After the hustle and bustle of May, June was something more of
a relaxed affair, though there were still two very important developments:
Firstly I’ve taken on a new private student; the first one I’ve
had for a while. I don’t usually do this as I would be in breach of either my
Terms and Conditions or Code of Conduct for Dudley Performing Arts. The rule is
that I’m not allowed to work in direct competition with DPA. Normally this
would mean that I couldn’t do any private lessons for children in the Dudley
area, but this person lives in a different area. I won’t be saying anything else
about them for legal reasons and respect for people’s privacy, but the
experience has been something of a revelation to me in a couple of respects:
The first is that my
friend who put me on to the student’s parents was my friend Leeanne, and I used
to be in a band with her sister Hannah. So the seeds of this working
relationship were actually sown in April 2010 when we put that band together!
Sometimes it’s worth staying friends with people. I hoped to be able to help
her in kind by backing her kickstarter project, sadly that didn’t work out.
The second was an indication of how far I’ve come along
since I started teaching all that time ago. It’s no surprise really; I’m always
learning and no one’s ever the finished product, but my lesson pacing in
particular has improved a lot since I first started. Add to that some
much-improved lesson content, and a lot more of my students have the potential
to do very well indeed. A good thing, since in these situations I’m accountable
to whoever’s paying me and they are going to want to see some return on the
investment!
The second development for me was a very important gig that
I did for my vocal coach Vie…
This came about as a fundraiser event for the Black Country
Food Bank. Now, I think in this day and age it is deplorable that people have
to rely on food banks. But they are real people, with real problems, and those
problems aren’t going to go away just because I don’t like it. I heard, for
example, about a family who were referred because the husband had returned from
working in the armed forces and was struggling to get a job elsewhere. They’re
certainly not what you hear about benefit scroungers, or whatever it happens to
be. They’re not going to appear on a Channel 4 Documentary. They are real
people.
Vie chose to do it as close to the Summer Holidays as she
could, because the food banks really struggle during the summer as people tend
to forget about it. It’s not so bad around Christmas – good will to all men, and
all that – but during the summer, you can actually see through the shelves. And
it’s not just food either; people tend to forget about things like shampoo,
nappies, and deodorants and can openers. I’ll put a link to the site here, please
give it a look and find out how you can support it – people will continue to
need it in the future.
May of Vie’s vocal student performed a short set at the
Calvary Church in Kingswinford, and the standard was incredibly high. It’s great
to see how well her students are getting on; I might catch the end of someone’s
lesson on the off chance I turn up early for mine but other than that I don’t
get to see it very often. It was great to do so this time.
My performance was an incredible experience. At this point,
I’ve basically been playing in pubs for the last eleven years, where there
could be about fifty people in the room and maybe ten of them will be half-listening
to you and applaud out of politeness. At the church, there were roughly 140
people there, and every one of them was listening intently. I played Like I Can
and A Little Respect, but the one everybody remembered and spoke to me about
afterwards was Storm from the North! Giving the song a bit of context helped –
it was the song I wrote about Crashpoint – and I’ve made a slight change to it
that now means it’s a little more comfortable to sing, which improved my
delivery. But unless I’m playing to a gig where the audience consists entirely
of musos, it’s rarely the original material that goes down the best. So thanks
to everyone for watching me that night; you couldn’t have given me a higher
compliment.
Looking forward to a gig with The Fakes next month, and some
of my students have exams. So do I, as it happens…
