The Joy Of The Unexpected

When I left my lecturing job I imagined it being a real struggle to leave behind the work routine, with several months of floundering around trying to establish something different in life. But I responded spontaneously to a request posted on F*cebook for an illustrator for a primary school children's book on sustainable clothing, and started working on that almost straight away. It's still got a way to go: I'm doing a lot of re-drawing partly in response to comments from the author, and also partly because I want to feel proud of the collaboration myself. It's due to be finished in December, and the project has taught me a lot about pacing my work as an illustrator, and when to start again when a drawing isn't working (amongst other things). It's so similar to making music: I've rejected whole tracks, and even whole songs, when they are travelling in the wrong direction.

I enrolled on a life-drawing class to feed my observation skills, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the challenges of that. I'd like to do more, because I've become a real fan of adult education. Before Covid I spent three years of learning to play the drum kit not because I wanted to drum in a band, but because I wanted to hang out with Shanne Bradley, who suggested it. I carried on because I realised the drummer's secret: drumming makes you feel great. It's therapeutic both physically and mentally. 

People think that's because you're whacking the shit out of the drums, but actually if you're a good drummer you get the sound and the beat out of the skins because you control the 'bounce' and co-ordinate what your four limbs are doing. This leaves no room in your brain for worrying thoughts. Even two hours of drumming clears your head, and takes all the tension out of your upper body.

Miraculously, even though I can't read normal music, I can read drum scores. We were taught from the beginning to link the sound to the dots, and this is probably how it happened. I'm not sure if I could do it without the score, and that's the conun-drum (!).

Pupils came and went in the classes; one of the best terms was the one where the whole class was female. Being an evening class, there were lots of different standards, cultures and ages. The teacher suggested that we should work towards a concert, and we started to think about repertoire. Almost as a joke, I suggested Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and the teacher found it on Youtube. Instantly the whole class perked up, and even the beginnerest drummer (a young Spanish woman), started playing along with the 'pah-pah-PAH' part of the rhythm. The joy of it! You don't have to be a 1970s Brummie metal fan to know that Paranoid's a good song. At the show, a line of four female drummers joyously thrashed their way through it, to appreciative applause from our friends and family.

Life throws up moments when you think things like 'I could never in a million years have imagined that I'd be sitting drumming to a Black Sabbath song with four other women!'. Three unbelievables in one sentence.

This digression into unexpected drum moments isn't too much of a digression: yesterday I was accepted for an artist-in-residence post. Again it came from F*cebook, that often deservedly-maligned social media site. As soon as I saw the advertisement, I knew exactly what I would do if I was given the opportunity, and now that I have (starting in January), it's made me so excited that my creative brain has gone into overdrive. I'll be posting what I've done, but yet again it's an unbelievable moment.

So I have switched track from being and educator and musician to being a musician and artist. There is still an animation project-in-waiting, too. 

I could spend a lot of thought dwelling on some terrible things that have happened to me, and some terrible people I've known. But this is the thing: if you fill your life with as much curiosity and creativity as possible, those dark things ebb away into insignificance and can't torture you any more. If you can fill your life with invention whether art, music or writing, you stand a chance of changing your mental environment from a threat to a celebration. I'm not naive enough to think that if we were at war or under threat from life-changing natural disasters, this approach would have any power. I know we don't live in The Sound of Music where we can sing My Favourite Things and suddenly the sun will shine every day and there will be world peace; we can't just Turn That Frown Upside Down. But I have seen what being creative can do for people, and how empowering it can be. This is not just for me personally, but also from the experience of 30 years of teaching, running workshops and listening to people speak about their own expressions of themselves through what they do in the wonderful worlds of art and music.

The bottom line is: any opportunity you have to try something new in these worlds of creative expression is always worth the challenge, whether as a producer or as an audience. More often than not it's worth doing just for the process, and just for the adventure. The sense of agency is quite astonishing.

End of early morning ramble!