In 2002 I quit my job for NCCCAP over on Buckingham Street and took a break from community based work, I released the Doctor Millar album ‘Always Coming Home’ and a best of called ‘Tarzans Ambition’. After two years of touring I was broke and disheartened, and I had pneumonia.
I needed to go back to community based work, where at least I could make a living but I decided to change the way I engaged. This time instead of primarily simply facilitating peoples needs, I would become pro-actively creatively engaged in what I did and always make work that I personally found compelling.
Background
I began to look at art and musical models that might fit the needs of communities. The question I was asking was this: Was there a way to turn the limited performance experience and musical skill sets of the performers into a positive? So that the product wouldn't undermine the process, wouldn't sound like musical failure to the participant performers? To make something where the context would enhance the product.
I was already a fan of American minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Terry Reilly. I was also a huge fan of the band 'The Velvet Underground' and through them had heard of the composer la Monte Young a major influence on many of the main players in minimalism. I came across a quote from him that said “Minimalism is simply about making the most of what you have”.
In 2004, I was cycling through Ranelagh on my way to pick up my daughter from school and I saw my friend the percussionist Brian Fleming going the other way. We talked and he suggested that I might be interested in making contact with people who were calling themselves 'Tower Song' and were making pieces in Rialto. This culminated in me being part of the artist team there and I ended up working as musician in residence for Fatima Groups United, on and off for six years.
I used my new idea of using minimalism as a tool in all those pieces. Simple three note phrases, repetition, spartan use of chords created a haunting effect when applied to such moving topics as peoples complex feelings about the places they had lived their whole lives in.
Tower Songs Ballymun
The Project
We made some amazing and innovative work there, and although as usual, I ended up sick and penniless, the attention that work got, within the community sector, and academically, both nationally and internationally meant that from there on in when people needed a community music job, I'd get a call.
When Tower songs decided to engage with Ballymun residents, they needed someone to work with a group of older residents and I volunteered. It was an amazing and enlightening process. We often worked on the top floor of the last block standing taking tea breaks to stand on the balcony and look down over the city. Extraordinary. Similarly to the way I worked in Fatima, I asked questions in workshops that were very open ended and allowed me to identify dominant narratives among the group, one struck me as a great unsaid truth: these people had moved into Ballymun when it was still a country village. They had worked and raided their children there. To them, the towers that everyone else associated with Ballymun were a recent addition, they weren't Ballymun. One of the incredibly sad things about the projects I have done is that so many of the people I worked with are now gone. I was conscious that this unusual perspective on Ballymun was disappearing and when these few people passed on, this marginalised view of what Ballymun is, would be gone. That became the mission of the song.
I was commissioned by Towersongs, Cityarts, to engage with a group of older men and women in Ballymun and make a piece with them.
We wrote the piece in 'Hotel Ballymun' – The top floor apartment of the final block which became an art space - just before it was knocked down.