“IT’S LIKE LIVE AID,

BUT BETTER”

BOB GELDOF*

When they cancel the world's greatest music and art festival, and replace it with a load of repeats you could watch anytime on YouTube, watchya gonna do?

When you've been given an Arts Council grant to connect people?

Run your own?

Announcing #YourGlasto, the second of five Art of Community Free Festival weekends on our own Pyramid stage in the Vale of Avalon to jump start a Creativity Revolution in the spirit of Punk 1.0 from ’76, brought up to date for Punk 2.0 and all our futures.

By The People, for The People, with The People.

Like Live Aid, but better?

*OK so I pretended Bob Geldof said that.

Like I pretended I was on BBC Breakfast on April Fool’s Day, live streaming from Farmer Eavis’s field in Glastonbury

Like I pretended we’d got thousands of people to unfurl a banner across Parliament Square on May Day with a picture of Elton John on it.

Like I pretended I did a live stream from the top of Big Ben to launch a pretend Hey Kids Book Festival.

Like I pretended to do a live stream from the Isle of Wight Ferry on my way to a pop-up we pretended to do at the Titanic Museum in Belfast.

Like I pretended I was live streaming a 3 day Free Family Festival from Eden Project last weekend.

Like I pretended that a disabled girl from Leeds headlined on main stage on the opening night at Eden with a beautiful rendition of ‘Times Like These’ and forgot she was blind and would never see the film we made of it.

Like, as you can see in the film above, we’ve pretended a bunch of dads built a half size paramid stage on the playing field of a Community School down the road from the site of its maternal inspiration, the icon of Great British creativity beamed every year to the world from the UK’s biggest music brand, The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts.

Yes, I pretended Bob Geldof said that because I can. So I will.

But I didn’t pretend that David Grant called me “The King of Lockdown” on the BBC.

Sir Bob has said there’ll never be another Live Aid and I agree.

Because like him, I don’t look in the rear view mirror.

Because I want to see a future, inspired by our past, built on our art.

Because, like many people I still have an imagination which Picasso said “can take you anywhere”.

Like many people, all of us even, and as Picasso said I was born creative:

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up”
Picasso

We’re building an art gallery that Picasso, my dad and hopefully Sir Bob will be proud of, one that attempts to capture, not only the creativity that oozes out of every off stage corner of every field at Glastonbury Festival. and puts it on main stage, but also puts the audience and their art up there too.

To celebrate Our Art, to inspire Everyone to Create and Start the #Creativity Revolution called for by the CEO of the Arts Council, Darren Henley.

Let’s not pretend, let’s finish what we started in Sunderland 3 years ago.

It was 1975

Like Bob Geldof I spent a formative part of my youth working with dead animals.

I had a before and after school job working in a butcher’s shop skinning sheep’s head and making pork pies.

At roughly the same time Sir Bob worked in an abattoir, which he recently said in a chat with Jules Holland on BBC Radio 2 wasn’t just a place for killing animals but was ‘slaughtering dreams’.

This sentiment chimes with the most definitive thesis on how the education system can do exactly that by Seth Godin, which he dedicated to ‘every teacher who cares enough to change the system, and to every student brave enough to stand up and speak up’, adding

‘Everyone wants to change education,
but no one wants to do anything about it’

Seth Godin

If you too are down with this Punk 1.0 stuff don’t miss the epic ‘Citizens of Boomtown’ film that was on the BBC recently.

A Career of Creativity

Given creativity has fuelled my life and a career in the creative industries, I was delighted to see that the number one TED Talk with 300m views was by a chap called Sir Ken Robinson.

It was about how schools can teach creativity out of children and why education systems need to evolve to meet the needs of the 21st century.

Sound good? Well Sir Ken has been called a ‘butcher given a ticker tape parade by the National Union of Pigs’ for his thinking and work yet applauded by communities, companies and countries worldwide.

Who would say such a thing? Why?

Regardless, to cut a long story short, inspired by Sir Ken, a book called ‘What’s the Point of School’ and a weekend at a festival,9 years ago I set about walking the talk.

With around 70 parents, teachers, local businesses and other creative carers, I co-founded a project in my sons’ primary school in Paddington. Within 2 years we had been shortlisted for Times Education Supplement Community Collaboration award for what we achieved.

I have since given up my career, fat salary and expense account to roll out what we did there to schools across the country as a non-profit community enterprise called STEAM Co.

Creativity? Who cares?

Like me, before I had kids, and Seth Godin also, I’m convinced that few people care about schools, teachers or children or their creativity, until they have their own.

So I set out to bring what I saw as being a critical conversation about creativity and education out of education’s echo chambers. I felt we needed to connect them with the wider world of work and broader society, where creativity, are valued highly. We have seen this more than ever during lock down, relying on seniors who learned to play instruments at school, serenade us on Thursday evenings and at street parties.

STEAM Co. are passionate about putting creativity first in our schools, work and lives.

We believe that creativity can engage and inspire young people in their learning, provide careers to fuel the economy as well as connect society.

Who doesn’t want some of that right now?

We know someone and we’ll come to him in good time.

“We are leaving the industrial economy and entering the connection economy.
You don't have to like it, but it's true.
Art is what we call it, when someone does something
that might connect us to someone else”
Seth Godin

We help our young people dream and find their passion. We call it their art, because art is what we call it when what we do might connect us to somebody else.

STEAM Co. helps Connect our Kids with their Art and our Communities with their Schools.

Art? You what?

We see Art as the combination of Creativity Tools (and Tech) and People.

Recently all our work – school visits and public speaking gigs were cancelled with the Covid 19 crisis, but we managed to convince one conference organiser to sponsor our Community Lockin – a Content Creation and Community Collaboration Hub – think green screen television studio in a spare bedroom.

That conference organiser was LGfL, who are the definition of an art company, a charitable trust in fact, they provide internet connectivity, creative tools and content for London and increasingly the UK’s schools.

Thanks to You

With the help of an emergency Arts Council grant we’ve just finished a month-long project which we called the #UKArtTakeOver.

It kicked off with a Parliament Launch event with over 30 speakers. We did a dozen pop-up events featuring kids and creatives in communities across the UK, a kids book festival and a closing thee day Art of Community Free Festival, which we pretended was live streamed from Eden Project, with their blessing.

We did reach out to and connected with Sir Bob via his people to see if he’d Skype in to say a few words, maybe even do a few songs with the Rats in his front room. He told Jules Holland they’d done that a few years back and were so taken by the experience that they reformed. Sadly, but understandably given what he has on his plate, he wasn’t able to join us.

Probably also because he thought it would be a bit shit.

Live Aid of our Time

In a piece in The Guardian recently, Sir Bob says that an event like Live Aid couldn’t work today because “It worked then because of the position rock and roll had in society. It was a central part of the culture, but that’s not the case today. While there’s some great music and talent out there, music functions more as it did in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s as a background to the way you’re living your life … people can make their own Live Aids in their bedrooms every day and put them online”.

But Live Aid used music and the celebrity around it to bring people together to create consciousness around a crisis – then Famine in Africa.

But now our crises are fourfold:

Education Crisis
Creativity Crisis
Democracy Crisis
Health Crisis

Ten years ago an ideologically driven, right wing extremist set out to change the UK beyond recognition and took the advice of a man previously considered a terrorist

The Eve of Destruction

Ten years ago Dominic Cummings started work in the Department of Education alongside Michael Gove.

Many feel that as a direct result of aspects of his policy work, we have an Education Crisis – with teacher morale/retention, funding and workload all at unprecedented depths and levels.

With critical thinking and creativity off the agenda, a Creativity Crisis is bubbling. 9 out of 10 schools report that they have cut arts and creative subjects in their schools and we have record low numbers training to teach the arts.

As Sir Bob said, we risk “destroying a whole generation of musicians”.

There is no dispute with regards to Dominic Cummings’ role in the Brexit outcome, which many consider to be a Democracy Crisis with many questions left unanswered.

And now he finds himself up to his neck in a Health Crisis with many feeling that both his policies and personal actions have led to the UK reporting more Covid 19 deaths in one day than the whole of Europe combined and some of the worst cumulative totals globally.

A Creativity Revolution

That’s why we need another Live Aid or the four smaller ones that we have planned to help launch what the CEO of Arts Council England, Darren Henley has called a ‘Creativity Revolution’.

CLICK IMAGE to hear my chat with James O’Brien on LBC about Dominic Cummings

The only thing that had been stopping us until recently was Dominic Cummings and the momentum and stranglehold he and like minds have wrapped the country and its schools via outlier astro turf organisations like ResearchEd. Parents and Teachers for Excellence and now the Campaign for Common Sense, perfectly timed to cultivate deliberately divisive hate around typical targets for ‘political correctness’ haters of things like equality in race and gender.

I had a great chat with James O’Brien on LBC today about Dominic Cummings and have written elsewhere about the murky funding arrangements and the modus operandi of their Pied Piper characters, all loveable, media friendly and well connected chaps.

O’Brien recently dedicated a whole show to the subject of #Teacher Hate - and how/why it happens. You can hear it on Podcast here

The latest recruit is the former deputy editor of the Times Education supplement who now has a plum job at the Orwellian named Public First PR agency.

This firm proudly and boldly proclaimed on its website until recently that it existed to help change public policy for its clients, and there I was thinking that was the job of elected politicians, for the people they represent!

And You’ve Been Caught

So IMHO Sir Bob’s second coming is perfectly timed.

A week or so ago it really felt as if Dominic Cummings had been caught in a Rat Trap, to quote the Boom Town Rats song.

Let’s keep the pressure on.

Help us launch and sustain Darren Henley’s ‘Creativity Revolution’ and let’s be clear this is not about party politics but policy.

Many in the government are concerned about the creativity crisis.

If we can raise awareness, this will become an electoral issue.

All Together Now

Two weekends ago we held our first Art of Community Festival – a three day event which we pretended to live stream in our Community Lockin from Eden Project, with their blessing given I’d been invited to attend a community activist camp there at the end of last year.

It went so well that we’ve just announced we’re doing four more:

26-28 June: Glasto Street Fest – just down the road from Worthy Farm
31 July - 2 Aug: Camp Bestival – Rob Da Bank has asked us to run Art Town
28- 31 Aug: Notting Hill Carnival – with Gaz Mayall’s Rockin’ Blues stage
25 - 27 Sept : Parklands Primary – a school on the Seacroft estate in Leeds

For the Glastonbury weekend we’ve just been given permission to build a replica of the Pyramid Stage in the school playing field from where we will live stream the Festival to the world.

It will be a weekend of Uplifting Performances, Inspiring Talks, Creative Activities and Community Engagement.

Step on Stage

We’re putting out a call for contributions from artist of all types, from all walks of life… children, parents, teachers and other creative careers to sing, dance, talk, run workshops alongside more famous celebrities.

Funnily enough a girl from the school where we started STEAM Co. in Paddington was called up on stage by Adele at Glastonbury in 2016 and those are the moments we want to relive, we want everyone to share their ‘Glasto Moments’ live on stage via Skype calls to us.

Already we’re delighted to announce a headline set from Sex Pistol co-founder Glen Matlock who will be joined by Earl Slick from Brooklyn, New York and who used to be David Bowie’s guitarist.

Two brothers will also join us, world famous singers, actor and one has a son who is a top DJ on BBC Radio One. The key to their success? Like Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Phil Daniels, Pauline Quirke and Patsy Palmer - Gary and Gary Kemp were two working class lads from King’s Cross, lucky enough to go to the Anna Scher Theatre community-based drama school in Islington.

And we have many more artists to announce and the weekend will be themed around ten key areas:

CREATIVITY - talks and activities to remind us what it looks and feels like and why it’s important
COMMUNITY WORKSHOPS - sessions inspired by the Community Activity Camps run at Eden Project
ART ACTIVISM - tips and tricks in talks and workshops on how you can change the world
ECO AWARENESS - where better than Eden Project to reconnect our planet and how we might start doing things differently
BLACK LIVES MATTER - diversity is a subject close to our hears and at the centre of the agenda at the moment
SLOW FOOD - we’ve never had more time, and possibly less money, so why don’t we look at food again? We’ll have another Little Big Lunch.
MAKER CULTURE - there’s a lot of talk about the ‘Three R’s’, but the fourth R is Wroughting - making. Let’s Create
COLLABORATIVE MUSIC - Live Aid was yesterday with the band on the stage. Now the audience makes music
EDUCATION - Is creativity as important as literacy? Are we teaching it out of our kids? How’s your home schooling?
SONG OF THE DAY - we have an anthem for each Day - ‘I’m still standing’, ‘Gold’ and ‘All Together Now’

Our Arts Council Grant covered our work in May so we’re also looking for sponsorship for these four festivals to enable us to pay the creatives whose art is their livelihood and to deliver the production that this opportunity, this time requires.

Find out more, sign up to be part of it or sponsor it here: www.steamco.org.uk/artofcommunity20