Julia

I feel that I can write a bit about Julia now. It was profoundly shocking to hear that she had died because she'd posted on Facebook that she was getting better, and she was so vibrant and full of life that it's almost impossible to imagine that she is not here any more.
Julia was the studio manager at The Premises studio in Hackney. Even if she hadn't been great fun and a fantastic organiser, mediator and deviser of projects, she would have been great just for being so good at her job.We first met almost ten years ago, when a small group of people got together to devise an MA in Songwriting, which would have been run in a specially constructed suite at the studio, and which would have been validated by the University I was working in at the time. Alas, that university badly let us down, delaying the project by two years before deciding not to validate it, because they were validating a similar MA at another small college.
Always positive, the group approached me and with massive amount of input form Julia, ran the first of five weekend songwriting courses at The Premises, which aspiring song writers came along to to devise a song, learn how to market it, and then arrange and record it with guest musicians. They were all so different in terms of numbers (the first one had sixteen song writers, the last one, five), personalities, and time management but Julia steered us all through each of them, and was an absolute bedrock of support. Instinctively, she knew when to give advice and when to ask for it: one of our very best masterclasses was with Green from Scritti Politti, and I asked for him to return to another one. Piney Gir was another really good guest songwriter. Those sessions spawned all sorts of musical collaborations, notably that of Feral Five, who have done really well since then.
Maybe closest to Julia's heart as a practising Buddhist was a different songwriting project with Hackney Carers. This one ran across four Thursdays and involved sixteen people again, all of whom had responsibility for a relative or partner who could not manage on their own.
I can't write much about it, except to say that as a community songwriter (where I started after being in bands), it was the most moving and inspiring project I've ever worked on. Carers live in an odd, magical and sometimes very dark world of their own, where their goodness and kindness is sometimes overshadowed by exasperation and exhaustion. Rather than writing about this in their songs, almost all of them chose to write about love in a move to escape the prison of their caring responsibilities. Julia trusted the group and me to just get on with it, and even the sometimes recalcitrant engineer worked through his lunch breaks to make the project happen. We had some ace session musicians from Julia's address book, one of whom had to deputise as a conductor ,which stressed his drumming skills to the max. In the end, almost everyone got to write and sing not just their own song, but other people's too.
Every so often, I still listen to the CD  and it moves me to tears.
Julia had much more than just a business head necessary to run the studio and its educational arm; she had  an ethical heart and a sense of detail (she never forgot to invite us all to the Premises parties) that was quite extraordinary.
Oh, and she was also one of the most glamorous people on the planet.
I don't know if anyone who knew Julia reads this blog, but I'm pretty sure that everyone who knew her has the same sense of appreciation and love for her. I had to write this for myself, as much as anything else. There are a lot of awful people that we are forced to share this planet with: Julia was a good, good person and I am eternally thankful that I was lucky enough to know her.