Ouch Talk Show 21 December 2016 .co.uk/ouch Presented by Damon Rose, Beth Rose and Emma Tracey

Punk Therapy

EMMA Before we get into this week’s episode of Inside Ouch I just want to tell you about an event Ouch will be holding in early 2017. It’s a live storytelling night and the theme is love and relationships. So, if you have a suitable story that you fancy telling in front of a live audience email it to [email protected]. Maybe you’re blind and your partner snogged someone right in front of you at a party. Or maybe your differences make intimacy a little tricky. All we ask is that you are disabled, that the story is true and that it’s about disability in some way. Bookmark bbc.co.uk/ouch/disability for further details.

Now, let’s get back into this week’s episode of Inside Ouch. [Music playing – Christmas as a Punk] What do you when you’ve turned 18 or finished formal education if you’ve got learning disabilities? Electric Umbrella sought a solution and wound up with an amazing Christmas single, and they’re here on a quest to make Christmas As A Punk number one. This is Inside Ouch; I’m Emma Tracey in Edinburgh. In we have Damon Rose.

DAMON Hello.

EMMA We have Beth Rose.

BETH Hi there. EMMA And we have three members of Electric Umbrella. Hello.

BAND Hello!

EMMA Awesome. So, we’ve got Tom Billington.

TOM Hello.

EMMA Used to be in Mohair touring with Razorlight and the The Killers. Lawrence Neal – you’re the singer. The lead singer?

LAWRENCE Yeah.

TOM Yeah, you are the lead singer of this one.

EMMA Did you like making it, the single, was it fun?

LAWRENCE I like all the punk bands, like the White Stripes for instance.

EMMA Did you like making Christmas As A Punk?

LAWRENCE Oh yeah, because we rehearsed it down at Abbey Road.

EMMA Goodness me! Was that amazing for you to be at that really famous studio?

LAWRENCE I think.

EMMA And we’ve got Robbie Mason. Hi Robbie.

ROBBIE Hi.

EMMA What do you do in Electric Umbrella.

ROBBIE Oh, I sing and I just make punk signs, you know.

BETH He’s doing it right now? Emma; he’s making a punk sign.

DAMON What’s a punk sign?

TOM You take your first finger and your little finger and you put them up. That’s it.

BETH Got it, Damon.

LAWRENCE It’s like heavy metal.

TOM But also like the similar thing that you do to sign that you’re on the phone.

DAMON Oh right.

TOM The two things are very close.

EMMA Similar activities. Let’s go back to what I was saying at the very top. Tom, you and your friend Mel started Electric Umbrella when you saw a social isolation problem with people with learning disabilities once they kind of finished college or whatever.

TOM I’ve had a career as a professional musician for a long time, and I was doing workshops, music workshops and teaching and all that kind of stuff and I ended up doing a lot of things in the learning disability world. And what we started to notice is that projects would come and go very quickly, so you might get a 12-week project that you could get involved in, come and be a part of every week and then it would just disappear, and there would be no kind of legacy involved in any of that. I think we all see it as a problem this huge thing of having very little to do actually when you get out of college and when you get out of any full-time education, and anything that really is about purpose and feeling anything about worth I suppose.

It started as a 12-week programme with ten people in a local authority near to Watford, and it was something that I had been brought in to do; they had a group of people with learning disabilities and they just wanted to do something musical. What I realised is there was nowhere for us to perform anything we created in that time. So, on that very first day that we got there we created this thing called Electric Umbrella. We said the Electric Umbrella is going to be the end result of this 12-week project. And at the end of it it was just something none of us had ever seen or witnessed before: we seemed to develop this approach that seemed to work and be able to pull stuff out of people that we wouldn’t expect. And so we ran with it. We spent two years essentially putting it on, not earning any money, just working away, working away, working away. And then at the beginning of this year we became a charity and now we have 60 members; we have three groups. Robbie here is the only person – maybe there’s one other person – who comes to more than one group a week, because he loves it so much.

EMMA And you don’t just stay in the workshops; you go out to do stuff as well. Tell me a bit more about that.

TOM We have a house band of professional musicians when we perform live that is also then augmented and supported and made up of other musicians who have learning disabilities. And we go out and we do tours and gigs and festivals and shows, and we’ve been out busking recently quite a lot, and we just kind of create something that sounds really amazing, gives our guys a chance to perform to their absolute potential; doesn’t worry about the fact that musically it’s going to fall apart at any point because the professional guys have got that bit covered.

EMMA We’ve got a clip of you guys busking. Let’s have a listen to Electric Umbrella on the streets. [Music playing and laughter] That sounds like so much fun!

TOM The trombone player there is a guy called Christian who we call the King of Laughter and he’s just wonderful.

DAMON And fingers on the buzzers everybody: what song were they singing?

BETH Do they Know it’s Christmas?

DAMON Correct.

TOM I had no idea!

DAMON It sounded like Do They Know It’s Christmas to me.

BETH Were you in it, Robbie?

ROBBIE Yes, I was.

BETH Were you singing? Playing?

ROBBIE I was singing and playing a bit of the old, just rattling…

TOM Rattling away in the background.

ROBBIE Yeah, rattling away in the background and just singing as well.

LAWRENCE I think we did lots of other songs that are like in the great classic from , .

ROBBIE Yeah.

DAMON What else do you play? What are your other faves?

TOM What other songs?

DAMON Yeah.

ROBBIE There’s quite a few. We’ve recently gone through, I did like the Travelling Wilburys; about to do some Monty Python. So, it’s really good.

DAMON I thought you were a punk band. Travelling Wilburys?

ROBBIE We are.

TOM The beauty of this is we’re not a punk band. Lawrence here is the lead singer of his own punk bank that Electric Umbrella have built around him. All 60 of our members have their own individual thing.

LAWRENCE And we had some autographs signed. TOM We had to do some autographs.

BETH Oh for you? You had to sign the autographs?

LAWRENCE From the Pistols themselves.

BETH Wow, that’s big!

TOM No one’s ever put Lawrence in a punk band before. Lawrence, you’ve been doing projects and stuff all your life really and been involved in stuff, but no one’s ever put you in a band before. No one ever realised you were a punk singer until that day that you turned up on our doorstep and started singing Hurry Up Harry, which is the ‘we’re going down the pub’ song.

LAWRENCE Hurry Up Harry, yeah.

TOM And suddenly it was like this guy has just go to front a punk band; this has got to be his thing. And then within our 60 members there are loads of pockets of those things happening, and then when we all get together, like we do three big shows a year, all those 60 people come together and the punk band side of it is just a small part of it.

BETH Okay.

DAMON There’s a bit of a tradition of people with learning disabilities doing punk, thrashing out with their instruments and that kind of thing. It’s a good genre of music to get into.

ROBBIE It’s fantastic music. It’s just to do with anarchy. People don’t give a damn about anything so they want to get everything across by expressing through punk, which is really good.

DAMON I don’t know, I guess we should establish guys, I don’t know if we like the whole labelling thing, but are you on the autistic spectrum?

ROBBIE I’m not on the autistic spectrum no, but I have mild learning disabilities, so.

DAMON Got you. And Lawrence, just so that those people out there at home who might be able to relate to you or have something similar, how would you class yourself?

LAWRENCE Me? Oh, I’ve got my cousins who are well into punk because they like groups like Suzi and the Banshees because one of my cousins has got Suzi and the Banshees LP called Scream.

TOM I think the point there: Lawrence is Lawrence.

DAMON Yeah, exactly. Quite rightly he ignored my question.

TOM I think it’s something that we seem to come, not up against quite a lot I suppose, but something like Electric Umbrella gives us – and I say us; it’s very much me as well – an opportunity to just be ourselves. It doesn’t matter that one person can sing clearer than the other or that the other person can even dance or walk or anything or any of those things. The fact that we’re doing it and we’re together and we’re pushing it out in this massively positive way it’s the togetherness that seems to be changing all of our perceptions and all of our lives.

EMMA Outside of Electric Umbrella I guess the council would label you guys as having a learning disability; school would; college would. So, what Robbie and Lawrence, what do you do the days that you’re not at Electric Umbrella?

ROBBIE Ooh. Well, at the moment I’m having one to one tuitions in music, making my own sort of music, as well as I do all the basic things like shopping, cleaning, living in my own place really.

EMMA So, you’re living independently now?

ROBBIE Yeah. I’m part of networks that have got like going out on trips and also just have all this care team that I employ through direct payments and all these sorts of things.

TOM Everyone’s got a very, very different experience of what their week looks like.

ROBBIE Yeah.

TOM You take someone like Robbie, or a friend of ours Billy whose mum drives 500 miles a week to get him to whatever there is for him to do; she will go hammer and tongs just to find stuff for him to do and feel worth and all of that. But actually an awful lot of our guys, I’d say in fact the majority don’t have that support, and they spend a lot of their time in day services and things like that, which as hard as they all try they are not funded very well and they are genuinely really trying to put something together, but it’s such a huge problem.

DAMON Can I ask about work, paid work? Have you guys ever worked or do you want to work or what’s that situation?

ROBBIE I used to work a long time ago when I was younger. But at the moment I haven’t really been successful in the actual working side.

DAMON What did you used to work as?

ROBBIE I used to work at Sainsbury’s.

DAMON And what did you do at Sainsbury’s?

ROBBIE Shelving stacking and all that sort of thing. In the end it wasn’t my type of thing so I just packed it in.

TOM That’s all about support though, isn’t it?

ROBBIE Yeah. TOM It’s generally not well supported. So, for someone like Robbie who probably could do some of these things if he was really, really well supported, in the same way that I think maybe that Electric Umbrella supports people musically, if there was a way that within the workplace that Rob could be supported one to one in the way that he is musically with me then there are other ways of doing it. But companies and society is not built like that; it just doesn’t work like that. And I think we see that a lot with our guys who are in employment for a while, those kinds of things happen and it doesn’t seem to last very long ever.

BETH And what about you, Lawrence, when you’re not rocking out with Electric Umbrella what do you do?

LAWRENCE Well, I used to have a dad and mum at one stage. I used to be with them; I used to go home at weekends. But sadly they’ve both gone. When I’m not rocking I do sports as well. I used to do football with the day centres.

BETH Okay.

TOM The trouble for us has been about kind of identifying the things that these guys need, which is basically regular and consistent familiar activities that they can do that makes them feel like they’re really a part of something. It’s very hard to do that, even in the short time, the few years that I’ve been doing it, just finding, getting that consistency.

The main thing for us has been about meaningful social interaction as well, so something that’s regular and building up relationships and building up confidence. The way that I and the people that I work with are able to get the most out of everyone is because we know everybody: we know every single name; all of our 60 guys I know all of their stories; I know what makes them tick; I know what they can and, I say can’t do, but what they need help with; I know what their favourite songs are. But that’s taken time of seeing everybody for every week for two years.

BETH And how do your musicians come to you? I’m guessing there’s maybe a waiting list now. Do they approach you?

TOM Yeah. We get referrals from social services quite a lot. It’s mainly word of mouth. It’s a relatively small area that we work in at the moment in Hertfordshire, we’ve got these three groups, and there is a waiting list, yeah. We physically can’t get any more hours in the day to work with any more people at the moment.

BETH And the sessions, if I was going along to a session, what do you guys get to do when you’re there?

ROBBIE Oh, quite a lot of things. We get to hang out. We get to use instruments. We get to just sort of have fun. Basically that’s how I can sum it up is having fun. And learning different things about different people it’s so exhilarating; it’s really good. It’s got lots of advantages.

TOM As Robbie just said, you learn so much about everyone almost every week. An example like yesterday when Lawrence and I did a show in front of 1,000 people in a school near Watford, and one of our members who has cerebral palsy has a hard time speaking and definitely a hard time singing and all of these things, he let rip in a way that I’d never seen; I’ve known him for two or three years. He sang the whole of Jingle Bells without any support. It was a bit of a mind-blowing moment. I’ve seen him every week for two years and I’ve never seen that. But in front of 1,000 people and completely out of everybody’s comfort zone he was able to just cut loose somehow. It was amazing to watch.

EMMA Tom, tell me about some of the clever strategies you use to include people as well.

TOM Yeah, it can be utter chaos. We’ve got a job lot of guitars that we were donated for example, and you put them in the hands of 20 or so people with learning disabilities, and people without, and it can be utter chaos. What I tend to do is I work quite hard in working out ways where we can play them. A lot of them is about tuning, so I might tune ten guitars to the chord of G, ten guitars to the chord of F and ten guitars to the chord of C, and we can then, using conducting techniques that our guys can do or I can do, we can conduct entire groups to play the G chord. That might be people on bells, it might be people on guitars, or recently I took a load of keys off an accordion so that it only played a certain chord and things like that, so that everyone’s in the right key and in the right thing. And then me through the middle I will play quite loud and quite strong so that everyone can join in and make this wall of sound, and it doesn’t matter when you play or when you strike the strings or anything like that, it just can happen in one go.

There’s loads of stuff out there; there’s loads of technological things. We use something called sound beam quite a lot.

DAMON What’s the sound beam?

TOM Sound beam is like an invisible keyboard in the air. So, if you imagine a torch beam: if you were to put your hand in that torch beam, depending on how close to the bulb you were, it would tell you essentially what key you’ve just played on this invisible keyboard. So, you can essentially just wave your hand or your head or even an eyelid, you can set the range really low. And you can programme that just like you can any midi keyboard.

We have a load of violins and stuff that we bring. Every now and then we do something called the Orchestra of Joy, so it’s about working with orchestral musicians and bringing in instruments that we can do. And the whole point there is – and I say this a lot – is sometimes it takes three people to play a violin: it might be one to hold it, one to do the notes and the other to do the bow – and the people that we work with they could be any one of those three people, or two. It might even take five people. We’ve got a double bass as well and there was one point it took four or five people to play it. But it’s about that togetherness and just doing it because of the experience of doing it. There’s no reason why someone who physically can’t play a violin just as you would expect can’t be a part of making that music with that instrument.

EMMA I really don’t feel like we’ve built your single up enough.

TOM We haven’t even talked about the single!

EMMA Okay, tell me about the single. Who wrote it? What is it about?

TOM This Christmas we have released our first single. It came out on the 5th December and it’s called: BAND Christmas As A Punk.

TOM Christmas As A Punk, yeah.

LAWRENCE Christmas As A Punk!

TOM Yeah. It was written as a part, one day Lawrence and I were working on our Thursday group, and we were doing a song called Hurry Up Harry which goes [singing] we’re going down the pub…

DAMON Oh, I know that one.

TOM You know that one. So, we were singing that one, and that’s a bit of a classic in our group, and…

LAWRENCE It was a bit of a classic from Sham 69 once.

TOM It was, yes. And we said, “Wouldn’t it be great to do a song like this where we could get behind it and we could all sing something?” And someone said, “What about a Christmas song?” I think it was June or something, wasn’t it. I was like, “A Christmas song? What do you mean a Christmas song?” and then literally we just sang it there and then. It was like [singing] Christmas as a punk – and it just came out like that. And before we knew it we’d built the song, we’d written the words, we had rehearsed it with everybody. And then we went into a studio and recorded it with a whole load of incredible session musicians as well. LAWRENCE When Ollie and Tom came in.

TOM Yeah, they came in. and then I took it round to Lawrence’s house to record the lead vocal. We recorded the lead vocal in your kitchen.

LAWRENCE Yeah. [Laughter]

DAMON I don’t know who it is you sounded like, Lawrence. I thought maybe you sounded a bit like John Lydon or someone. Who do you think you sound like? Who would you like to sound like in the punk world?

LAWRENCE Like my friend, like Johnny Lydon or Jimmy Pursey.

TOM Yeah, Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69 is your big favourite, isn’t he?

LAWRENCE Oh, Jimmy Pursey, yeah.

TOM It’s had something like 60,000 views on Facebook, which for us is an enormous achievement. We just thought we would stick it out. We made this completely crazy video as well, which was just a wonderful experience in itself: all 60 members getting a chance to just completely wig out in front of the camera. Again that was another experience where we saw these amazing things happen which you wouldn’t expect. BETH And people can watch that on your Electric Umbrella Facebook page?

TOM Yes, electricumbrella.co.uk and you can see as well, that will lead you through there, but you can also see a making of documentary that we did as well.

ROBBIE The only time I’ve ever got loads of views is one of my tracks which had 5,000 views, or 6,000 views, so that’s pretty cool.

EMMA Tom Billington, Lawrence Neal and Robbie Mason thank you so much for joining us.

LAWRENCE Thank you.

TOM Thank you so much for having us, it’s been brilliant.

ROBBIE Thank you for having us. Peace to all of you.

EMMA And thank you to Damon and Beth for coming in after your Christmas party for this.

TOM Yeah, well done.

BETH It was a pleasure. ROBBIE They’re not too drunk by the way! Just put that on the record there.

BETH Absolutely.

EMMA This has been Inside Ouch. You can email us [email protected]; like us on Facebook; find us on Twitter @bbcouch; or go to bbc.co.uk/news/disability. This is Electric Umbrella with Christmas As A Punk.

[Music plays]