of it? I see it this way: AY has a gift for opening palace doors.

As we all get invited in behind him, we get to see more of the state of everything – high level business, the NGO sector, the climate movement, all of it. And we maybe get to turn it all into a platform, with a movement’s mentality, that takes the useless pressure off any one of us to be a super saviour, including AY. We were helping to build The Battery Tour. Doing different jobs exploring how to.

It, yes, felt weird not to be the one on stage. Or the one passionately speaking. But in this setting, I had zero cache – and that was fine. It was more than fine, it was significantly instructive. Brought to life most consciously for me by the third person in my partnership with AY – Nico.

I know a thing or two about events. I’ve put them on, helped others put them on, branded them, hosted them, been the central bloke at the front telling the story, been behind the camera as hidden help to someone else’s story. In Italy, in Scotland, and in Croatia and the UK in between Battery Tour work, I was part of a string of events, some of them huge. Each of them gave example of how to produce such experiences, including the traveling event of the Battery Tour caravan itself this autumn.

One of those events, the most corporate in Dubrovnik, was so well organised ahead of the days it was on I felt smoothly slotted in to focus calmly on one job – bring alive the experience as host. And it felt liberating, however strange to spend so much time in other people’s worlds all autumn. In all of the other events, however big, I could smell those familiar cinders from the sparks of last minute panics, COP26 included.

It’s the nature of events, that plans will have to change. Things will go wrong, people will bail, permits will fail and so will technology – bet your life on it. But there is always an issue of energy – what energy you use, what energy you pass on, in making an event and involving others.

The Battery Tour team required a ton of energy, but all of us delivered it in buckets for ten resilient days in Italy because there wasn’t quite a sense of panic. It wasn’t zenly calm either but, in Italy especially, Nico added to AY’s confident spirit of generosity to others by exuding his key value:
 
Holding space to listen for wisdom.

 

Listening for truth.

 

“I’m not much interested in my opinion. Or for that matter AY’s or yours – we all have them. But humans also have this amazing capacity for channelling wisdom – and if we can learn to hold space to listen in to what it’s trying to tell us in any given moment, we will make much smarter decisions. Because we’ll only be doing what is necessary.”

 

Nico said this to me once. In fact, many times in different ways.

I took this on board leading up to Italy. It’s a mental trick of mine to take stock of every step and proceed in at least just the next step’s amount of faith, based on my sense of gentle trajectory. And being as used to projects and events and traveling as I am, I tend to be calm and organised on the go. But Nico helped me bring an extra dimension of intentionality to this. A perfect example being the first full day we were in the country.

Nico, Sabine, their utterly charming boy Aiden, Caroline and I had only met that drizzly morning on the street outside the FAO. It was delightful, our first coffee together in the real world. By lunchtime, on site at the Terme, we had still yet to meet AY who was landing from New York only that morning, but we had already been given the news – now all assmbled from across the world – that we couldn’t do the Global Goals Music Roadshow Showbiz Special Supershow after all. Not on the stage where all the music acts were performing we couldn’t – the venue with the amazing ancient backdrop and all the production pointing at. We couldn’t even film a thing that showed we were on site there. A bit of historic site Italian beaurocracy not weedled out for us before we all spent a fortune getting on planes.

If we DID film here, what we filmed would have to belong to the World Food Forum, as the licence holder. We couldn’t put it on YouTube ourselves.

When I said to the person explaining this all to us that this show was being sponsored by Enel Green Power she turned white for a moment.

I began to calmly think of alternatives, problem solving. Nico took me aside and helped me think out loud.

“Think about it,” he said, “what if we went along with this? Brought to this point, all ready to go, what if we surrender hanging on to it as we had envisioned and took the showbiz chance to film here as a special thing?”

Taking a moment to listen in, before problem solving. That’s what he was doing. And his suggestion in that moment is exactly what we did, with results that are much better than if we’d filmed infront of some bushes that could have been on the Southbourne overcliff.

Very few event moments look like this.
 

Taking the road through the clouds.

 

Running your own business, or even just your own creative practice you might think you are a train driver – toot toot. Expected to keep the wheels turning and everything on track. But you may well be behaving more like the locomotive itself – the big chugging engine dragging the whole train across the country.

There is certainly much about the venturing life that seems to demand endurance.

On an eight-day shoot for a client in Florida once, esteemed creative director and mate Andrew Sheerin once said to me: “You’re a machine!” And he’s another prize fighter in his way. When I know the plan, and have a strong hand in it, I can keep going for a while. Hell, when another esteemed creative director and dear mate and actual sort of prize fighter and definite backing dancer for Peter André, Gellan Watt, took me on his stag weekend skiing in France for the first time ever, I got uncharacteristic food poising on the first night, was wiped out with S&D for 24 hours and got back on the piste at 100 miles an our with still no terrific stopping skills the following day. I’ve never quite been completely consumption hankies and wan faints by the window.

But I’ve had to map out my limits. As anyone half facing the basics of adulthood has to. And a key limitation for me is not one to help my surprising sudden bid here to convince you I belong in the Highland Games. Namely, I can fully personality crash if I feel I’ve lost myself.

As a young man, gosh was I moody. Searching for some equillibrium of self value. As a bloke who’s come to terms with himself and learned to work with people who want a bit of the idiosyncratic value I can add, I came to forget this in the Momo years. Just one or two odd experiences reminded me of it along the way and I didn’t see one coming in Italy. A darkness I couldn’t pull out of at the very end of our time together. The night before my birthday.

I said at the top of this personal post: “Still think you are supposed to be in control of your destiny?” It’s the sort of thing said by gurus who’ve felt the power of momentum. The sort usually leading them to thousands of subscribers and a platform to talk about surrendering to destiny. But I’ve never felt the slightest squeak from the wheels of momentum – when I stop pedalling, the bike stops and I fall off, half way up the hill. Not born to be a fighter, I’ve had to learn resilience to still be an artist with no one watching.

In a weird moment, suddenly distanced from the inspiring group of people surrounding me on a balmy Roman night, I felt lost to myself. Nothing anyone had said, far from it. Perfaps just too much time in someone else’s world. Like dark walls closing in, no place to shine or add my true value – despite running the shows. The Battery Tour isn’t about me, I’m a guest encouraging someone else’s vision and my head applauds this. But for a little techtonic shifting moment, and an embarrassing one, my spirit felt crushed, like running out of oxygen. Or in this case, Momo.

Wisdom doesn’t think like this.

Such experiences are a reminder that my life isn’t mine. Neither is yours. It is actually made of value unseen. Half way up the back side of the hill. Un-arrived.

This is why the seen life drives us all mad. The desire for recognition. It is a life in emergency mode perpetually – if it didn’t get recorded, it didn’t happen. An especial joke for us on that trip, given the Inception level of recording the recordings going on between the production platforms we were working with, filmmaker Danny, social media lead Enya and all of us lot with our phones. But the Must Be Seen life is the antithesis of wisdom. And it’s why I actually felt I could trust and respect AY – he’s always known his job is to be seen, to accomplish things, not his desire. He’s quietly wary of all that showbiz bollocks, it’s simply something he feels he must soberly face. There’s much in there I can relate to.

I’ve never wanted applause for the sake of it. Don’t need the crowd’s love like a drug. And I have strongly never wanted to take someone else’s win – I simply don’t need to. I just function out loud because it’s my gift. And my desire to encourage with the freedom of theatre. But you have to take care of your own self as surely as anyone else’s; you know who’s oxygen mask you are to put on first if you are to be any use to your children when the aircraft window blows.

I think the practical truth as we explore is that new partnership is about finding a new balance – between letting go of your own centrality and not losing yourself in the process. It’s new for me to find myself trying to run with global leaders – never kidded myself to try. Momo is still me in a shed because I appear to value freedom much more than trying to be on The Apprentice, or The Voice. I’m no prizefighter, I’m a playful encourager. Balancing this truth of myself with a vision of the world worth fighting for is my challenge now; knowing how to channel the fight building up in me – and find a team I can fight for.

It’s all the imperfect journey of a limping pilgrim, as surely as any hopes for sustainability. The humbling but burden lifting call of leading a guided life and not trying to keep up with anyone. A call I am overdue to understand still better. Even after all these years of believing that all I have to trade is being myself.

Little deaths, like honest accidental sharings of your true self with new brothers and sisters, are where the road of healthy growth leads, I think. And as if to bring this home forcefully, I was brought up short in recent days by something I heard said with shocking clarity: The ultimate expression of self devaluation, suicide, is perhaps really a yearning for a new identity. A new story of your self at a higher level.

If we’re listening out for wisdom, we’ll find we are not simply in perpetual transition but transformation. The very functioning of life itself.


 

Making the next moment.

 

My experience of Glasgow was something on top of all this. My interpretations of COP26 itself are for another post, perhaps, but I’ll share one observation.

AY was the only one of us with a pass to the hallowed Blue Zone. And, it turns out, the only one of his 17 UN Young Leaders to have one. He said to me: “I realise I am alone in there, bro. There is no one coming but us.” Which is a perspective.

It took a couple of days for me to put my finger on it but I realised I felt a slow, quiet drain in the soul being up there. Splendid as Glasgow is, COP26 looked like a system that doesn’t know how transform itself. The story, the telling of it, the characters in it.

We agreed it felt like a great (overwhelmingly white) cocktail party washed up against the doors of a hallowed Inner Room, chattering and planning and some of them trying to protest for things and some of them having nice dinners all in a lively social energy. And I could picture AY and I breaking into the Inner Room beyond all that to find it… empty. Dark and completely unmanned. Nothing in there.

There is no help coming but us.

It’s an unfair literal image for those pushing hard to get agreements signed and make something of it. But figuratively it’s chillingly true. As sensemaking mate and former GGGuest Rina said to me over text while I was up there: “We must look to the miraculous margins.”

Are we it? I have no idea; I am trying to listen and engage richly with what’s come to me, but hold it lightly.

I can say so far that meeting these guys has been lifechanging. AY’s invitation to help make a show has added a whole dimension of learning I didn’t see coming to all I’ve been lead to do in recent years. And he’s a legend to share time with – I can see a lot of gold to spin together ahead yet. A new creative chapter together. With Nico part of the energy of the Battery Tour’s future, along with diamonds like Raine, Carrie, Enya, Nicolai, El, Danny, Stephen and our own fabulous niece Tara plugging in their passions with us, at least for a bit, I feel  the combination could be portal-to-the-future opening.

I’d hoped that riding along would be more than a break from everyday work for the lovely first lady of Momo, I hoped it would put new fire in Caroline’s heart about her own incredible values and perspective. And it absolutely did; AY has gathered souls of all ages that remind us both there are other ways of doing things, other ways of valuing life out there.

It feels like a diaspora of love for a whole new age for humans on Earth. I’m not overstating how I feel about the experience, and what I hope I can bring back to those already with me in the longing for such futures.

And for all the wonderful creative ambition of AY’s Project 17 taking shape, I think there is something about the magic of the GGShow that is immediately speaking to us about The Battery Tour’s spirit. To break barriers and build bridges – and this can be done as simply as bringing people with different experience together in a spirit of hope, honour and goofing freedom. We saw it happen in all three specials of it we filmed, in Rome, Glasgow and Milan. It was a kind of magic unlocked every time.

And it gets to me like only the more hopeful human tomorrow can.

None of this need mute Momo:tempo. Or Unsee The Future. If anything, tuning in as best I can to what comes next, it feels like it will have the opposite effect on all that, and plans with other beautiful creative sisters and brothers of mine.

For one thing, if I took nothing else from it, I took a sudden dawning realisation that if any three people could take an explosively talented planet cabaret on the road, it would be the possibly genius combination of Raine, me and AY. Is that what the Global Goals Music Roadshow is really going to become?

I’m listening.

In the mean time, I can say this. My next news will be sharing from the heartland of my work as an artist. And you are going to want to hear it.

Oh, and that goofy, hopeful little show is now on Earth X TV – and you can find it here.

If you are dumb enough to want to journey into the future you’ll need help. Lots of it, in the right shape of people – people who get something of what you’re worth. Know you’ll not look your best under pressure always to them. And don’t expect passport control to understand the shifting sands of local Covid regulations much better than you do.

If you decide it’s time to set out I can tell you it may take work, but it won’t be shovelling coal.

WATCH THE GLOBAL GOALS MUSIC ROADSHOW LIVE IN MILAN ON EARTHX TV >

 
 

Coloured perceptions.

 

Does the word “diversity” make your teeth itch? As far as you’re concerned, is the whole idea of it some fake liberal shame tool from back before racism was fashionable in the media again? You are an irascible old thing, aren’t you?

Well, let’s forget all that for a moment because I’d like to simply ask: Where are your roots?

I grew up on the east side of Bournemouth. Southbourne, or South Town as my brother Tim has often called it to sound way more skate, is essentially known for how close it is to the beach. On our daily constitutionals, Caroline and I invariably head up to the Grove and through Fisherman’s Walk to the cliffs, as the district’s Victorian and Edwardian developers healthily imagined we would. They may well have imagined me with my moustache grown out much more, obviously, but with only a few sartorial tweaks, I think Mrs Peach and I would be quite the Edwardian Sobo-ers. (My wife looks great in hats, for one thing.)

But right out the back of my house is another big outside space with a very different character that I had forgotten the town’s founders had also put there – and this weekend I had a boon of a job take me back to it. And, to be fair, in quite a fancy shirt.

Kings Park is a big ol’ bit of green open space behind Boscombe. When I was growing up it was just a driving cut through my dad always took to get across town, and we skirted a bit of it on the way to school on our bikes. It’s also where the Cherries are based – AFCB’s stadium is there, next to the eternal athletics track I spent a couple of sports days hanging around uncompetitively during some of those school days, waiting to be let out to go to art college. It’s a public space I’ve always taken for granted as a bit boring and just there.

Long since closed to through traffic, however, the park has grown into a lovely planted series of big green spaces and trees and a gentle wonder for dog walking and kids weekend sports clubs, winding down to the Littledown. We rediscovered it during lockdown, along with many other outdoor spaces I can’t believe I hadn’t really explored in a life living in the really very outdoorsy town of Bournemouth.

There’s a lesson here about perception – while your attention is so taken with one thing, everything else around you can turn out to be not the place you assumed it was.

 

Worlds coliving.

 

This was perhaps the purpose of World Of Love Festival – to reflect back to Bournemouth a bit more of the town it really is today. Because it’s a lot more colourful than whalebone and tweed and a few nice Japanese prints in a museum.

Bea Sieradzka launched the festival in 2019 as a “celebration of diversity”. Which might make your eye start twitching again as you head to the bowls club, but Bea is two interesting things: Incredibly tenacious and not from round here.

As a language teacher from Poland who’s made her home in Bournemouth, other people representing roots from all around the world really seemed to take to her idea of having a safe space to testify – to share, parade, sing who they are, adding to the mix of all of us living here right now.

“Diversity” sounds rather confected to me now, I’ll confess. It sounds a little unnaturally sweet, even in my liberal white ears, plugging in a years-old World Circuit compilation to the festival PA that weekend.

In conservative coastal towns like Bournemouth, is “diversity” just summer wallpaper, flatly covering up systemically uncomfortable year-round relationships? Does the melting pot just create grey goo? If you’re feeling weary from the culture wars, such events just might seem like parading appropriated histories. You intellectual cynic.

Maybe it depends on how you’ve personally considered the idea of representation.

All I know is, the effect of Bea’s incredible ambassadorial work all over town that weekend felt gently wonderful.

 

Far from ordinary everyday.

 

Introduced by sustainability mate Michael Hancock, Bea commissioned me to host the main stage during the two days.

I said: “I’d love to, but I’m at the stage in my life where I want to encourage different voices and faces to those of Edwardian gents like mine.”

To which she replied, effectively: “Then you’re missing the point. No one is disqualified from representing here.”

Across two mercifully balmy days, groups from maybe thirty different national communities brought together food, fragrances, music, dance and stories into a shared experience there in King’s Park that just seemed to make everyone feel… happy. That was the word I observed hanging over the little festival ground there. No fuss, no stress; everyone just seemed hang out and feel happy.

How wonderful, in the world as it is right now.

It was a calm oasis, away from the news and the social channels.

While I did get to introduce a wonderful range of live acts on the little main stage – from Kletzmer fiddles to Filipino soul, patterned Igbo parades to Mexican skirt swirls, shinkling Indian dance shapes to syncopated Brazillian Samba – Michael’s years in TV production enabled us to grab some of our guests and chat to them a bit on camera also. It may have been a bit South Today, but it was about doing that thing that seemed central to the whole idea of this festival – encourage accessibility to the stories.

I can say it’s something that has clearly become central to my own work too, especially this year.

As the crew from Samba FM introduced me to a radio station in Southampton dedicated to broadcasting global latin voices, or as Cheikh from Afric Arts Drumming said to me: “It’s the children, they will remember this experience”, or as young Onyinye felt moved to simply share from the main stage why celebrating the yam is a central bit of harvest symbolism for her Igbo family, I simply found myself moved that it could feel this natural.

In fact, it all felt a bit like the spirit of the Global Goals Music Roadshow to me, and I said so from the main stage.

But the point is that this is still far from ordinary. The joy and pride that everyone I met obviously felt representing in Kings Park was not disconnected from our current times of resurgent cultural conflicts, far away as all that so wonderfully felt for forty-eight hours. Dropping in to the Dorset Race Equality tent for a chat, one line rang out to me with realism:

“The very same people we are celebrating with all around us today are the same people coming to us for help.”

It’s way too soon to not restate the obvious: When you can put a name and a face to it, racism seems all the more insane. So we have to represent. And in the finer grains of us, the deeper truths of us.

 

We need World Of Love. We need champions like Bea to push for them to happen. To fight for spaces to show love – to demonstrate that it’s something proactive and determined, making experiences that feel like inclusion, not appropriation.

In an era of conflict and crisis, this is how you fashion the resilience of richness. Crucially, right in your back yard.

—-