This month’s blog is about recording ‘The Way We Roll’ podcast with Simon Minty & Phil Friend. Called “Live music, Breast Cancer & Me” we talk about some tough stuff (#Trigger Warning), but we also cover the highs of my life in music, not only the lows.
Alt Text: An image on a laptop screen of two white disabled men & one disabled white woman, recording a podcast from their separate rooms, in their separate boxes on-screen.
In June, I was honoured to be invited onto ‘The Way We Roll’ podcast. Simon, Phil & I discussed everything from why I love music & how this helped me found ‘Attitude is Everything’ in 2000, to my old nemesis Breast Cancer. It was great fun recording the podcast, mainly because Simon & Phil are very supportive.
Essentially, it was a conversation between friends (Simon remembers the first time that he & I met in the 1990’s (!) at an event in the ICA, London) & I was never worried or nervous about opening up to them. They made me feel free to tell my story just how it is. Chaotic & mind-bending.
You can listen to the podcast here: https://buff.ly/4bzetuo
I had wondered whether I should be talking about the charity that I founded, ‘Attitude is Everything’ in the same space as my Breast Cancer diagnosis. In some previous articles & interviews about my work to improve disabled people’s access to live music, I’d made brief mentions of diagnosis & treatment when relevant. However, this podcast was the first time that I’d talked about ‘Attitude is Everything’ & Breast Cancer together. And why? Because they’re intertwined in my life experience & they’ve shaped the way in which I’ve worked & lived over the past four years.
We start with why I love music & why, & how this led to me starting ‘Attitude is Everything.’ Since then, I’ve been campaigning for 24 years for disabled people to have better access to venues, festivals & live events, & for disabled artists to be able to play anywhere they want to, & for disabled employees to work in their dream job. We talk about the early days of the organisation, & how, for the first 8 years of our existence, we were a project housed within another organisation – effectively living ‘hand to mouth’ – until April 2008 when Arts Council England gave us our big break & we started being regularly funded by them.
We talk about why it’s important to make sure that disabled artists & employees get their breaks in playing & working in music. We talk about how the music eco-system works, acknowledging the danger that if small venues & festivals fold, then there is a big risk to the talent pipeline. It means that we won’t see our Coldplays or Taylor Swifts at arena tours in the future, if we don’t invest in grassroots & community events. We talk about how the disabled community is an important revenue scheme – we discuss how making your venue, event or site accessible can help you build more audiences, & that more audiences mean more money into the business. We talk about the demand & appetite from disabled people to get involved in live music.
We even get to laugh about my attempts to be in bands & my terrible singing voice!
But then talk turns towards how the campaigner within me had to start advocating for better Breast Cancer awareness & healthcare for disabled people. How I used my project management skills to link all my various consultants together so that they could plan my surgery & subsequent treatment – the things that were said that were unhelpful, & equally, the things that were said & said which kept me going. We touch briefly on why I took part in Breast Cancer Now’s ‘The Show’ & gave a story to Phil Alderson’s collection ‘Someone’s Survival Guide.’
We finish on how you need to be your own advocate, & there is always something you can do to help yourself, no matter how disempowered you feel.
So, give it a listen. It’s probably a lived experience in music that’s rarely heard, as well as a Breast Cancer story told from a different, diverse perspective.
Once more to Simon & Phil for being generous & kind. They’re also incisive, expressing the need for answers & solutions as well as asking the questions.
And here’s the link again to listen to it: https://buff.ly/4bzetuo
The Musings of Spu 