How did you end up working with older people using music?
It happened very organically in here. This is actually my 16th year working for the Oh Yeah Music Centre and when I started, most of the work we did centred on younger people. I had worked for an NGO and that organisation had worked with younger people, so I had transferable skills and that was fine by me. But, as I started to look around to see what was available for older people as well as older musicians. I was an older musician myself, there really was very little on offer. Almost no support at all.
The background I had was working with marginalised people and I wanted to continue to do that, and I was thinking about the question of Dementia and how marginalised older people were in our society. I spoke to Stuart Bailie who was the CEO at that time, and Charlotte Dryden who was the Creative Director, and I asked them if we could develop a project, and they agreed to that as long as I could secure some funding. I got great support from both of them and that is how it all started.
You had Over the Hill Music Collective set up already at that time?
I had set up not long after starting to work at Oh Yeah what is now known as the OTH Music Collective and that worked primarily with musicians aiming to support older musicians to be able to write songs, get them recorded and also to find avenues to perform.
My role at the Oh Yeah Music Centre as Music and Older People Manager started a little before that then as well, and while there was a bit of an overlap, OTH didn’t work with people experiencing Dementia. It was, as I said, geared towards older musicians and older people who just liked music.
What about your work at the Oh Yeah Music Centre?
That was about working with people experiencing Dementia and working with their carers. There was a little bit of crossover, a bit of an overlap, and there were particular times when, after special consideration and a bit of negotiation, OTH did some work for the Oh Yeah Music Centre, this was with several OTH members who worked independently but had a wide range of experience.
How did you develop your skills in this area?
In the early days the work was mostly intuitive. I had been a musician for 30 years, I had worked with an NGO, had done development work with younger folk, so I already had a lot of skills. But mostly it was about talking to people, seeing what was needed, and this was especially so when we started working in Residential Centres.
I was working at the coal face and as I started to get more work in Day Centres and Residential Homes, some work came up with Community Arts Partnership and there was some training involved. So I received some training from the Alzheimer’s Society. But a lot of what I have learned has been experiential and working closely with Managers and care staff.
And was this through working on particular projects?
We started off with a project about the Second World War (In The Mood) and that came about from a story, which emerged from the Music Tour; at the time I was the host on the music tour bus, and it was about American soldiers coming over here and wanting to dance. And they actually broke the dance floor at the Ulster Hall. I thought there must be other great stories like that out there.
From there we developed a project which eventuated in a show at the Oh Yeah Music Centre which was a radio show. It had announcements about the war-time situation all the way through it, and there were dancers and interviews, there was drama, poetry and it worked out really well despite the fact that it was performed at the height of the flags protests.
Because of those protests, it was really hard for people to come to the show. There was chaos everywhere, and in the middle of that very tense period, locally, we put on this show about World War Two. It almost mirrored some of the hardships during the war I was very proud of that show.
And there were plenty of other projects (Maritime Blue notes was one) ; working on getting people to write plays, getting those plays performed by actors, and, as I said, many other activities over the years and that is how I developed my skills in this particular area.
