George Musgrave – författare

Stream PodcastGrant Hutchison (Frightened Rabbit):‘This book should be mandatory reading for every label, booking agent, manager and tour manager in the business of music and touring so we can all better understand what’s really involved in living the life of a professional musician and the role we all have in making that life as liveable as possible’Tim Shiel (Double J/Triple J Radio, Australia):‘The most important book I’ve ever read about music’‘An eye-opening must read’ ****Shaun Ryder (Happy Mondays): ‘Holding on to your mental health in this pressured environment is so important and at times so very difficult, I know that all too well. This book lays bare what it is like to live for your music and how it can feel to be a musician today’The Wire magazine:‘Poses uncomfortable questions…[and] sheds light on complex issues with compelling thoroughness’‘Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally-Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health’ Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer & Chair of the Ivor’s Academy):‘In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the well-being music brings to society and the well-being of those who create. It's a much needed reality-check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist’Adam Ficek (Psychotherapist [Music and Mind]/BabyShambles):‘A critical and timely book’Joe Muggs (DJ, Promoter, Journalist [Guardian, Telegraph, FACT, Mixmag, The Wire]):‘The best guide to what being a musician, and what "the music industry" actually are that I can remember reading’Andreea Magdalina (Founder of shesaid.so):‘This book is extremely important....The pandemic is forcing our industry to reinvent itself, once again, and this book is a call to ensure these new systems are fairer for everyone and that they foster a healthier lifestyle’It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.

Stream PodcastGrant Hutchison (Frightened Rabbit):‘This book should be mandatory reading for every label, booking agent, manager and tour manager in the business of music and touring so we can all better understand what’s really involved in living the life of a professional musician and the role we all have in making that life as liveable as possible’Tim Shiel (Double J/Triple J Radio, Australia):‘The most important book I’ve ever read about music’‘An eye-opening must read’ ****Shaun Ryder (Happy Mondays): ‘Holding on to your mental health in this pressured environment is so important and at times so very difficult, I know that all too well. This book lays bare what it is like to live for your music and how it can feel to be a musician today’The Wire magazine:‘Poses uncomfortable questions…[and] sheds light on complex issues with compelling thoroughness’‘Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally-Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health’ Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer & Chair of the Ivor’s Academy):‘In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the well-being music brings to society and the well-being of those who create. It's a much needed reality-check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist’Adam Ficek (Psychotherapist [Music and Mind]/BabyShambles):‘A critical and timely book’Joe Muggs (DJ, Promoter, Journalist [Guardian, Telegraph, FACT, Mixmag, The Wire]):‘The best guide to what being a musician, and what "the music industry" actually are that I can remember reading’Andreea Magdalina (Founder of shesaid.so):‘This book is extremely important....The pandemic is forcing our industry to reinvent itself, once again, and this book is a call to ensure these new systems are fairer for everyone and that they foster a healthier lifestyle’It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.

An exploration of the much-derided English suburbs through rap music.There are many different Englands. From the much-romanticized rolling countryside, to the cosmopolitanism of the inner cities (embraced by some as progressive, multicultural enlightenment and derided by others as the playground of a self-righteous metropolitan elite), or the disparagingly named "left behind" communities which, post-Brexit, have so interested political parties and pundits, demographers and statisticians.But there is also an England no one cares about. The England of semi-detached houses and clean driveways for multiple cars devotedly washed on Sundays, of "twitching curtains" and Laura Ashley sofas; of cul-de-sacs to nowhere and exaggerated accents; of late night drives to petrol stations on A roads, fake IDs tested in Harvesters, and faded tracksuits and over-gelled hair in Toby Carverys; of questionable hash from a "mate of a mate" and two-litre bottles of White Lightning from Budgens consumed in a kids playground. Much derided. Unglamorous, ordinary; cultural vacuity and small "c" conservatism. A hodgepodge. An—apparently—middling, middle-of-the-road middle-England of middle-class middle-mindedness. Part poetry anthology, part academic study into placemaking, and part autoethnography, The England No One Cares About innovatively brings together academic discussions of the ethnographic potential of lyrics, scholastic representations of suburbia, and thematic analysis to explore how rap music can illuminate the experiences of young men growing up in suburbia. This takes place by exploring the author’s own annotated lyrics from his career as a musician known as Context where he was referred to by the BBC as "Middle England’s Poet Laureate."