-THE TRASH BIN OF ETERNITY

1 August 2006

There has been a gap of a few days since writing the last sentence. I didn’t want to write anymore until I had re-read all the SCORES again to remind myself of moments and thoughts that I might have forgotten.

Over those few days I was doing other stuff. Going to different places. Thinking other thoughts. This morning I got all the SCORES from all the schools artworked up and ready to publish.

On a quick flick through they all looked great. That is, from a visual point of view. Then I started to panic. What if I read through them again and they were crap and me thinking they were great had just been a moment of soft patronising judgement on my part in a ‘Awwww, aren’t they cute’ sort of way.

After reading a couple I decided not read any more. A decision had already been made that we were not going to pick out what I thought were the better ones. It is not my job to decide which ones cut the mustard. (What does ‘cut the mustard’ actually mean? I hate using those sort of phrases that we just trot out without any thought of where it came from or why.)

Anyway, back to these SCORES scattered on the floor in front of me that we are not allowing any of our (John Hirst, Cally or myself) editorial judgement. Well, there is a bit of editing going on. I forgot to ask them to come up with titles and seeing as I had used verbs for all the titles of the 17 ones that I did, John Hirst has chosen verbs contained in each of these to be their titles. Also we corrected spelling and punctuation. A couple of the schools asked that only the children’s first names appear on the credits. This was to protect them from something in some way I think, so we made the decision that all of them would have only a first name credit. I thought they should also have the names of the school. This was for the obvious reason that it would be nice for the school and give the SCORE a bit of context. But there was also another reason. This reason is that it may be important for you to know roughly the age of the author/composer of each of the SCORES, thus the words primary/junior or secondary/comprehensive are there to give you that rough idea. What I definitely didn’t want to do was a ‘Chelsea (8), Connor (9)’ type of thing. Putting the ages in brackets after their names is a patronising step too far.

But there was another angle I was concerned about. I am wanting all sorts of people to feel they can submit SCORES to be performed by The17, these all sorts of people to include those who take themselves seriously as composers of new music. Maybe I should not admit it to you but I want the validation of having the odd SCORE submitted by some respected person from the new music world may bring. I know this is crap but I’d be lying if I didn’t let on that this is the case. Now the downside of having all these SCORES by children and young people, however cute they may be, is that they are likely to put off the folk who see themselves as serious composers of new music. You get my drift?

To counter all that, I do think that taking what I am doing into schools and doing it with kids who may not give a shit, keeps me grounded in some way. And if they do get something from it too … I can’t deny I get a real buzz and it seems to give me a sense of lasting validation beyond the ego rush that I might get if Steve Reich or whoever was to write a SCORE for The17.

With each of the remaining seven schools that I went to the, pupils seemed to respond very positively to what I was inviting them to do. One of the recurring problems was that if I gave them any sort of example of something I might think of as a sound that would have a special place for me, they would seem to latch on to it and use a very similar thing themselves. At every school I would read out the skylarks one that I did. Maybe this is the reason there is a number of SCORES asking The17 to listen to birds or animals.

Some of the classes seemed more lateral in their thinking as a whole group. I don’t know if this is because they had a particularly inspiring teacher or because there was something in the ethos of the school. There were a couple of schools where I got a slight sense of cynicism from the teacher about what I was doing on my first visit, but this was non-existent on my second visit. This may have been because getting the pupils to come up with their own SCORES was more inclusive, but from the off they were all up for it.

Shit! I’ve just been ordering all the SCORES that I’ve got scattered on the floor in front of me and I’m starting to panic that we might be missing a whole schools’ worth. If that is the case, I have no idea where they have got to. The plan is to have the little book with all the SCORES in it out for when The17 do Huddersfield in November (2006). We are working to a tight schedule. I’m supposed to have everything written by the end of this week to get the thing turned around in time, as in these words edited, book designed, printed and bound.

I’m off to Ireland at the weekend for a week doing something else altogether. Then off to Greece for two weeks with family and I’ve got this problem with my passport.

Last Friday when I came to empty the washing machine there were all these little bits of paper sticking to the clothes. They were too damaged to see what they had all been part of. My fear was that it was a twenty quid note and then I found the soggy cover of my passport stuck to the inside of the drum. The only passport office in the country that could see me this week is Liverpool. I have an appointment there tomorrow at 2.30. Today I’ve been looking for my birth certificate when not looking at these SCORES scattered across my floor. It couldn’t be found. Tonight I’m getting a train up to Norwich to go through the filing cabinets in my workshop in search of my birth certificate before I make the dash up the country to Liverpool in the morning.

What has me destroying my passport in the washing machine, losing my birth certificate, having to make a demented trip up to Liverpool got to do with the rebirth of music, The17 and getting a wee book out containing a load of SCORES by schoolkids? Maybe nothing, but I know from weird experience that it is often when things are spiralling and panic is pushing your buttons that your mind can be more open to the ideas from out there. Some people need drink or drugs to get the creative jizz flowing, others need peace, quiet and contemplation for the mind to open but there have been enough times in my past that I know it’s by no means only chance, when things have been getting pretty dodgy and I’m up against it in some way or other that the random ideas can start sending their Scuds into my brain. I wouldn’t be surprised if between now and when I do or don’t get a passport in time a whole new way of thinking about The17 will have catapulted itself into a crevice in what holds the stuff in my head.

I do not want to advocate a life of complete disorganisation and crisis management in the hope you may be the recipient of a grade one creative idea but …

So like I was saying a few hundred words back, if there is a whole school’s worth of SCORES missing there is no time to do anything about it. And even if I could contact the missing school tomorrow morning, which is an impossibility as it is now the summer holidays, I know the kids would never be able to rewrite it again for me.

Writing that last sentence about them probably having no idea about what they wrote, has just opened up something in my head. I spent months contemplating the 17 SCORES that I wrote to try and kick this thing off, before I wrote any of them down. Those words that got written down and printed will continue to be tampered with and knocked about at various times over the coming months and years. Always refining, trying to get closer to something, but maybe never getting any better. Even some of those original 17 SCORES will get kicked out, dropped from the side to make way for others that have already been brewing away for some time. That one about making up a chant and the one about taking all The17 abroad to perform, they are for the dumper. Mind you, they may have been long since dumped by the time you read this.

But these 50-odd SCORES done by the kids up in Sunderland and County Durham were done with no contemplation, no thoughts about the state of music, no half an eye on their own place in the history of art and music-thinking in the early years of the 21st century. They just did them ‘cause some bloke turned up in their class and asked them to do it and probably by the time they were at home having their tea that day they had completely forgotten what they had written. Maybe it is the fact that very little thought had gone into them that gives them, at the very least, charm and in some cases a real potency and charge.

The one school that was markedly different from the others was Wearhead Primary. All the others had been urban schools. Wearhead is a little village and as you may guess is up near the source of the Wear. The Wear flows on down through Durham and heads out into the sea at Sunderland. By the time it gets to Sunderland it is a large deep river where ships have been built for centuries. Up in Wearhead it is a babbling brook.

The village school has no more than 48 pupils and only two teachers. It took us a couple of hours to drive from Newcastle up to Wearhead; high up on the Pennines amongst the fields of spring lambs and primroses and dry-stone walls. And the kids were different, not posh or anything, but aware of things in different ways. When asked what kind of music they were into, there still seemed to be this taste for rave on one side and Green Day on the other.

The lot we were working with at Wearhead were drawn from school years 4,5 and 6. At the other schools they were all from one class in one year. When we got there the second time the teacher had already done work with them over the previous few days that related to The17. She had downloaded a number of the SCORES and had been using them with her pupils. Kathryn, one of the girls in her class, had taken it upon herself to write a SCORE at home for The17 to perform. She had brought it in and the teacher had got the class to do it. This teacher – who does have a name and I have just looked it up in my diary, it’s Liz Gill – got the class to perform it for us. It is the SCORE that is now called PLACE.

Liz Gill asked the kids to stand in a circle, she invited John Hirst and me to join in with them. She asked us to think of a place, close our eyes then think of a picture of our place, this picture was to represent an atmosphere, and we had to think of a sound that was in the picture or atmosphere. Think about all of this for 17 seconds. She indicated when the 17 seconds were up, she asked us to keep our eyes closed and sing the sound for a further 17 seconds.

I was not only moved that this girl had taken it upon herself to write this SCORE and that the teacher had taken it seriously enough to get the children to perform it, but it worked. It worked brilliantly, all the children joined in, or it sounded like it to me as I stood there with my eyes closed joining in and making my sound. It also sounded great. If you are a junior school teacher, I recommend you try this SCORE with them. If you do, let us know how it went (via admin@the17.org).

In each of the schools that we visited this second time, there was always one kid who seemed to really get what I was going on about, in a way that is well beyond how I am implying that all of the children sort of instantly got it. This one kid in each class of these seven classes would never be the classroom comedian or from the clique of cool girls or smart-arsed lads. They were always the slight outsiders, maybe not with the obvious good looks that you think might mark them out for success.

I used to have a theory that in every class in the country there is somebody with the potential to be a pop star. And I don’t mean an also-ran in some faceless boy or girl band. I mean somebody with something real to put over whether it be a Robbie Williams, Bono, Bowie or that lad out of The Streets (those four were not chosen for any particular reason, they were just the first four that leapt out of my pencil). Now that I’ve said that I noticed that I didn’t include any girls so to make up for that I will put Poly Styrene, Madonna, Joni Mitchell and Lily Allen. The difference between those in the class who make it as a pop star (also read actor, artist or whatever) and all those 1000s of others in those classes who don’t, is not because they didn’t lack talent or even motivation. It is because they didn’t have the opportunity, they weren’t in the right time, right place; the zeitgeist wasn’t knocking about. Maybe I have already said this, but now I want to say it in a more straightforward way – there are plenty of pop stars who have had their 15 minutes or more whose talents, however slim, only made any sense at a particular point in the history of pop. John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) could never had happened either a few years earlier or a few years later, he would have just ended up doing some dead-end job and would have been remembered by classmates as the odd kid. The same goes for John Lennon, Bob Marley. Even Elvis Presley.

This theory of mine is not based on any extensive research. It’s more of a firmly held hunch based on some things I experienced. In the late 1970s I was part of a peer group that had drifted together in Liverpool. My guess is we were all the odd kid in the class in our various schools. This must happen in every cosmopolitan city in the world, this drifting together of like, even if the like is only based on unlike, on not fitting into the usual groups. The spotlight fell on this peer group in Liverpool, the zeitgeist came a-calling and every sodding one of us who could string a few chords together, warble a tune or had something to say, got their 15 minutes.

There was at least one kid in each of the classes in each of the seven schools I’d been working with who had that take on things from a different angle, something that was coming from somewhere else. Now I know the world has too many would-be pop stars as it is. But maybe those kids had what it takes to be a great architect, engineer or entrepreneur. All of these and other disciplines have a common need, which is for their successful practitioners to be able to see things from a different angle and a willingness not to be afraid to make an arsehole of themselves in front of other people.

I’m not trying to convince you that there is a Shakespeare in every class but there are lot more could-be Bards or whatever, knocking about than you could ever imagine, just doing the dead-end jobs that Johnny Rotten didn’t get to do. But maybe one Shakespeare is all we need.

Football is completely different though, the talents that are needed are so specific. There is only one Wayne Rooney. Every lad that shows any sort of promise kicking a ball about the playground in this country has the opportunity to rise to the top. There is such a solid infrastructure in place for finding the next Wayne Rooney, Ronaldinho or even George Best. Not a single one will be missed.

Anyway, enough of my theories. That bit about football at the end I just made up now is based on the fact that my youngest son’s best mate – they are both six – has just been approached by both Arsenal and Chelsea.

Back to the classroom at Wearhead primary. All the children did their SCORES. We got each group to read them out. In fact this was something we had done at a couple of the other schools but it was only when we got to Wearhead that this idea clicked in my head.

This is it. I may be against making permanent recordings of events of The17 but I would love there to be recordings of these pupils from the seven schools reading out their SCORES. Hearing their voices gives them a different context than reading them on the page. I’m not trying to imply one is better than the other just … well, I suppose it’s an accent thing. We all have an idea in our head about what a Geordie accent sounds like or at least we do if the ‘we’ I’m referring to is folk living in the British Isles. But although all of these seven schools were in the northeast and so have an accent that on a surface level is similar to the Geordie accent of Newcastle, they were all markedly different from it. They also had accents that were subtly different from each other. It is those subtle differences that I would like to capture.

I was planning to go back up and visit each of the seven schools once the wee book, with their SCORES in it, has been done. On my return I could record each of them reading out their SCORES and then at the17.org you would be able to listen to them read them as well as download a PDF of each of the SCORES. This may be sentimentality on my part but right now it seems like a good idea.

The plan was that all the pupils from all the seven schools were going to be bussed to the Hatton Gallery for the playback of COLLABORATE that they had all taken part in performing. Wearhead Primary, a two-hour drive from Newcastle, was unable to do this. Because of this the plan had been to do a playback for the Wearhead children in their school.

After we had collected in all their SCORES, we drew the curtains to block out as much light as possible. John Hirst suggested they all lie on the floor and close their eyes. We then played them back the full version of COLLABORATE. I lay on the floor and closed my eyes as well. It sounded so much better than the version of COLLABORATE that we had done in Stockholm before Easter.

After it came to an end we asked them what pictures, thoughts, feelings it brought up in them. They all seemed to respond to this very well, each telling us what they thought and why. But after a while it seemed they were trying to out-extreme each other with who could come up with the scariest description of what they felt and thought.

And that was that. We could hear the dinner ladies getting the school dinners ready behind the pull-down shutters. The curtains were opened. Sunlight poured in. Lambs were bleating in the fields. We packed up the gear and loaded the Land Rover.

Liz Gill took us aside before we left. She asked us if we had noticed how one of the lads in particular had responded to the playback. I hadn’t because I was lying on the floor with my eyes shut and John said he hadn’t because he had been keeping his eyes on the recording levels. It seemed that they suspected one of the lads had a mild form of Asperger’s. And children with Asperger’s Syndrome have more than a tendency to hear sounds louder and more intensely than other people. According to Liz Gill this lad had been freaked out by the playback, he kept his hands over his ears for the full seven minutes and needed comforting by the teacher. She felt we should be aware of this before we did any other playbacks we should check with the teachers in case any of the pupils have similar conditions.

We said our farewells one last time, climbed into the Land Rover and headed down the valley for the drive back to Newcastle. Just as I was thinking how its weird that we all hear the same sound in different ways John Hirst chips in with ‘Bill, I told you it was too loud. Just ‘cause you are getting deaf you think everybody is hearing it the same as you.’ If I am getting deaf, I am in denial. My father, who is 93, is almost stone deaf now and I don’t want to end up like him.

This Wearhead visit was on Thursday 18 May. The following morning was our last school visit. It was our second visit to Shotton Hall. These were lads and lasses in years 10 and 11 so were all about 15 and 16 years old. They were kids who did drama and had no problem standing in front of each other and expressing themselves, using words, sounds, movement or whatever.

As we had more time at this school’s second visit than we had with the other schools we did a complete version of AGE with them. All five parts but just kept it down to three minutes in length. They loved it. Could not believe it was just their voices, that nothing had been added. If you are reading this as part of the small book of SCORES and do not know about the SCORE AGE, visit the17.org and you will learn all about it.

When John hit the delete button and got rid of the lot they were almost incensed that something they had created that they considered to be beautiful had been consigned to the trash bin of eternity.

I explained to them that if they were to follow the SCORE for AGE they could recreate it whenever they wanted with the few bits of recording gear that the school had and that that was the point. And it was definitely not about cluttering up the world with more recorded music that no one will ever get around to listening to. The teacher wanted to know if it could be used as a soundtrack to a play that they had been putting together. ‘No way! The sound of The17 is never, can never, will never be used as a soundtrack to anything. Whoever’s asking. Whatever they are offering.’ I think I laboured the point with them so much they must have thought I was some sort of nutter.

After that was settled they got down to the business of performing Score No. 17, SCORE. And strangely, this bunch of 16-year-olds who, as I said, were very confident at expressing themselves verbally and physically, when it came to writing their own SCORES did not have the unconstrained magic of some of the junior school kids.

Job done. We packed up and headed back to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.

In the afternoon came the climax of this whole project of working with the seven schools. Even without Wearhead there were going to be more than 180 children being bussed in. Because of the numbers and fears about having this many school kids in the building at once we had to split them. Three schools at 1.30, the other three at 2.15.

At 1.25 the first lot started to troop in. I took control. Or at least tried to. I felt like a head teacher taking assembly. We handed them a blank sheet of paper and pencil each. Asked them to lie down on the gallery floor, dimmed the lights right down and then played the track back to them. I again lay down and closed my eyes. The sound enveloped me. My head teemed with visions, thoughts danced in and out of my consciousness and one particular lad annoyed the crap out of me with his incessant sniggering. But that did not spoil the overall affect.

When the track ended I stood up and asked them all to write on the piece of paper the thoughts or feelings they had while listening to the music, or to describe the pictures that it had brought up in their imaginations. They did. We collected them in. We all clapped each other and then they all filed out to get on the coaches to take them back to wherever their lives were happening.

After a few minutes’ break the other three classes trooped in and we went through the same process again. The only difference was that after this playback the track was deleted.

Working in these schools had been mentally and at times physically draining. If nothing else, I have ended up having so much more respect for what teachers have to do. But there is a lot more besides. This has been one of the most rewarding creative experiences I have ever been involved in. It has reconfirmed my belief in what I’m trying to do with The17.

The best way I can think of ending this particular text is by adding the thoughts, feelings and imagined pictures that these young people had written down on their pieces of paper.

An aeroplane spiralling on fire out of control with people all around worried and scared. Then crashed.

A loud group of bees.

The seaside because it was calm.

Running through a jungle.

A train coming.

It felt like thunder and lightning and people screaming.

Like I was in a tunnel.

A whirlwind/hurricane.

War.

A deep sea choir.

It felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff and all the sound was the wind and noises that you would hear.

A huge grey mass.

I felt scared. It was like a storm in my head.

I felt like I was stood on the shoreline of an ocean of dead peoples souls.

I felt as though I was stuck in a really dark prison and all I could see was the stars as I looked up.

A big army coming to get you or attack you.

Angels singing.

Scary. People dying and coming back alive making noise like snakes.

A space ship flying around at night.

A ballarena dancing.

A boat sinking.

I thought it was a rabbit but it wasn’t it was a baby elephant.

At first I thought it sounded like a ghost train then I heard just the ghosts and they were trying to communicate.

In the jungle at night and lots of animals making a loud noise.

A red and black shadow.

It felt good.

Like lava chasing me through a tunnel.

Underwater, people struggling for breath as they are caught in seaweed and can’t escape.

War.

Thunder. Rain.

An owl at night.

People sad.

It sounds like a car crash.

A horse getting knocked down.

Lots of animals making the same noise. Mostly birds and animals.

People getting thunder.

Dark and loud.

Thunder.

It sounded like wind blowing strong.

Trees.

A storm.

Scary ghosts coming out of graves.

A relaxed feeling.

It was spooky.

I thought it sounded good.

A rocket taking off.

Like the music from an African charity advert.

A train coming towards me.

Stormy night. Thunder storm. Scary.

A scary sensation.

Like I was in a dark tunnel.

A scary movie because it got louder and louder.

I thought it sounded good.

Tiring and deep.

Scary, frustrating, hearing voices in the mind.

An owl at midnight.

People racing.

Nightmare. Scary. Horrible.

People screaming.

Loud and scary.

An orchestra warming up before a concert.

A storm.

Like a person stomping up the stairs.