Amongst other things.... Cheesemakers get up at 3am. There are billions of living things in a teaspoon of soil. Punk apparently has no retirement age. And creating a new way to release music doesn’t mean you have to stop making records.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks at The Third Half. One of the things I love about doing this is that I can spend one day talking about charity and the next talking about cheese, soil, punk or the future of music, usually without much of a plan, but nearly always coming away with something I didn’t know before.
So here are seven things I’ve learned recently, in seven short films, some of which where the full versions are in the editing studio. Stick around for Fyfe Dangerfield at the end, because his view of where records fit in a world of streaming, fragments, unfinished ideas and instant everything is rather more nuanced than you might expect.
1. Your cheesemaker may well be working while you’re asleep
“What is your cheesemaker doing at 3am?” Possibly not a question you’ve asked yourself recently.
Julie Cheyney makes St Jude cheese, and we talked about farming, craft, place and what actually goes into making something most of us simply pick up from a counter. Turns out quite a lot happens before breakfast.
2. It’s worth asking where the money actually goes
We’ve been having loads of conversations about charity recently. We hear the appeals, we sponsor people, we donate, we occasionally sleep outside, but what happens next tends to get less attention.
Ken Deeks joined me to talk about Boycott Your Bed and Action for Children, and I wanted to get beyond the fundraising total to understand what that money actually does. There’s a reason people give up their time for this, and seeing the other end of the donation is a pretty good reminder of it.
3. Punk doesn’t appear to have an upper age limit
We’ve had Americana, indie and classical composers, so it was probably time for some punk.
Fal is the frontman of The Indestructibles, and our conversation went into music, attitude, getting older, making mistakes and what happens when the bloke singing punk has accumulated rather more life experience than the bloke who started doing it. Has he mellowed? I’ll let you decide.
4. Forty years can go remarkably quickly
Heather Manson and I were at Airdrie Academy together, before life happened: dance, America, Ironman, and helping raise millions of pounds for Street Soccer Scotland. We hadn’t properly caught up in about 40 years.
This isn’t really a story about looking backwards though. It’s about just how much can happen when life takes you somewhere you never remotely expected to go.
5. A teaspoon of soil is considerably busier than I thought
About 10 billion microorganisms, in a teaspoon. That was one of the things Alex from Generation Soil told me, and frankly I’ve been looking at the ground rather differently ever since. Soil isn’t just the brown stuff underneath us, it’s an extraordinary living ecosystem connected to our food, our environment and ultimately us. Not bad for a teaspoon.
6. If we want tomorrow’s musicians, they need somewhere to be rubbish first
Before artists fill arenas, they need somewhere to play first, somewhere small enough to experiment, get things wrong, find an audience and learn how to get good.
My conversation with Mark from Music Venue Trust was a reminder that when a grassroots venue disappears, we don’t just lose a building. We potentially lose part of the pipeline that creates what comes next, which brings us neatly to someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about exactly that.
7. The future of music doesn’t have to replace its past
Fyfe Dangerfield is probably still best known to many people through Guillemots, but our conversation went considerably further than that: songwriting, creativity, unfinished work, the strange places ideas come from, and The Stream, which Fyfe created as another home for music that doesn’t necessarily need to wait until it fits neatly onto a conventional album.
The important point is that Fyfe is still making records. The Stream isn’t an argument that albums are dead, or that one way of making and releasing music has to replace another. There’s a place for the record, a place for the finished album, a place for a song released into the world on its own, and a place for ideas and music that might otherwise sit unheard because they don’t fit the traditional model. In Fyfe’s philosophy, there’s a place for everything.
Cheese. Charity. Punk. Street football. Soil. Grassroots venues. Songwriting. On paper, not much connects them. In practice, perhaps more than you’d think.
And on top of all that, next week is our inaugural anniversary event, Third Half Live. A year of these conversations, in one room, for one evening. It’s all organised and ready to go, which is a bit of a worry in itself.....
People. Planet. Progress. And a fair amount of thoughtful chaos.