A Year of Living Precariously
/The ALPS from SPACE, DECEMBER 2015 FROM TIM PEAKE
2015 ended with rain. Lots of it. The wonderful city of York is, as I write, still submerged. This week Leeds and Manchester suffered the same fate as Carlisle last. Temperatures have been regularly in the high-teens in London throughout November and December. The garden trees are ablaze with fresh-blossom. The astronaut Tim Peake flew above the Alps this week and posted an image that looked like the English Lake District in July [see picture, left]. This is not the opening of yet another three-part dystopian ‘young-adult’ fiction, but the warm soggy reality of El Niño Britain in late 2015. Perhaps this year even the most hardened climate change-denier amongst us might now be swayed by Moscow’s absence of Christmas snow and might watch, wide-eyed with nostalgia, at Ruben Östlund’s wonderful Force Majeure, where the local burghers detonate explosives across the mountainside because a phenomenon known as “too much snow”.
@GAPINGVOID: A CONSTANT SOURCE OF GREAT INSPIRATION
As the world slowly percolates, my business venture Wave Your Arms morphed from a fanciful idea into something ever more stretching and hugely fulfilling, yet imbued with all the emotional highs and lows that the ‘entrepreneurial sages’ rightly predicated. In the past twelve months I have visited China, Finland, Singapore, Switzerland and Los Angeles, with many of those experiences documented in these pages. I have had the pleasure of working with Prof Brian Cox, Harper Reed, Sir Clive Woodward, Sean Fitzpatrick, Jeremy Paxman, David Rowan (of Wired), Eliza Maningham-Buller, Iain Poulter, Paul Casey, Remi Krug, Adrian Wooldridge (of The Economist), as well working with the leadership teams of some extraordinary businesses and with the colleagues and inspiring Faculty at London Business School. As it says in our own marketing blurb: "the key ingredient is in harnessing the skills and energies of great people who are delight to work with and love what they do". And we have done that in spades. I remain...Humbled. Amazed. Grateful. And hungry in 2016 for more.
As readers of this blog will know, the world of arts/culture/sport/media and creativity are our continued source of inspiration and increasingly shape the way we [should] think about the world of work. If we could ever bring even the smallest essence of the joy that great film, or theatre, or music creates into the corporate workplace then much would be transformed: careers and lives would be enhanced and the concept of work/life balance rightly blurred further, not made more marked. I am not sure this has been as stellar a year of creative inspiration as 2015, but part of that is a narrowed bandwidth on my part and a creeping 'conservatism' in taste that my kids clearly abhor and something I need to address in 2016. Anyway, as has been the tradition on here for a few years now: here are some the MOTD style edited highlights.
B O O K S
The year started with a book and it is the best book I have ever read about music: Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All . The story follows the formation of a band called The Ships in the Night and the relationship between two close friends from different sides of the planet (Irish Robbie and Vietnamese Fran) and a brother and sister rhythm section to die for. The typical mode for these tales (see The Commitments, Once) is for heroic failure to be celebrated amidst fart gags and much acoustic troubadour-ing. Here the scale is writ much larger: from Luton to Dublin to New York, from backstreet bars 'open mike' to headlining the Glastonbury Festival. From sleeping in crap vans to flying on private planes. Success and failure is found not heroically and humbly, but hugely and devastatingly. The characters are drawn like old friends you will have loved, lost and clung onto over the years and the two-thirds-in kick in the teeth for Robbie and the reader is a masterstroke. Since finishing the book (and having bought copies for friends and family) I keep hearing The Ships on the radio, and on Spotify, and in old records I have not listened to for years. I wrote to Joseph and blathering-ly offered to adapt his book for the screen. Still waiting for a reply.
Meanwhile, David Laurie produced his labour of love: Dare: How Bowie & Kraftwerk Inspired the Death of Rock 'n' Roll and Invented Modern Pop Music. It’s a great read, not just because the topic resonates with anyone blessed with ears that heard the tunes of the early ’80’s first-hand, but because of David’s personal ownership of every reference, every recommendation, every memory of a record heard for the first time, it holds the attention and makes you dive straight to Spotify to re-discover again. Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzel’s Becoming Steve Jobs was intriguing, involving and enjoyable in a way that the official Isaacson biography wasn’t. It covers the same territory but takes a view and is full of strange moments (for example, when Jobs licks the screen of the monitor when reviewing a beta version of OSX.) I have not yet ventured out to see Danny Boyle’s film version of Isaacson’s book, uncertain following the reviews that emphasised the dark side of genius, not the illumination he created. I can wait for a small screen which is easier to walk away from. For me, Jobs is the man behind “here’s to the crazy ones” which is framed on my wall alongside an email I received from Jobs himself which said (in response to a speculative email I sent to him in 2010): “No interest. Thanks for thinking of us. Steve.” Much missed that man.
M U S I C
Apple launched Apple Music, but it proved to be a huge disappointment and despite some smart marketing (which is no surprise) and hiring Zane Lowe, the fundamentals that Steve Jobs would have insisted on [it should improve your life by using it], it is clunky, slow, poorly laid out and harder to navigate than Spotify. The investment in both subs though means I have stopped actually buying music. If I've stopped buying - and most people under the age of 20 don't even consume through paid subscription - then the music business really is dead. I still wander past HMV in awe that it is still there.
I dived into rediscovery in 2015, seeking out bands I had not heard of for years. Sometimes a new band being the prompt to revisit elsewhere in the distant past. So you can listen to Trevor Horns' production masterpiece on Yes' Owner of A Lonely Heart or Grace Jones' Slave to The Rhythm, and then get blown away anew by the production on Everything Everything's Distant Past. Joseph O'Connor's book took me not to the folk-rock I expected but to Cloud Castle Lake and their extraordinary Sync (which sounds like the Tijuana Brass meets Bronsky Beat). Album of the year (on plays, if nothing else) is Marks To Prove It, by The Maccabees. There is something wonderful about the ambition these guys have. While much of the world seems to have given up on guitars: these use the old-fashion of a riff, or a triumphant chorus and throw in rhythm and texture and lyrical surprise after surprise. It's a better album than The Foals' What Went Down, which was just really good, not really great: though Birch Tree has been played a lot. Stereophonics have occupied the car stereo for much of the year and I've also found terrific quieter moments with Daughter and also rediscovered Laura Groves (formerly known as Blue Roses) from Shipley, and the lovely Emelie and Ogden with Ten Thousand or more cinematically it Public Service Broadcasting, or Hot Chip. The Mercury Prize nominations promoted me to re-discover Gaz Coombes' ebullient Matador, but also introduced me to Benjamin Clementine and his album At Least for Now. I knew none of the backstory of the exiled-Englishman busking to live down and out on the streets of Paris. But here was this man with a voice to die for singing of hopes and fears and ambitions using snatched conversations on the subway and a friend's encouragement to seize all that he could possibly be, in London..."I won't underestimate who I am capable of becoming". People close to me hate the song. I just listen to a man whose almost mock Estuary accent soars! Still the song of the year [see video below).
