Now, this thing about ecosystems is that it’s impossible to tell what the important parts are. It’s not a hierarchy, you know. We’re used to thinking of things that are arranged in levels like that, with the important things at the top and the less important things at the bottom. Ecosystems aren’t like that. They’re richly interconnected and they’re co-dependent in many, many ways. And if you take one thing out of the ecosystem, you can get a collapse in quite a different place. They’re constantly rebalancing. And I feel that culture is like that. And I think that British musical culture in particular has been like that.
So my thought the other night, when I was walking home was, new ideas are articulated by individuals, but generated by communities. What we tend to do is – perhaps quite naturally – celebrate the individuals. We’re very keen on the names. But what we don’t do is to look at the whole community that they’re drawing from.
Now I’m going to give you as an example of this my own story in a very potted form.
Usually when people tell their story, they make it seem like they did it all themselves. ‘I did it my way. I’m a self-made man.’ It’s particularly notable among high-tech billionaires who tend to think that they started the world. So my story is like everybody’s story and very complicated and I’m just going to look at certain particular parts of it.
When I was 11, I passed the 11 Plus and because I was of Catholic parents I got a scholarship to a Catholic Grammar school. Like many schools, it had set aside a few places for bright, working-class boys I believe was the phrase. Then I went to art school. The art school was free. We didn’t pay fees then. I spent five years at art school. Absolutely invaluable time. I studied with some great teachers, some of whom, incidentally, had taught Pete Townshend, who was one of the first in this series of lectures.
I left art school and I went on the dole. This was a very important part of my life. And I went on the dole because I desperately didn’t want to get a job. Because I was worried if I got a job, I would never get out of the job. And I wanted to be an artist. I was very clear about that.
So I stayed on the dole and doing odd jobs and had the great good fortune of meeting Roxy Music. So I had luck. Joined a wonderful group of people. And then, another great piece of good fortune… that John Peel came to one of our early shows, and put us on the radio. A writer called Richard Williams heard it, wrote about it. A big piece. Which was pretty unknown at the time because we didn’t have management record company or even fans, actually. And then, of course, John Peel was one of the reasons I’m here, actually, because he was a key figure in my life. And then the other thing that I should mention that kept me going during that time was the NHS and the Library Service.
So, I mention all of those things. They’re not the only things in this story, of course, but they’re important in a way because they were all institutions that had been set in place a long time ago by people who had some sort of idealistic notion of social engineering. Lord Reith, setting up the BBC, had the idea that the whole nation would benefit from being a part of this new idea of radio, that ideas could be spread around differently. A lot of the way people are talking about the internet now.
