The Monthly talks to Beyond Skin’s, Darren Ferguson, about the 20th anniversary of the peace-building organisation – Part 1 – One World and Beyond Skin

What were you doing before you set up Beyond Skin?

I was a musician, I taught piano and worked for Concern Worldwide. I also played in rock bands, and worked as a session musician. I was signed to a record label and I even produced my own album. That was in 2001 and the album was called “Arrhythmia” which was put out by Red Records, sadly, they are no longer with us, and I produced it myself. The album had lots of sampling of music and sounds from around the world. There were some very good musicians on that album, like Ursula Burns for example.

And at this time were you listening to Word Music?

I was moving towards listening to different sorts of music and you had to search for it. There wasn’t much in the charts, but if you made the effort you would find material from all around the world, and I did like different types of music, music beyond what you could hear in the charts or on the radio.

What made you set up Beyond Skin?

We set up in 2004. The previous year, 2003, Belfast made the international headlines as the “Race Hate Capital of Europe” and as someone who was born in Belfast, that wasn’t a proud moment.

I’m a musician, I was involved in aid work and I had seen how you could link music and the arts together to achieve something. From there, I was inspired by a film called “1 Giant Leap”, produced by Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman, who travelled the world to look at what connected us as humans. Music, storytelling and art was the narrative.

I was also inspired by Peter Gabriel who was using his platform as a professional artist to do things for Amnesty International. I was interested in Nitin Sawhney’s album which is where we got the name of the organisation from.

The Factory Records story intrigued me, and there was the Hypgnosis Art Team and the kind of the art work that they developed for album covers. There was a sense of mixing a kind of Punk attitude with peacebuilding. We just wanted to shake things up a bit because sometimes peacebuilding can be a little boring and we wanted to do things in a different way, a more creative way.

What happens then?

I went to the Belfast City Council to meet Caroline Wilson who was the Good Relations Officer at the time, and said that we needed to show the film and get the film-makers over. That’s how naïve I was. I just bounced in and made these suggestions. She said that the Council couldn’t fund an individual. That what I needed to do was to set up an organisation or partner with someone else.

I set up Beyond Skin really just to facilitate the showing of the film. We ran the film, we got the film-makers over and then we got 12 musicians over to perform at the Conor Hall, which is no longer there as well. It was in the Arts College. We organised a week-long series of events.

And you keep things going after that?

After that I thought we need to keep things going, and that we should do our own Giant Leap project, but we didn’t need to travel all over the world because, by that time, lots of people had come to Belfast to live.

We hired a recording studio run by the McPeake family, a famous Irish traditional music group; Francie McPeake the 4th helped us produce the album. We got some funding and we hired the studio over the summer of that year.

Then things developed by word of mouth. You might meet a Polish saxophonist and they might know another musician in the call- centre where they worked. Someone else would know a Venezuelan percussionist. That’s how things were back then. And once we recorded and then launched the album, it was called The Motion Project, we were inundated with phone calls asking if the band could come to play at events, at schools and community groups. They were wanted for workshops and concerts.

That was when you developed the IME?

People would ring us up to do a workshop because there was no one else doing diversity education through music. At the time the term ‘workshop’ didn’t excite me so I would say that we didn’t really do workshops, we do IME’s, (Interactive Musical Experiences), high energy, improvised musical experiences, where the kids or audience could go wild and become part of the band.

We needed to be able to get to a school or a community centre and set up quickly and get going, often with different people each time, and so what we did needed to work a certain way, and it had to make an impact. And we certainly did that.

That worked really well and that went from 2005 through to 2013. At one point The Motion Project was so big that everyone thought it was a separate organisation. Eventually we got rid of the name and kept everything under Beyond Skin, but that approach really became what Beyond Skin was known for.

And it was always about bringing people together through music and art and connecting people from different social backgrounds, religions, race, and abilities.

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New Belfast Community Arts Initiative trading as Community Arts Partnership is a registered charity (XR 36570) and a company limited by guarantee (Northern Ireland NI 37645).Registered with The Charity Commission as New Belfast Community Arts Initiative - NIC105169.