We have always been clever we should just stop acting dumb

 A few years ago I spent time working on some skills like flint knapping and what became clear was how clever our ancestors were. Not only could they hunt but they had the make everything required for hunting, the arrow heads, the arrow shaft, fletching, the bow, the cordage, everything; and if it did not work they starved.

It must have been the same for the musicians, same with everything, clothing, housing and fishing. We look at people in the past as superstitious and stupid, the fact is we do not have anything like the practical skills of our ancestors. Even going back to the Edwardians or the Victorians it has been estimated that the average person was far more intelligent and practical than we are, however that is not the story that we get at all.

The point here is that we are not tested by the life that we live like our forbears and therefore we get lazy when it comes to the way that we think and problem solve this leads to stress and the usual problems with the lifestyle that we have, including increased rates of depression.

For the artist and the musician we really need to break away from the formulaic approach that we are given by school, college and university. The problem is the context of compliance, in fact that word is used in everything from child protection to health care etc. now in essence that is very laudable but it has the effect of strangling the life out of things because no one wants to take risks. The risks that I am talking about are just the risk of non-conformity where you are just doing something different, as a teacher that might be not having a lesson plan that Ofsted can look at. The path to hell is paved with good intent and that is the problem here, because we are slowly destroying ourselves by making life a form of personal slavery.

I see this a lot with players who end up as machines of technique and not true artists. Think about it, none of the famous musicians were technically the best, far from it, that would have been the bedroom guitarist, who have always been there; the guy that was so screwed up he never left his bedroom but now because of YouTube he does not need to leave his bedroom to get online.

The great artists have something to say with their music and that means that they need to break rules, break the taboos, the buzz words of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll the life style of the Dionysian cult approach to life to embrace the divine needed taboo breaking as a prerequisite.

So what is the solution for this? First of all and this is only opinion as is everything I write is, we need to realise that people had solutions for things that we do not use anymore, a form of mythic thinking which is great for creative thinking a case for revelation where you know the answer without justification. Also the understanding that we are not that clever if we are only using logic because we only need to enter a form of quantum theory to realise that form is difficult to justify and maybe nothing is real let alone an idea maybe all these things create some form of agency that makes things happen but they are not in essence real they only manifest the illusion of the real.

So do not be dumb, dream big and make something happen just like the weirdos from the past.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.ukthree days of playing in a band

Trees and Hedgerows and their significance to artistic thinking

I have a friend who is involved with the Wildlife Trust in Kent and we were discussing the rationale behind taking out old hedgerows and the subsequent effect of topsoil erosion (as you do). The scientific logical argument behind doing this is that if a field is bigger you can use machinery and make the work more effective however in due course we discover the long-term effect is detrimental; a little bit like killing the goose that lays the golden egg, you may get short-term benefit by long-term disaster.

I grew up in Cornwall and I did actually meet some old farm labourers who had lived and worked on the land and had some of the old-time wisdom that often feature in West Country jokes. One of these is the guy turns up in a flash car asking directions from the old farmer ‘so what is the quickest way to get to Scotland from here’ the old farmer thinks for a while and then says’ best not to start from here’. That sums up the problem that we have currently, many things including the education system, health care and the environment are best fixed some place other than where we are.

There were written cases around the time of the enclosure acts where trees that had figured in the lives of generations of a family suddenly became the possession of a landowner where in the past it sat on common land. This was one of the biggest forms of theft that we experienced in this country and something that is rarely taught in any significant way in schools, that the people with money stole the land by changing the law and disenfranchised ordinary people like you and me.

Old style thinking that the tree lived on the land, and had done for centuries, and did not belong to anyone it belonged to the land. Now this argument works incredibly well when it comes to environmental thinking, because if that tree has a right to exist and has some form of ownership of the land it sits on then by keeping it the tree effectively safeguards all of the environmental infrastructure that it supports and is supported by. This is a simple way of expressing a complex idea just as listening to something in your head and expressing it musically is easier than explaining how the music and is created theoretically.

The problem with the intellectual approach is it is far too simplistic and seems to be inefficient when dealing with complex situations such as the environment and expression in music. So going back to the idea of the hedgerow and the incredible diversity created by borderlands (it is well known that diversity increases in areas that are bordering something else, such as a shoreline, forest edge or in this case the edge of a field) maybe this is a good way of looking at music that does not sit easily within a genre in that it might create more musical biodiversity, the Beatles and their use of Indian music as an example.

So there we have it music and hedgerows and we have not even got into the song of the blackbird and thrush which of course along with the Oak, Hawthorn and Apple would give us plenty of material for the English folk music tradition.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  play in a band for three days learn the tricks of performance

Can you beat the system?

The story of the music business is full of tales of manipulation, malpractice and sexual misconduct, rather like Hollywood. Courtney Love in her book detailed the way that money is shared out from an advance showing that the bands are left with very little after payment to the manager, payment for videos, recordings et cetera. So can you beat the system or maybe better can you work in another system?

I pondered this over the years as most of my work involves education and I am interested in finding meaning in such a way that I can explain things from my experience and the experience of others.

 I had a very close-run thing on the success front in the early days with the band fronted by a singer who was the son of a well-known film star, there was so much gameplay going on but I was not old enough to spot how to deal with it. I preferred to believe the people in charge had my best interests at heart; problem was (and is) in a capitalist system no one has your best interests at heart there is only pursuit of profit.

 Unfortunately that is the reality, whether that is the production and research into medicines or whether that is selling your house, no one really has your interest at heart only the bottom line and as long as the incompetence is not bad enough for someone to be sued then they get away with it, ask anyone who is buying and selling a house. As long as we can see this then we can work around it or at least expect it, so for musicians why does someone what to book you, because they like you or they expect you to fill the venue?

So you can go along the lines of doing something that actually helps people to achieve something or realise something. The first could be teaching them so they reach a certain grade or get to Music College, the second point is to play for someone’s wedding or birthday or a company’s event putting over the corporate message. Now these have a defined measurable outcome (maybe more flexible in the second instance but if people are having fun then you both win) the point is it is measurable, so that is playing to the system of transactions. The point is that you are not turning up in the Blues Brothers style playing Blues in a Country and Western Club. You would be amazed how many young musicians do not think this through. 

Look at how you can cooperate with others may be from another system so from this perspective music can be used in some form of training, the people doing the training are from a different mind-set. You can bring to the mix a perspective developed from performing and skills from teaching. Lessons learnt from teaching adults can be very valid and insightful in business because one learns a lot about the inner thoughts and beliefs of ‘mature’ people and teaching teenagers may afford you an insight to how to deal with problem adults!

The American entrepreneur and business thinker Jay Abraham used this idea of cross business thinking for his work. A problem in one business may have been solved in another sector so go and look and see how other businesses work. In dealing with another system in order to beat your own could take you into corporate training and teaching an instrument as a metaphor for learning other skills or using performance abilities in something other than the standard concert situation.

Remember that systems are created by people and because the system, whether it is monetary or otherwise is in existence now, does not mean that it will be in existence in the future. Music historically has always been on the cutting edge of systems and the economy, going there first, so take your music somewhere different. The holy grail of the recording contract may not be of any importance any more at any level for a performer and the degree of no importance for the educator.

Once upon a time everybody believed in the divine right of kings…………..

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk play in a rock band learn the secrets .

Playing the guitar is a beautiful thing

Playing the guitar is beautiful but there are some people who teach it can make it boring or worse, a misery; that does take some doing.

I was contacted by an ex pupil of mine that had just received his music degree but in his words ‘Uni was good apart from my guitar lessons sadly. The man who “taught me” showed me how much a teacher can really affect your enjoyment of music! So If I didn’t seam grateful at the time... thank you! Because it probably got me through my performance module alone!’

I have always been aware of the teachers who have the unique gift of making the guitar boring I think a lot of reasons for this is the assumption that the guitar should be taught something like a classical instrument. No offense if you are learning classical guitar that is a different matter altogether but not if you are learning a contemporary form of guitar playing.

I see this type of thinking a lot among teachers that there is a correct way to do something and this may be the case if you’re learning a strict discipline of playing for a particular instrument but as soon as you get outside the confines and strictures of a way of thinking then there cannot be an ordained way of playing.

Remember that all of the great contemporary players had some form of idiosyncratic way of delivering music from a Hendrix playing with his teeth approach to the Jeff Healey ‘play the guitar on your lap’ or a Keith Richards ‘playing the different tuning’ to Eric Clapton ‘play so loud that your amp is about to blow up’ sort of thing. None of these follow the correct way of playing guitar with the thumb at the back of the neck and the hand correctly placed over the guitar strings.

So what is it that we need to do? I would suggest that a good teacher is an alchemist, one who finds which ingredients are available within the pupil and by mixing these with the ingredients that the teacher has, can create something transformational there is really no way that you can know what the pupil is capable of and a best guess it is something that is completely beyond what you believe is possible. That has often been my experience but it is only my experience if I allow them to push my ideas beyond my comfort zone.

Education sadly has become very little about opening the mind and very much about social management and ticking boxes, people asking questions about tempo and about technicality when in actual fact these things are taken in the stride of the pupil if they are excited about the prospect of discovering how brilliant they are about being creative.

Because education and higher education in particular is all about the dollar it has become an economic machine that needs to be fed creating much in its likeness; very different from opening the mind like a parachute to explore the creative landscape from a distance but still infused with the excitement of the jump.

So think about what makes music exciting for you, ditch all the stuff that you found boring and go for that. Technical material that is required in order to make stuff exciting should be put over in such a way that people are desperate to learn it.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk

The Trickster

In the myth the trickster moves between the worlds passing knowledge to humans and taking payment for it, sometimes to annoy the gods and sometimes to test the humans.

I use and teach the cutup technique for song writing and for the uninitiated it looks like cheating but this was the technique used by the greatest songwriters in pop music from Lennon to Bowie from Bolan to Cobain.

I am interested in the idea of the trickster musicians like Bowie and Mark Bolan in fact many of the great guitar players had techniques that you could look at some form of trickery. In fact if you look at technology and what it can do creating an illusion of sound and vision that in itself is a form of trickery as it is certainly not reality.

I have pondered that we get trapped by thinking and that some form of deceit needs to happen to fool us out of that into another mode of thinking and cutup is a good example of this. We often see this as a series of phrases taken out of context from magazines and newspapers and put together in a random form which then weirdly makes sense poetically however William S Burroughs did more.

In fact any form of non-linear irrational thinking can be termed as cutup for instance going outside and recording the sounds that you hear in the street in fact snatches of conversation that are put together out of time was one of Burroughs’s techniques. Also just flipping between TV channels or radio stations, taking parts of blogs and putting them together any these techniques will be the basis of cutup.

When I was explaining this technique once at a blues camp summer school somebody actually made the remark that I had burst his bubble that the illusion of all these wonderful songs that somebody had listened to over the years have actually been some form of fraud. This is one of the elements of the trickster in myth and in reality. There is a strange phenomenon when something unusual happens that there is an element of fraud that seems to go with it even when it is not necessary because the event is weird enough in itself. An interesting case in point was that the Enfield poltergeist the event was well documented but the woman involved who lived in the house told some untruths which make the whole situation seem unreal. What is interesting about this story is that years later she tried to explain why she had actually lied about certain elements as if the strangeness of what was happening affected her mind. And this is quite common in fact there is a book written about the trickster effect which states that truth in these situations becomes very malleable.

Because of this often Fortean type events are often thought of as frauds when in actual fact the event itself was real but some other sort of fraud or economic use of the facts accompany the event.

My use of cutup has been really creative in my experience and I suggest that you try these and see what results you get. When I work with this it does seem to put you in to a dream experience of thinking and maybe because of the way that the unconscious is unlocked gives rise to these very strange effects. Whether we look at the artists who have used this technique very successfully as being frauds, cheats and tricksters or not they often lived lives that seem very unreal to us in the mundane world but I think that this is one of the true areas of artistic consciousness that we can easily obtain by using this simple technique.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk be creative for three days

‘May my life be exalted

‘May my life be exalted

May my law be cherished

May my strength be increased

May my tomb not be readied

May I not die on my journey

May my return be ensured to me’

(Early Irish invocation for protection)

In myths about words and writing they come either from God or a trickster they either make the gods or demons troubled depending on the culture and the story, but they are never something humans thought up.

The idea of language being powerful and having language gives one power has been debased in the modern world, where seemingly the only ones who know its true power are politicians and people in advertising. But words do create powerful images and they change people’s minds but not by reasoned debate this is the big mistake of the logical liberal academics that have taken the intellect to such a place that is totally lost. The power lays in the emotional response, the way that words empower and raise the senses both for good and ill.

If you know this then not only can you use it you will also know it when it is being used on you. It is useful when pondering why some songs have great power and often it is the lyrics that do this. Lyrics that are full of imaginary or a call to action like the Beatles ‘All you need is love‘ where love is used as a mantra; there is no logical argument here just by repetition you have to think of love .They are not saying why do you need love? or you should love me.

Say what you want, ‘We will rock you’ ‘Wild thing you make my heart sing’ by describing the feelings not mentioning the emotions you can make people feel, ‘Walking back from your house walking on the moon’.

In Ireland and Wales the bards would not only celebrated but also feared by what they could do with words. So if that is true maybe that should be your aim as a musician to be celebrated and feared in equal measure. That was true in the 1960s maybe we should start aiming words at people who seem to rule our lives with words.

Vic Hyland

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  music summer school

‘If you can you should’

A friend of mine who is a herbalist and researcher was explaining how the physicians of old got into the technique of bleeding and surgery.

The physicians of course were men who had been trained in those skills at University or some form of tutorship, and he explained how many of the ailments could easily be treated cheaply by herbs that were available from the wise women of the village (those who had not been murdered as witches that is) but if you are paying top money for a physician then they could not be seen to do what the old wives could do they would have to do something far more complex. The history of medicine is interesting in that regard as the sort of thinking still holds sway, for instance there are many illnesses that can be cured simply often by fasting and a change of diet but we are programmed to think that we need an expert who is by extension expensive. When the reason and therefore the solution to curing scurvy was discovered one doctor at the time said that it could not be the simple.

Now there is an interesting aspect when it comes to music and learning and business opportunity if we apply the same thinking

Firstly do you need a teacher? Maybe the answer to that is yes because at least you get off to a good start and you certainly need some reference points early in learning new musical instrument. Secondly do you need to go to college? Think carefully, I would say for the contacts maybe you do but for the training I would say no. What does the qualification actually give you? If you wanted to become a teacher and a lecturer then maybe it is a good idea because the system is self-perpetuating i.e. you go to college to get the qualification to go to college to teach.

Now consider the opening quotation ‘If you can you should’. This is one of the driving thoughts that we have today. We see it everywhere, if you can afford a new phone you should, if you can go to Music College you should, if you can have the chemo therapy you should. Whereas in the past it was more a case of if you can do nothing then maybe you should, or may be better said ‘if you can you should do nothing’ let me explain. We are always taught about catching things early, in actual fact sometimes the body can deal with things and you never know there has been a problem, your body has been repairing you every moment of every day since you were born so something is going on when you are ill. Sometimes you just need a good rest but anyway that is another subject. The reason we know that these changes happened is that the words that encapsulated the idea of mañana in the English language have fallen out of the vocabulary. We had words for the ‘do something tomorrow leave it today’ and ‘have a rest’ but because of the Protestant work ethic and then the Industrial Revolution and then the media particularly television we have been driven and then indentured in order to conform.

The business opportunity here is simply going with what people expect and you see this in everything from the health industry and self-improvement whether it is an App which helps you run a marathon with Mo Farah or getting into shape with whoever and so on.

We as artists need to think subversively otherwise what the hell are we doing this for? If you really wanted to make money you should be working in the city not trying to make money playing the guitar or the drums and if you want stardom then you really need something to say or be so pretty as a man or a woman that really you are selling your art by how nice your backside is.

The idea of going to music college, Brit school, BIMM or anywhere is maybe just a case of ‘if you can you should’ but of course now you can do this online for very little money, you can even get the qualification. What you really need is to be known, but that my friend is something for another day.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk   A Rock music summer school for just three days with the tricks of the trade no qualifications needed.