Tag Archives: music

David Gray

I spent over four hours in a cell for busking during lockdown – that was wrong

By David Gray | Tue 12th January 2021 - 11:45 am

The increasing polarisation of politics across the globe is concerning for many reasons. The storming of the Capitol felt like a defining moment in this trend, while our government’s hollow pleading for the nation to unite over their shoddy Brexit deal has done nothing to bring opposing sides together. One area where this polarisation is becoming increasingly worrying is over Covid-19 measures. The world is not made up of Covid-denying conspiracy theorists and authoritarian-loving lockdown fanatics, but whenever a debate crops up, the position you take on that debate will inevitably see you lumped into one of those categories.

Most people accept that the temporary suspension of some liberties is a tragic necessity. But scrutiny has never been more important. John Harris’ excellent Guardian article goes into this at some length, so I will add the dimension of my own experience to this.

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The Voice

Rob’s Liberal Democrat rap

By The Voice | Tue 10th December 2019 - 11:58 am

Liberal Democrat Rob Castell thought he would be standing against Dominic Grieve in Beaconsfield. However, he stood aside when the election was announced. Dominic Grieve has been an important pro-Remain voice in the Commons, crucial to stopping Brexit. He is standing as an independent and the Liberal Democrats locally and nationally agreed not to oppose him.

Rob has been campaigning with Dominic Grieve, who is picking up much unexpected support.

Rob’s generosity in standing aside is clear. He has been a great and positive presence on social media during the campaign, though. Recently, he was put in touch with the producers of Politix and Chill, a new BBC Sussex podcast for young people. They asked him to write and record a rap about politics. Two others, from the Conservatives and Labour, were also invited to do so and they were judged by talent scouts.

Rob told me that it was a great experience and he hopes it will make politics more accessible for young people.

Watch it here.

The words to Rob’s rap are below:

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Caron Lindsay

A playlist fit for a new leader

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 28th July 2019 - 5:40 pm

Those of us watching the announcement of our new leader last Monday were treated to an excellent playlist while we were waiting for the result to be declared.

Listen here and watch Jo’s fantastic acceptance speech.

The long delay, was, I understand, the wifi in the venue not being quite up to the job of giving us the result instantaneously at the touch of a button. But we got there in the end. And we got to listen to some really good tunes while we waited nervously.

At one point, my son actually came through and said “Why are YOU listening to such cool music?” To be fair, I don’t listen to music that often. I’m mostly into podcasts or Radio 4. However, when I do, my son has to endure my random collection of trash and musical theatre.

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Adam Bambrough

Part 2: Why the Liberals Democrats should be the natural political home for Arts and Culture in the UK

By Adam Bambrough | Thu 30th August 2018 - 1:30 pm

Part Two – How We Can Support The Arts And Culture Industry In The UK 

The Arts and Culture industry is currently wrestling with a plethora of issues that we already hold high on our agenda.

Mental health still carries a stigma within the Arts, with performers and backstage workers, for example, knowing that were they to share their struggles with anxiety or depression, the chances of them being employed would be substantially reduced. Productions are run on a tight budget and timescale, and the risk of employing someone who may be in the eyes of a producer ‘potentially unreliable’ is much too high to take.

Sexual harassment and bullying in the workplace remain commonplace in many renowned creative buildings, where the rules of other industries seem not to apply, and young employees are treated as commodities, with management buoyed by the knowledge that the pool of people wanting to work in the industry far outweighs the number of jobs available.

Despite recent improvements, there remain great challenges with diversity, with the Arts still being dominated by white, middle class men, leaving women, who are further penalised should they have children, working class talent, those with disabilities, and minorities largely underrepresented.

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Kirsten Johnson

And Music Services continue to be cut…

By Kirsten Johnson | Thu 3rd May 2018 - 12:45 pm

Lib Dem MP Stephen Lloyd is supporting a campaign to save the East Sussex Music Service. He wrote in his newsletter:

Sadly the budget cuts just keep rolling in from East Sussex County Council, and they’re now planning severe reductions to our music services.

The absolutely brilliant East Sussex Music Service (ESMS) are celebrating their 84th year; they deliver music lessons to around 7000 children in schools across the county per annum and 1000 children, aged between 4 and 18, attend area music centres each week. Despite this success, the county council have announced plans are being made to close the music instrumental service by 2019. This will result in the loss of valued music provision for many and destroy a service which has introduced thousands of Eastbourne children to music over the decades.

I believe such proposals are unnecessary, wrong and shortsighted. I’ve also been told that staff believe savings can be made without slashing such a much loved music service. We need County Hall to pause, listen to the people they serve and go back to the music staff to ask them how the funding circle can be squared, rather than just propose a decimation of the entire instrument teaching provision. A decision which if it goes through, will be horrendously difficult to reverse. Please join me in opposing this cut by signing the online petition here.

I remember being amazed when studying the music systems of Albania under Enver Hoxha’s regime, that every child, from nursery onwards, was taught music. By the age of four, those showing talent were given individual lessons. By the age of six, some children were learning two instruments. Music was a celebrated part of culture, not a sideline. I wondered why we didn’t do the same.

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Caron Lindsay

Layla Moran: We shouldn’t be punishing children for taking part in dance and music

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 29th March 2018 - 3:45 pm

Embed from Getty Images

Back in the day, I used to get permission to be away from school to take part in the local arts festivals. It was good for me to broaden my experience and skills and good for the school to see its pupils win awards and present themselves well.

So I was pretty annoyed to see that the Royal Academy of Dance had complained that the Government’s rules on term time absence from school prevented children from taking their dance exams. From the BBC:

According to RAD exams director Andrew McBirnie, before 2013 ballet exams could be run “during the school day and the student was able to leave a class at say 10 o’clock, do their exam and be back by lunchtime – and that seemed to be a perfectly legitimate activity that the student might be doing as part of their all-round education.

“Increasingly over the last few years… there have been more and more schools saying: ‘No we can’t allow this any more because of this issue with unauthorised absence.'”

Just this week, a study showed the beneficial effects of structured music education on cognitive ability and academic performance:

Structured music lessons significantly enhance children’s cognitive abilities — including language-based reasoning, short-term memory, planning and inhibition — which lead to improved academic performance. Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the research is the first large-scale, longitudinal study to be adapted into the regular school curriculum. Visual arts lessons were also found to significantly improve children’s visual and spatial memory.

Just like when I was at school in the 80s, a Conservative Government squeezes school budgets and music specialist education is the first to go, as a report in the Guardian highlighted last week.

The director of the Royal College of Music has criticised the “steady decline” of music provision in UK state schools.

Prof Colin Lawson used a speech celebrating Prince Charles’s 25-year association with the school to add his voice to a situation that Andrew Lloyd Webber has called a “national scandal”.

Lawson praised work that has been done to analyse the effect of arts and culture on public health.

The Liberal Democrats have long opposed the limits to term time holidays anyway, but Layla Moran had this to say about today’s reports:

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The Love of Learning

By Kirsten Johnson | Thu 12th October 2017 - 6:00 pm

What are we doing to our young people? Testing them until the joy is out of learning and school is just one tick box after another. The head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, said

The regular taking of test papers does little to increase a child’s ability to comprehend.

We have completely the wrong approach to learning. We need holistic education for our young people, encompassing the widest range of subjects, building character and instilling the love of learning.

This includes the arts. When I was 11, we moved to Missouri. I started at a new junior high school (years 6-7 in the English system) which had a school band. Up to that stage I had played a bit of piano and sung in the church choir. The music teacher asked if I’d like to learn the clarinet as he needed more players in his band. Within three months I was sitting 2nd chair in the clarinet section. I would never have learned an instrument if it hadn’t been for the opportunity at this state school. I remember my parents, who were on a tight budget, scraping money together for some private lessons later that year, costing $4 a lesson.

Years later, I’m a professional musician, wondering where the next generation of musicians is coming from. We need music, and all the arts, as an integral part of our schools. The economic argument is obvious – the creative industries contribute £87.4 billion per year to the economy. We would be denuded as a society without the undergirding of the arts which permeate and enrich our lives.

But I wish to make the moral argument, bringing me back to the opening point of school being too much about testing. Having an arts-inclusive curriculum builds a well-rounded intellect. The brain, when it has to marry the left and right halves in analysing and performing a piece of music, develops physiologically. Attention spans are lengthened when one learns to concentrate on playing your part in a band. Aesthetic awareness is broadened, that life is not about ticking boxes but about beauty, relationships and creativity. Learning to sing together builds community and teaches young people to work together. We learn that coming together produces something more wonderful than striving alone.

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The Voice

WATCH: Norman Baker’s Reform Club’s hard-hitting song “Give War a Chance”

By The Voice | Fri 29th April 2016 - 11:48 am

Norman Baker’s band, The Reform Club has a new album, Never Yesterday, out. Today, they release a very professional looking video.

Watch the hard-hitting song Give War a Chance which satirises the activities of a “peace envoy” and is published ahead of the Chilcott Report which we are sure will be published at some point this millennium. Norman plays the role of the envoy to absolute perfection. And there are tanks. Real tanks.

Of the song, Norman says:

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Caron Lindsay

Tim’s top tunes: How many have you heard of?

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 24th December 2015 - 10:25 am

Tim Farron features tomorrow in a Christmas Day Lakeland Radio broadcast. Between 12pm and 3pm tomorrow, the pre-recorded show will air and Tim will count down his top 40 tunes.

Cumbria Live has the story:

There will be no Slade or Wham Christmas hits with Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron picking the music – instead there will be songs from the Sex Pistols, The Clash and X Ray Specs.

The show will feature on Lakeland Radio on Christmas Day with a selection of Tim Farron’s favourite hits from across the years including Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now by The Smiths which might be viewed as an unusual festive tune.

It is well known that Tim and I move in very different musical circles. One of us is the essence of all that is cool. One of us loves everything trashy, cheesy and camp. It’s therefore hardly surprising that I have only heard of a handful of his choices.

Here is his list in full. How many have you heard of?

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Paul Walter

The Last Post

By Paul Walter | Wed 11th November 2015 - 9:30 pm

As we approach the end of Armistice Day, it is, perhaps, appropriate to remember the tune most associated with military memorials, The Last Post.

The BBC produce some superb radio documentaries. They have surpassed themselves with “The Last Post” presented by Alwyn W Turner. It tells the story of the tune and describes its extraordinarily wide use, often at national and international occasions and including at the funerals of Sir Winston Churchill and IRA man Bobby Sands. He also mentions the American equivalent, “Taps”, which was played at the funeral of John F Kennedy.

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NewsHound

Tim Farron on Swim Deep, Wild Beasts and Everything Everything

By NewsHound | Thu 22nd October 2015 - 3:56 pm

Everything Everything @ LatitudeRemember that awkward moment with Ming and the Arctic Monkeys? This is not a problem we’re going to have with Tim Farron. In fact, he’s more likely to introduce us to bands we’ve never heard of. When he took his dog Jasper fell running the other night, he was listening to Everything Everything.


NME have picked up on an interview he did with The Big Issue North in which he talked about his musical tastes:

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Caron Lindsay

Norman Baker gets musical to highlight dangers of animal extinction

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 5th March 2015 - 12:55 pm

Norman Baker's Animal CountdownLewes MP Norman Baker has taken to music to warn us all of the dangers facing some animals we take for granted. Lions, tigers, elephants and rhinos are under threat. I spent 99p on it and it’s actually very good. You can find out how to download Norman Baker’s Animal Countdown here and the video, which I can’t embed, can be watched on You Tube here.

Norman wrote an article for Politics Home ahead of his Adjournment Debate last night in which he outlined what needed to be done:

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The Voice

Norman Lamb and the ‘prince of grime’

By The Voice | Thu 29th January 2009 - 10:13 am

The Guardian’s Patrick Barkham has the story of the strange connection between Tinchy Stryder “a 22-year-old grime artist from east London, enjoying the highest new entry at No 3 in this week’s singles chart” and Norman Lamb “a middle-aged Liberal Democrat MP from Norfolk”:

Stryder’s tiny independent record label was created by Lamb’s son, Archie, when he was just 17, after his Lib Dem dad remortgaged their home to loan him £10,000. Archie and his friend Jack Foster dropped out of school after booking Stryder – then completely unknown – for their urban music nights in Norwich and persuading him to

…

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