Ouch Talk Show 21 December 2016 bbc.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 London 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 Sham 69, Hurry Up Harry. 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.