Just play music

It's Friday afternoon. The sky above the railway station is gradually fading from white through grey to black. It's been a busy week, full of meetings and discussions and decisions and brain strain. My piece on the ACE consultation drew some very personal comments - I don't mind people disliking my ideas, but take criticism of my prose style to heart! I've just finished a letter in support of some artists from the Eastern Cape in South Africa who've been refused visas to travel to take part in a major education programme in the Spring. A pint or a gin and tonic wouldn't go amiss, to be honest.


Days like this I will often go home and have a little noodle around on the guitar to decompress. I like to sing songs, but nothing relaxes me quite like just playing. (It's a non-aggressive way of getting the effect a game of fiveaside has on me.) There was a great article in The Guardian about amateur music making, by Charlotte Higgins, this week which really made me want to do this with some other people too. The people just sounded as if they were having so much fun and getting so much depth out of the experience. Play is, after all, a very serious thing.

Charlotte meets a number of orchestras and groups, and also communicates her own passion for playing. I'm no classical music buff, so my music making is in another sphere, which makes it hard to avoid the '40something-guitar-dad' cliches when even thinking about playing with other people. I don't mind inflicting those on my family through the walls, but would draw the line at strangers. (I think of my staff here like family, obviously, hence our inflicting the Management Team Ukulele Orchestra on them at one party.)


One person says something I really empathise with: learning a piece is "a life's project: even if I do learn [the notes] of the D minor Partita, that's just the beginning of ­interpreting and ­understanding that piece". He adds: "I'm struggling to express this, but there is something about ­playing that is wholly good for myself, ­uncomplicatedly good, in a moral sense. When you play music you are an agent, you are doing something rather than being a consumer or a subject. For me, it's part of being a human ­being."


The size and significance of the amateur sector is, I think, increasingly realised. The point the article makes is that quality is there too. It sometimes just goes with the love of music rather than the presence of payment. Charlotte Higgins has followed up with a blog asking for details of amateur groups - hopefully there'll be an upsurge in numbers of people using their instrumental skills.


Perhaps there is something in the air for 2010, about 'expressive lives'. The choir my wife and daughter sing in, which I've mentioned before, have started a 'sing for your supper' session at Arc in Stockton and had 80 people there last week - families of all ages and backgrounds making music together just for pleasure. I also had a lovely letter from a user of the Take It Away scheme recently, thanking us for making it possible for him to buy a banjo - 50 years since he gave up playing. The gentleman's aim was to be able to play it by his next (76th) birthday.


There, that's reminded me of the transformative power of the arts up enough to drive home now - do read the articles.

Give me enough rope: albums of the noughties

I'm now going to really expose my shortcomings as a high brow, by listing 10 of my favourite albums of the decade. And show my age by using the word album probably...

No classical, no jazz, no hip-hop or r'n'b, nothing too ou-there, I'm afraid. I could have done a Mercury and put Bill Frisell and Medeski, Martin and Wood on here, for instance, or Kanye West - I like them a lot, but when I go with my gut they've not made real favourites this decade. Here goes...

Time (The Revelator) - Gillian Welch (includes possibly the best 14 minute long song in the history of folk-rock)
Not The Trembling Kind - Laura Cantrell (a favourite of the late John Peel, classic debut, though check the song 'Bees' on her 3rd album for my favourite Cantrell song)
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - Arctic Monkeys (Sillitoe crossed with Cooper-Clarke with great tunes and well-thumped guitars - yes it's obvious, but for good reason)
Is This It? - The Strokes (as fake as the Monkeys are real, maybe, but in a great way, even now)
The Futureheads - The Futureheads (Early Gang of Four crossed with Pink Flag-era Wire crossed with 'Born to Run' - how could I not love it?)
More Adventurous - Rilo Kiley (history of pop alluded to on one record, with great girl group attitude)
Dig Lazarus Dig - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (a long way from The Birthday Party but still with fire in his belly, an unlikely advert for growing older)
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco (wonderful record from my band of the decade, from when they were the American Radiohead - except good. In fact, I like Wilco so much I could have named all four studio albums from a productive decade, but will limit myself to two...)
Sky Blue Sky - Wilco (highspot so far of the Nels Cline era)
Aman Iman - Water is Life - Tiniwaren (not a token world choice, saw them live twice and they were astonishing - the Velvets with gourds. Saw them give the Mayor of Gateshead an amulet once, but that's another story.)

Ok, going to press publish before I add in Lightspeed Champion or Fleet Foxes or...

Notes on the noughties...10 non-fiction books

Here's my second-list of 10 of my favourites from the noughties... all from the Robinson bookshelves... prose non-fiction, with some notes...

Like a Fiery Elephant, - Jonathan Coe (great biography of the fantastic B.S. Johnson)
Bringing It All Back Home - Ian Clayton (best book about loving music I've ever read)
Chronicles, Volume 1 - Bob Dylan (can't think what to say here it's so obvious)
Bass Culture - Lloyd Bradley (encyclopedic history of reggae)
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell (thinking without thinking)
Resilience Thinking - Brian Walker and David Salt (just search 'resilience' on this site to see why)
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (I like thinking with number as well as words)
17 - Bill Drummond ( entertaining art philosophy, my name in here somewhere as a member of The 17)
Getting to Maybe - Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman & Michael Quinn Patton (making the impossible happen, inspiring book on social change)
Rip It Up - Simon Reynolds (how post-punk changed the world, or bits of Britain anyway.)

Hmm, very blokey, very contradictory, glad I didn't list the books about northern soul (d'oh!) No wonder the supplements never ask, is it? I have read some of the books I should have on this list, but this are more my favourites. I spent the 80s and 90s reading about literature, art and theatre, honest.

Leaving (the first decade of) the 21st century: 10 favourite novels

Well, what with the papers being full of 'end of the decade' summaries, I've been scanning the shelves and my brain for a few lists with which to expose my narrow- and shallow-ness. Here's the first, 10 of my favourite novels published since 2000. (In no particular order, as they say on The X Factor, and missing out lots I wanted to list.)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
The Night Watch - Sarah Waters
The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Peoples' Act of Love - James Meek
The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The Damned United - David Peace
The Madolescents - Chrissie Glazebrook

Odd how many of them begin with 'The'. Don't know what that means!

Younger than that now

There’s been lots of coverage in the last couple of weeks of 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent ‘domino’ effect across Eastern Europe. Whenever I think of that November, I also remember my first naïve steps into 'arts development', as it’s when the first issue of Scratch, the poetry magazine I used to edit and publish, came out. I recall stuffing envelopes with fresh-smellign magazines whilst watching the news on tv.

I started the magazine with a strong interest in how poets were reflecting the 2nd decade of Thatcherism with a kind of expanded, po-mo-realism, wise-cracking and allusive but political at a deep level. Although there were some signs of hope (the Green Party got 15% of the vote in the European Elections in 1989, for instance), it could feel as if nothing was ever going to change. So why not start a poetry magazine that would show that, as I put it in the first editorial, ‘the exercise of the imagination is an act of liberation’?

As is only normal and proper there’s a lot about that first issue that now makes me cringe and smile simultaneously – the youthful self-righteousness, the slack use of Letraset. But no one can deny that within a year of me starting a poetry magazine, the Berlin Wall was paperweights across the world, repressive communist regimes had crumbled, Ceausescu was dead, Thatcher was out of power, Nelson Mandela was free and my wife gave birth to our first child – who says poetry makes nothing happen? (Of course, I can make a strong case for personal responsibility for only one of the things in that list.)

Why am I sharing this, other than to mark the occasion? Well, it’s something to do with change. In that first editorial, I also quoted Greil Marcus:

‘It was too easy to lose touch with rage, with a sense of what is good and evil, to lose touch with the idea that its worth something to make, and try to live out, such a distinction. These are the politics of the freeze-out. They turn into a culture of seamless melancholy with the wilful avoidance of anything that one suspects might produce really deep feeling. Raw emotions must be avoided when one knows they will take no shape but that of chaos.’

Change runs through a number of recent posts – perhaps because I’m personally very alive to it right now, mainly because it’s in the air. I suspect we’re not in a melancholic freeze-out, with two tribes eyeing each other guardedly, but in something both more manic and more ersatz than that. (As with the ridiculous attacks on Gordon Brown last week.) It can feel like raw emotion or personal interest is all that’s allowed. Whether we are actually shaping chaos to a greater degree feels highly debatable. We seem to know change is-a-coming, in a way few did in 1989, but are we any better prepared?

The question I keep returning to, in our culture and in our Culture, is how we bring into actual being a proper combination of emotion and analysis, imagination and intent, change and continuity. And as in 1989, I have a hunch that if the arts can’t help, we’re going to struggle.

Brahms for breakfast?

I've been in a number of conversations recently about campaigns to increase public engagement in the arts, and the best way to do that without either dumbing down, or making an offer you can't live up to, or simply banging your head against a brick wall. I came across the Americans for the Arts tv ad campaign to encourage young people to do more arts. There are probably some serious policy issues to discuss, but I'm sharing this primarily because they made me laugh.

Vincent :30 from Americans for the Arts on Vimeo.

If you've recently had a sense of humour or irony by-pass, or are one of those arts people born without a sense of humour, I suggest you move along now, as there is nothing for you to see here.

Wrapped up in books

Well, it’s been quiet on here as the Family Robinson have been away on holiday – having fun to put the thought of this next week’s A Level and GCSE results out of our minds. Well, that’s what my wife and I were doing, not sure about the kids…

Anyway, after a day and a half of dealing with the things marked urgent, I thought I’d relax for a few minutes and create Arts Counselling’s first ‘annual feature’ and share with you my holiday reading.

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland – entertaining tale told in epistolary and note form with an novel-within-a-novel that did make me laugh out loud, and then go back to rewatch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Read this and you’ll never go into Staples without thinking of it.

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson. Beautifully imagined story of the poet Rupert Brooke and a housemaid. The facts of Brooke’s youth and artistic circle are seamlessly woven into a picture switching between Brooke and the maid – who becomes so real you think she must have been a real person too. (Arts Council England gets some nice thanks for support whilst writing of this, by the way.)

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. A massive (though not as huge as his final book 2666) and massively lively story of the founders of the Mexican school of Visceral Realist poetry – apparently based on Bolano’s own youth in Mexico City. A bit like Kerouac’s Desolation Angels rewritten by Thomas Pynchon. A bit.

Cider with Roadies by Stuart Maconie. Not sure why I hadn’t read this before… forty-something man reminisces in humorous fashion about the punk and post-punk years growing up in the North West of England, it could have been written to give me a relaxing day. (Maconie grew up in Wigan, which is where the 113 bus that went past my childhood home went. He even worked for a while at Courtaulds like my Dad.) Warm, self-deprecating and fun, slipped down like a pint of Boddingtons.

The Masterpiece by Emile Zola. Don’t know why, felt like a bit of 19th Century French naturalism by the end of the fortnight. Suffice to say, you can’t get much further from Stuart Maconie’s good humour than Zola’s ‘never-going-to-end-well’ school of realism, but what better way to prepare for the return to work than a book about artists and their visions and travails.

I knew I was writing this for a reason: looking at this list they are all about one form of art or another, and the search for ways of making that manifest in society and in life. Hmm...

Back soon with some serious policy related stuff - just getting back in the swing.

Books and records

I'm just sharing this because I think these, and other, 'classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Just for fun.' are brilliant. Enjoy more here. They're by Little Pixel and you can find out more about him here.

Homage to Arthur Seaton?

I hope I'm not crashing any serious taste issues with the image above. Harland Miller has a show opening at Baltic in Gateshead next week and the invites have been raising a smile in the office, so I thought I'd share. I really like the Evelyn Waugh one, 'Gateshead Revisited', too.

If everyone else put their hand in the fire, would you?

I'm experimenting with Twitter. See title to this post for a suggestion of my ambiguity about this. It feels like the outer limits of my interest in myself, and also in others and their activities. (I'm also finding it a little unpleasing to use.) But perhaps it might be useful for something - I'm stalking - whoops, I mean following - the likes Richard Florida and Sir Ken Robinson as an experiment and I've had some interesting links from that already. So I'm going to experiment with using it in relation to this blog, and to arts events/product I see. It will encourage me to stick with that if a few Twitter users follow me - do it here. I promise to spare you the ups and downs of the end of the football season, what I'm having for tea and that sort of thing . (Find me personally on Facebook for that!)

How to gulp from the dailiness of life

Sometimes art just turns up at the right time, doesn’t it? Last night, feeling a bit tired and frazzled and wishing it was already the weekend, I went to a work-in-progress showing of Unfolding Theatre’s Building Palaces. It involved being shown round a number of rooms in a small group – each being a ‘palace’ to the actors and musicians in them. One room involved being blindfolded, which disturbed the control freak in me. One room gave us the chance to bang gongs and bells, which was easier fun. One room we got to make our own palaces with material and pva glue. (Apart from the repressed people in the corner, who stood there with their arms folded…) It ended with a group of the North East’s finest artistic minds on a rooftop in the Ouseburn, as the sun set and a massive moon looked down, surrounding three musicians playing beautifully - and accompanying them with the whoopee cushions provided. Some people think laughter and mystery don’t mix. I’m not one of them.

Then when I got home, for no discernible reason, other than I’d been thinking about books as my palace would be lined with them, in alphabetical order by author, I pulled the Selected Poems of Randell Jarrell from the shelf, and flicked through it and read at random his little poem Well Water:

‘What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up…” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! You cup your hands
And gulp from the dailiness of life.’

Whether you’ve got a long weekend for Easter or a short one, may chance bring you find some clear cold water, the sun, and the moon. And I personally recommend a whoopee cushion too…

Why are amateur arts ignored?

A few weeks ago, Reemer Bailey of Voluntary Arts England persuaded me to do a quick interview for her blog. This was done electronically at the end of a hectic week before a week off, and was then heading for their website, where you can now see it. It's the first in a series of interviews with policy makers. (Though it does slightly read as if it's the first in a series of interviews with me - fear not, VAE readers, I'm only doing it once!)

Amongst other things directly relevant to voluntary arts such as my title question I was asked to say something controversial (the Bill Grundy approach) and to choose between Gordon Brown and Barack Obama. You can go straight to the interview here to see what I said, but best to go via the VAE site front door as you may see lots of other more useful information such as their very useful new briefings on sustainability and resilience of voluntary groups.

Has nostalgia got a hold on me?

One of my resolutions for the New Year was to try and avoid nostalgia. I've since been debating with various friends what activity is allowed under this regime. First I was picked up on liking Fleet Foxes. Not a fair cop as I don't even like Neil Young or CSNY, though I do like weird folk music. Then perhaps revivals of plays should not be allowed. Did I only like the Fluxus show at Baltic mainly because the graphic style made me nostalgic, albeit for a time largely before I was born/conscious? Did all those lovely printed things actually make me nostalgic for the punk and post-punk that picked up on them? And so on.

So I've been buying new records, seeing new plays and looking for new things - or known people doing new things. (Last year's album from the revived Portishead, for instance, strikes me as an astonishing piece of work on any terms and definitely didn't make me yearn for the This Life years.) But then today I heard a report that's it's Motown's 50th birthday.

Although I was only born in 1964, and thereby can't really be nostalgic for Motown, the impulse is in there, alongside a love of many of the songs, and an appreciation of the change Motown made. It was the first black-owned company to cross over - previously black musicians had made music which crossed over, but for white employers. I've actually never felt the need to 'choose' between Motown and Stax, which many (mainly white, it seems) critics portray as more authentic - even though many of the key musicians were white - but I know the whole story is not rosy. But where ever you sit on Motown as expression of cultural identity or as employer, any number of fantastic, life-affirming songs came from a company that 'embedded' (as we bureaucrats like to say) black music in the mainstream like no other.

If you don't enjoy this excellent video of the Greatest Ever Robinson and his Miracles, odd dodgy note and all, please seek immediate help. (Oh dear, I can hear that final straw breaking some poor puritan camel's back somewhere...)

No more rock and roll for you - is documentation really evil?

I’ve been reading Bill Drummond’s book 17, about his choir The 17 and his battle against the superfluity and subsequent creative redundancy of recorded music, which he believes has run its course. I became a life member of The 17 by taking part in its performance at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle on 17 May 2006. You can read an account by one of my fellow choir members that very night here. It was a very intense experience. I find some of his ‘scores’ for the choir moving as well as provoking.

Drummond’s work arguably challenges one of the key thrusts of the new Arts Council plan, the ‘digital opportunity’. Is there a responsibility to preserve ‘live’ experiences? Are the performing arts blessed or cursed by the way in which so many shows happen live and you were either there, or you weren’t, and only memories remain? At the end of each performance by The 17, you get to hear the sound of the recording being deleted – how digital a live experience is that? But is the art theory that recording is dead simply that, a kind of art/anti-art gesture in line with many in Drummond’s rather brilliant past?

I’m torn on this. Digital technology opens up new ways of preserving and interpreting past live experiences – it can enrich the participation, as indeed Drummond’s use of multiple websites does for his argumentative art practice. Online distribution could perform the functions village libraries did historically, opening doors to the otherwise distanced.

But then, he’s also right that the very availability takes away the magic. I found a recording of a New Order concert – Blackpool, August 30 1982 to be precise – which I had remembered as one of the best concerts I’d ever seen: that memory was rather complicated, shall we say, by what I actually heard on the recording.

Anyway, I recommend 17 – and indeed his earlier book 45 - to anyone interested in art, music, technology or Bill Drummond: he’s full of ideas worth thinking about. But I’m not getting rid of my records for anyone.

More to life than books you know but not much more?

A couple of people thought I was actually reading Clement Greenberg and Frieze whilst on my holidays. As a family catchphrase has it: I might be daft - but I’m not stupid…

I will wind up gently, after two days of email threshing and thrashing, by sharing the books I did actually read on holiday, for no other reason than some people suggested it.

Bringing It All Back Home by Ian Daley. Fantastic book about music, life, class, identity and place – in particular Featherstone, West Yorkshire. Funny, poignant, stimulating, the last chapter made me weep and the rest made me go delving through my mp3 player. If you’ve ever liked music, or people, you should read this book, so that’s hopefully all of you - but I'm told it might help if you're male and the far side of 40.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. Parallel future noir, set in an an Alaskan Jewish-homeland. Prose snappier than a fedora, proper thriller and emotional content too – very satisfying.

Then We Came To an End by Joshua Ferris. Had meant to get away from odd office behaviour on holiday, but this is all about people and their odd behaviour in the office as cutbacks loom and the pointlessness of their jobs dawns on them. (Obviously didn’t ring any bells at all with me…) Starts off funny and a little glib but builds. By the end I was describing it as Joseph Heller’s Something Happened for the web 2.0 age – and I love that book. Fittingly, there are some entertaining web promos. Start here.

The Rain before It Falls by Jonathan Coe. Slight detour from Coe’s usual style – wierdly enough reminded me of Maggie Farrell’s The Vanishing Trick of Esmee Lennox which I read on last year’s holiday. Bit over-written at times but eventually very engaging tale of love, daughters and mothers.

Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks by Christopher Brookmyre. Functional ‘quirky’ thriller I borrowed off my son as I’d run out of other books.

Ok, now it’s back to Westminster and Whitehall Weekly and normal service.

Can blue men sing the whites?

I’d been thinking about aesthetics and identity a lot since my last post. Then on Friday I saw a trio of fantastic performances by black musicians in the shape of Allen Toussaint, the Neville Brothers (time off injured last season has improved Gary’s keyboard playing no end, I swear, though he looked a bit different…), topped off by Abram Wilson’s fantastic jazz band reinventing New Orleans jazz whilst covering the Arctic Monkeys, Michael Jackson and James Brown and it felt very much ‘mine’ and very much ‘other’ at the same fun, exhilarating time. Then on Sunday night I watched the wedding reception episode of Gavin And Stacy series one. (Yeah, I know, late catching up – I’m always out at ‘art’, you know.) Which was one of the most pitch perfect bits of writing I’d seen in a long time, and very like the wedding reception I went to in Preston a couple of weeks ago.

So I thought I’d also throw out a Nick Hornby-style ‘Five things that Aren’t Saturday Night Sunday Morning but what is’ list, just for fun…

· The poetry of Jim Burns (a Preston poet to his bones despite moving to Cheshire some years ago, and being the world’s expert on the Beats). Start by looking at a few of his poems on the fantastic Poetry Magazines archive. http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/search/index.asp?search=Jim+Burns
· The work of the Side Gallery – treat yourself to a few minutes browsing their website.
· Control by Anton Corbijn – not the whole rock star suicide thing, obviously. But the depiction of bookish grammar school boys and life in Macclesfield has the tang of truth about it. (Looks great too.)
· David Eldridge’s Market Boy. This play definitely rang true from my (mercifully brief) time in London in the 80s, but had a joie de vivre and zest that made me think there is life beyond Northernness… (Would it be fair to call Eldridge Lee Hall’s Essex cousin?)
· The Royle Family can be a bit crude at times but I spent what I think of as literally years sitting on the sofa and brewing up like the Ralph Little character, though I was reading a book too. My mum even looked a bit like Sue Johnson, and although we would never have gone in for the belching, farting, banjo-playing thing, my granddad did have a neat Xmas party trick that involved whipping out his dentures…

Which makes me think that one man's box is another man's identity is another man's cliche, which would take me on to Peter Kay, so it's time to stop.

Anyone for a poetry reading instead of going shopping?

Matthew Taylor of the RSA predicts a rise in ‘post-consumerism’, given the economic downturn and general doom and gloom. He suggests a few trends that might catch hold as a result such as sustainable design and make do and mend. (He also predicts the rise of the vegetarian super chef, which is what I was doing 20 years ago – it never happened, at least not for me, alas…)

I like this idea. Here’s a few more arts-related suggestions for post-consumerist trends:

· People will buy musical instruments (perhaps using the Arts Council’s Take It Away scheme) and spend evenings playing music alone or together
· Music blogs and other digital downloads will make paying for music even more of a fetishistic hangover than it is now
· The older your tour t-shirt the more you’ll be respected
· Dancing will become the new gym membership
· Gallery going will become even more popular as a first date
· The live experience of theatre and music – perhaps the ultimate consumer item as once it’s over, you are (traditionally) left with nothing but memories, the experience having been consumed – will come to always include a free recording, either on cd/dvd as you leave or on-line.
· The women I know in book groups will stop buying books and just go straight to the wine.
· Freecycle will be as big as EBay (Ok, not strictly arts-related though you can probably get the odd instrument and good for props.)

On the other hand: I don’t think this means I have to stop buying cds and old records, does it...

How did I end up on stage with an Undertone?

It must be conference season. After the one on social capital I wrote about recently, last week I had the pleasure of chairing ‘Our Creative Talent’, an event organised by three partners: Arts Council England, Voluntary Arts Network and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The event marked the launch of a major piece of research into participation in the arts through voluntary and amateur groups, and through informal learning. You can download it here. There are some pretty impressive statistics about people’s involvement in the voluntary and amateur arts, although as with most ‘groundbreaking’ research, it raises as many further questions as it gives answers. (Or at least that’s what the researchers were trying to persuade me...)

Speakers ranged from Margaret Hodge to Feargal Sharkey, once an Undertone now head of British Music Rights and possibly Britain’s only strategic ex-pop star via Alan Davey and Robin Simpson (whose blogs I heartily recommend: start at Cultural Playing Field.) There were various workshops, then a panel session where I had that almost impossible task of spotting people put their hands up.

There was a really positive atmosphere throughout the day and it is clear that the voluntary arts are seen differently than was the case when I first wielded a long-arm stapler in their cause. There are lots of questions to work through though: can the sector deliver on quality consistently enough? How is the sector changing given the aging population? How do we encourage better connections with the professional and funded sectors (the right, better connections)? How do we cope with the destruction of adult education in this country? For starters.

You can read all about the conference, and listen to some of the sessions on the Voluntary Arts England site. (Follow the Flickr link there enough and you can see me on stage with Feargal Sharkey. I’m not embarrassed to say that gives me a thrill. Click here to see a seasonal Undertones classic. Or here to see him in full pre-smoking ban glory on my favourite Undertones song. )

Can you feel the force?

How my kids laughed at this… Apparently I am one of 500 of the most influential people in the North East of England. Well, at least according to a highly unscientific and undemocratic exercise in The Journal newspaper, that is, and if you want to make a sarcastic comment about the North East please do so using the normal channels!

The reason I mention it, apart from amused pride, is that I’m interested in the high number of cultural figures in the list. (To be honest, it’d be a shame if someone in my job wasn’t on that list, so I don’t put it down to my personal qualities especially.) These range from novelists such as Val McDermid and David Almond through choreographer Liv Lorent, poet Sean O’Brien, playwright Lee Hall, a good set of Chief Execs, producers and festival directors right through to giants such as Ant and Dec. The ‘Culture, media and the arts’ index is twice as long as the public sector one, for instance – surprising perhaps as the public sector is a big employer in this region. And there are more of us than there are lawyers. (They can probably outspend us in the Influence bar though.) I take that as an indication that culture here has, at least in part, and in the perception of whoever put this list together, put itself at the heart of regional life. On a good day I always think that, but it’s good to have some ‘external’ confirmation.

(Another confirmation came last week in that the announcement of the Hodge Review and the abolition of the regional cultural consortia was, somewhat surprisingly, front page news in The Journal.)

Another noticeable trend is the number of ex-Arts Council/Northern Arts people now in senior non-arts jobs in the region. Maybe that’s the kind of thing we need to really ‘mainstream’ the arts: more people prepared to dirty their hands with the process of ‘influence’ and power? Perhaps the various ‘cultural leadership’ schemes need to also think about how some people can move not just ‘up’ but ‘across’?

Am I now too old to enjoy On The Road?

Here’s an interesting example of the dilemmas around how to encourage ‘participation’ – in this case, reading. Some of the major children’s publishers are suggesting adopting ‘age banding’. This means that books will display the recommended age range for readers. The theory is this guidance will make is easier for adults to buy books for children and young people, ‘signpost’ potential readers towards books they are more likely to enjoy, and thus encourage more children to read books and thereby increase our rather depressing child literacy rates. The big publishers and some writers support this approach. I imagine it might also appeal to grandparents and aunties and uncles, not to mention children used to unwrapping books they’re never going to read.

On the other hand, Phillip Pullman and many other leading children’s authors are asking for support for their protest at this. They feel the approach would be damaging to young readers, put some off books that might seem either ‘babyish’ or ‘too old’ according to their banding, and generally undermine individuality – as well as ignoring the intentions of many writers and illustrators to make their work matter to people of all ages. You can read their case, and join the protest if persuaded, at www.notoagebanding.org.

This looks like a classic example of good intentions being undermined by clumsy intervention that goes against the grain of what actually motivates people. Think of the books you might have missed if you paid more attention to banding than to design, the first pages, the blurb, your instinct, and so on. Why not adopt the ‘if you like that, try this’ technique as refined, in different ways by Amazon and last.fm? And whilst we’re at it, why not use that more widely right across the arts? I know they can get it horribly wrong, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

(Mind you, I do sometimes think some of the existential Penguin Classics I read as a teenager should have had a sticker on saying ‘You might actually be too young and hopeful for this. Lighten up and come back when you’re older.' And when I read the new 'scroll' edition of Kerouac's On The Road I did indeed wonder whether I was getting too old and grumpy for it...)