Hugh Garry

Bowie, Ideas and Creativiy

"I wanted to be the instigator of new ideas. I wanted to turn people on to new things and new perspectives." 

I loved the Bowie documentary Five Years which screened on BBC 2 last week. There are a few Bowie documentaries out there but this really dug deep into his creative process. There were so many great quotes in there that I thought it might be an idea to look at them in relation to some of the ideas I've blogged or talked about in the past. 

"I've always found that I collect. I'm a collector. I collect personalities, ideas." 

Some of the most creative people I know are collectors. As I pointed out here collecting "exercises your creative muscle. It powers your curiosity, imagination and appreciation. It teaches you about aesthetics, sharpens your powers of observation, helps you understand patterns and recognise what is missing. We build narratives around our collections as well as human connections. We strive for perfection with our collections and in doing so achieve Flow. We experiment and tinker with our collections and most importantly everything we do with them forms a pool of inspiration for future projects."

"I'm a storyteller and I decided to enact the story I was writing rather than perform it as myself" 

You learn how to become a storyteller through your collections. 

"I wanted to make a mark and I didn't know how to do it. And it took me all of the 60s to try everything I could think of, in terms of theatre and art and music, to find out what it was I wanted to do anyway." 

Just try things. You can't earn interest on saved ideas. Get your ideas out there. Be curious. Stop waiting for permision. Play around and your efforts will pay off... eventually.

"Everything that I read, any film that I saw, any bit of theatre. Everything went into my mind as being an influence." 

Stock up on brain food. Fill that part of your brain with ideas to feed future ideas. Everything is a remix so steal ideas. You are a mash-up of what you let into your life.

"I went naked in Berlin. I really did strip down to basic essentials." 

Less is more. Restrictions help creativity.

Stop waiting for permission

Last night was the second in my series of Shoreditch House Events on the subject of 'where good ideas come from'. This one was on combinatorial creativity, remix culture and why creators need to stop beating themselves up over stealing the ideas of others. Apologies are not necessary. As Mark Twain said "All ideas are secondhand".

I mentioned the moment I first heard Grandmaster Flash's 'Adventures on the Wheels of Steel', a memory that will live with me forever. It sounded so fresh, so new and original, like music from another planet. Incredible given that its component parts were old tracks. The secret of the record's impact lay not in the stolen component parts but in the combination with a new way of vocal delivery - in this case cut up vocal samples from Chic and others, the glue that held the track together. This new way of making music was a revelation. 

When Einstein said "Imagination is more important the knowledge" the imagination bit he was talking about is the ability to see the connections, it's about pattern recognition and being able to join the dots. It's a great quote but I'm not sure I agree that one is more important that the other. You have to have the parts on the table to be able to come up with interesting ways of putting them together. As Jay Z points out in his brilliant book Decode, those parts were the record collections of hip hop's missing fathers.

"We were kids without fathers…so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves…Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh."

What I really like about about the birth of hip hop is that it arrived with an attitude that was unapologetic about stealing other people's work and creating something new with it. It was almost like hip hop gave artists permission to steal. Once the gates were open remix culture flowed and new heroes were made as a result of appropriating the work of others and combining those elements in fascinating ways. Once the permission was granted creativity flourished.

I wish more would be honest, open and ballsy about their influences. Why hide your sources? Make them visible? Pay tribute to what you've built upon. Or as my maths teacher would say "Show all your working out in the margin so that I can see how you arrived at your answer". Imagine if every film maker produced one of these.

Earlier this week I was working on a project with a group of women who had waited a lifetime for someone to 'give them permission'. Someone to say "It's OK to...". How differently their lives will be as result. It's such a pity that someone didn't give them permission years ago. Sometimes waiting for permission is as pointless as asking turkeys to vote for Christmas - you'll be waiting a long time. When the people in power are protecting the problem that they are the answer to then only you can make the change that you want to see.

Less Cowbell

The Futureheads have a new album out this week. It's called 'Rant'. What's remarkable about it is it's an a capella album. A brave move for a rock group that have a strong fan base and four studio albums under its belt.

At this stage of their career bands can live or die by their next move. They've come through the 'difficult second album' phase, been touring for a decade and need to do something that is different but is more of the same. Usually the answer to that dilemma is 'more cowbell'. Or in other words, lets do more of the same but bigger. More guitars. More drums. More noise. And lets do it louder.

As mentioned in my previous post '4 lessons in creativity from The Artist' taking stuff away is always an option:

Creativity is about subtraction. What you remove is as import as what you add. If you're making a blockbuster like Transformers and you add more robots, you simply have a film with more robots. If you're making a film like The Artist and you take away the voices you have something 'remarkable'.

What's really interesting is that when you combine elements in a creative way (such as rock bands and a capella) to create something new interesting posibilities that arise as a result. For example you could argue that it took the arrival of broadband and Flash to make Youtube a reality. In this case touring the album becomes a completely new experience for the band and the audience. Not only is the cost of the tour reduced because they have less gear (on ticket price) but the venue's they can now play a different kind of venue. 

It's great to see the creative side of 'the industry' taking bold steps in risk averse times. 

Quotes from The Futures of Entertainment: Music

Has social media inspired a new surge of creativity in pop?

I've been talking a lot recently about how my team should start thinking a little less about an audience of individuals and a little more about the interactions between them and their audience. Once you get your head around your audience having their own audience then you start to ask the question 'What do they have to broadcast?' or better still 'What do they need to broadcast?' and 'How can we help them?'

We did some great stuff last summer with digital autographs and Reading Presents which created objects personalised to our followers that we knew they would share. They were pieces of media that went beyond the stream of status updates that they usually broadcast. They were visible and very desirable to their audience.

Then a few weeks ago I went to the excellent Firestarters event at Google organised by my Tanzania travel buddy Neil Perkin. As I'm not in advertising I felt a bit of an impostor, but like anryone else trying to get our messages broadcast these conversations are always going to be relevant and incredibly interesting. In particular I loved Mark Earls who spoke brilliantly about how people's natural instinct is to copy and how ideas can only spread if they are visible.

So this got me thinking about Gaga who is often compared to Madonna when she was a couple of years into her pop career. What is it that seperates Gaga from Madonna in her prime? Well, they both write great great pop songs, the both make great videos, they have great stylists and producers. Fair to say Gaga is a modern Madge. Right? Wrong!

What Gaga does that Madonna never did was to create a tribe. Sure, Modonna had fans but you wouldn't say it was a tribal experience. Gaga on the otherhand has the biggest tribe out there. Gaga wins where Madge, Britney and Christina fail by making copying visible. I'm not talking dressing like your idol here, everyone does that. No, I'm talking about creating visual language to go with the spoken language created by The House of Gaga. As well as the costume fans are recognisable by their interactions. They refer to each other as 'Little Monsters', Gaga is 'Mama Monster' and they give each other the 'paws up' to confirm their belonging to the tribe. By calling her entourage 'House of Gaga' she is drawing pictures in the minds of all those little monsters. Gaga makes it so easy for people to join her tribe because communication is strengthened through such a visible identifiable language.

There's nothing new about pop star tribes. In the 70's you couldn't walk down a high street without bumping into a Bowie or a Bay City Roller. But it kinda died off. Despite what retrospective TV dramas would have you believe the streets were not filled with Adam Ant or Boy George tribes in the 80's. The closest you got to Gaga was Morrissey who had his tribe wearing NHS glasses, becoming vegetarians and using a new vocabulary inspired by Wilde.

What's really interesting about the Gaga is that she's not alone in having a strong tribe. Nicki Minaj has her Barbies, Rihanna has her Navy and Beiber has his Beliebers - that's right, Beliebers, you better belieb it. This year the MTV Music Awards even has it's own Fan Army award with 13 different bands nominated.

So has social media played a role in the reinvention of these kind of tribes? Has the ease in which audiences can talk to their audineces via social media inspired a surge in creativity in pop music? If the visible language of Twitter is the hashtag then surely Gaga's 'paws up' is just as brilliantly useful in pulling together a global conversation around a given subject.

Whilst I've never been a fan of her music I'm a huge fan of The Gaga. Her attention to her image through fashion, video and social media is a lesson to everyone and her talk at Google was one of the best I have seen. If you've not watched it yet then what the hell are you waiting for. Go get it.

 

SXSW - Love, Music & APIs

SXSW - Finding Music With Pictures

Day 27 - A song that you wish you could play: The Darkness 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love'

Apart from the cowbell I can't play any instruments. But if I was granted just one wish from the tune fairy I'd want to play lead guitar on this. I'd wear spandex as part of the deal and play it to Rikki every Tuesday morning. I know she fell in love me because I used to drop it during my sets. Together we'd air guitar so much that I'd forget to cue up my next tune.

When we started going out I'd sing her a silly song every Tuesday morning to put her in the mood for what would be a 24 hour work day in Ibiza. It continued when we returned to Blighty and lasted a good six months before I ran out of enthusiasm and she stopped seeing the funny side of being woken by the sound of me singing 'Living On A Prayer'. Looking back I'm amazed she put up with me for 6 years after what must have been a torturous first 6 months. All down to my air guitar skills I think.

Day 26 - A song that you can play on an instrument: Bowie 'Diamond Dogs'

I can play the cowbell part of Diamond Dogs better the Will Ferrell can play 'Don't Fear The Reaper'

Day 24 - A song to be played at your funeral: The Smiths 'Vicar In A Tutu'

'I was minding my business, lifting some lead off the roof of the Holy Name church'

Wow - Can't believe I got to Day 24 without a Smiths track.

The Holy Name Church name checked in the song was where I was christened so I imagine it will be the place of my departure too. Hope so, it's a lovely gaff.

It's just a brilliant song, one that springs to mind every time someone paints The Smiths as doom merchants. I love it. It sums up a lot of what was so good about Moz as a song writer, filled with humour and a brilliant rallying cry for anyone who sees themselves as being a little bit different. He encouraged people to celebrate their differences, whether it was wearing your NHS glasses with pride or swinging your hearing aid as you danced. It was an ethos that I took into clubland when I stared running my own club night because 'outsiders' and 'underdogs' and 'the different' were always more interesting 'the beautiful' and 'the glamorous'.

'A vicar in a tutu. He's not strange. He just wants to live his life this way''

Clubland was a pretty shallow place to work. There is no getting away from that. Always looking to do something different running my own club allowed me to create a safe place for people to celebrate their differences and express themselves however they wished. It wasn't a gay club and it wasn't a straight club. It was a club for the miss-shapes of the world - a safe haven for the kind of people the rest of clubland would rather stayed at home. We went out of our way to make 'the different' feel special. It was a club where you could wear a dress if you fancied it because no one would bat an eyelid. It was the kind of place where pensioners would star in our fashion shows, where shy people could come out of their shell and the confused could experiment with their sexuality without fear.

I remember doing a pirate themed party and used Adam Ant on the poster with the strap line 'Ridicule is nothing to be scared of'. Typical daftness but an amazing party. The following week a regular who suffered from Vitiligo (a condition that causes white patches on the skin and in the hair) turned up proudly showing off his new tattoo. It read 'Ridicule is nothing to be scared of'. I'd empowered him to feel confident about himself, to celebrate his differences via the power of an Adam Ant lyric. Who'd have thought it? It was then that I realised the power of my position and how even the most petty things can speak volumes to those looking for something to believe in.