Worth and Value

When I lived in Edinburgh, a sculptor friend and I conducted an experiment.

They worked in bronze which is the oldest form of sculpting and the most enduring, stone apart.

One Saturday, we took his latest pieces up to Princes Street Gardens, where tourists and rats fight pigeons over space.

This took some doing as his latest piece was a hooded falcon couched on a falconer’s gloved fist and an osprey alighting on a branch. Although the branch was made of fantastically sea-bleached driftwood salvaged from the beach at Oban on the West Coast, the two birds and the falconer’s glove were rendered in solid bronze.

I don’t know what you know about bronze. I have engineers in the family from a time when to be an engineer meant hitting recalitrant lumps of metal very hard with other recalitrant lumps of metal, or heating them up and trying not to die while pouring them from crucibles the size of houses into molds. So I can tell you that bronze is an alloy, and that it’s highly ductile (which is why it was so popular as a sculptor’s material: it captures every detail, including the thumprints of the careless sculptor). It’s somewhat brittle, although less than cast iron, and it oxidises, which means its outer layer forms a patina, and this patina protects and prevents the inner material from oxidising. This latter means it endures - which is why we have bronze sculptures from the fourth millennia BC still around.

It’s also heavy, like most metals when they’re in a decent size lump.

Getting set up in the gardens took a car, some swearing, a bit of sweat and quite a bit of heavy lifting. A peregrine falcon in flight is a song of speed and acceleration, coming down out of a clear blue sky like a bolt of winged lightning. Cast in bronze, however, it’s just a very heavy object.

Once set up, we spent a full day trying to give both pieces away to passers-by, filming our efforts as part of an installation.

The day was like something out of Monty Python - the unfunny bits that don’t land but that tell you more about Britain than the funny bits:

Hullo. Would you like a sculpture.

A what?

A sculpture. Either one of these (indicates birds). My friend here made them. He’s a recognised artist.

(Unlike most people who claim to be artists, he actually was one, by which I mean he made his living at it.)

Would I like a sculpture?

What’s wrong with them?

Nothing. Lost wax cast bronze. Pick one. Take both if you want.

What’s the catch?

There is no catch.

You’re having me on.

No. Yours if you want it. If you don’t want to carry it home, we’ll even deliver it to your address.

A sculpture?

A sculpture. Two.

Free?

Absolutely. Both of them.

What’s wrong with them?

This is a truncated and compressed version of the conversations that we had with the passers-by who stopped to talk to us. They uniformly ended with them walking away, usually casting suspicious glances back at us. But even this was a more positive response than 95% of the people we tried to give away the sculptures to. They didn’t bother stopping, most didn’t even reply to our ‘Good Mornings.’ They just glanced at us and kept walking, mouths tight.

After a long day with no takers we packed the silently glowering falcon, dreaming of endless skies with no hood and no jesses, and the osprey, forever landing on his driftwood branch with all of the barrelling power of an apex predator back in the car, took them back to the studio, and walked together down to a pub called The Shore on Leith Water in the early evening sunset. I had a gig to play - Saturday night saw The Shore entertaining Edinburgh’s best traditional musicians, and I was the non-traditional guitarist soaking it all up like a sponge and learning about DADGAD. We ordered a pint of Guinness each and took a mouthful before speaking.

And there we have it.

There we have it.

We’d had a theory that people pay for what is perceived as valuable - or to put it another way, if you offer to give something away for nothing, people won’t value it, but if you slap a large price tag on it, people will pay it because it must be worth it.

And we’d just fairly conclusively proved our point.

Both sculptures went for £40,000 each (in 1999) and are now part of the Royal Collection.

And we’d tried to give them away for nothing on the busiest day of the week in a city supposed to know art and its value. Even if you knew nothing about art but something about cold hard cash, you could have taken them for scrap and got a couple of grand out of them.

£80,000.

In 1999.

Now, as part of the Royal Collection?

This wasn’t us being arses. It wasn’t a situationist stunt. We weren’t going to say ‘No, we were only joking’ if anyone claimed them. If anyone had said ‘Okay then. I’ll take them’ we had sworn to each other that we’d nod, shake hands on the deal and help them get it to their car. It would have been a massive financial loss, of course, but we were absolutely convinced that our ideas about worth and value would be proved right.

And they were.

The point of this story was not to unfurl an anecdote about an adventurous and interesting past.

We all have one of those.

As Songs For Separation goes out into the world for people to say yea or nay to and I move on to the next thing, it was to explain and explore why I’ve eschewed the current model of the music business. This says you release your work everywhere all at once and if you’re good enough and become big enough and / or lucky enough, the theory behind fractionation will reward you.

This is so much rubbish.

Fractionation didn’t work when they introduced it in Higher Education and Further Education and as the ‘gig’ culture in the UK and it doesn’t work for music. Then, lecturers / teachers / workers were given ‘fractionated’ contracts, which meant that they worked a specified number of days / hours a week, or were paid specifically to deliver a particular module.

The realities of the job meant that if you were on a three-day fractionated contract you ended up doing another two days of work - because it was the only way to deliver what the job required from a professional standpoint. Paid for three days, worked a full week - management saw them coming, but then management were never stupid enough to put themselves on fractionated contracts. As for an Associate Lecturer or Teacher, well, £40-00 an hour might seem like a lot when it’s first offered to you, but that’s for one lecture (which takes eight hours to prepare), and a two-hour seminar (which takes a minimum of four hours to prepare), and doesn’t cover primary or secondary marking - which at 350 scripts, all requiring detailed adherence to the marking scheme and feedback comes in at …

Well, by the time you’ve worked out your hourly rate, your Russell Group Uni is using zero-hours labour to deliver award-winning degree courses at an hourly rate well below national minimum wage. Lecturers on permie contracts aren’t doing the hard yards. It’s the muppets doing PhD’s who think that if they show willing, they’ll eventually be the ones on a permie contract who are working themselves cross-eyed.

No wonder most PhD’s are started but never finished.

Fractionation doesn’t work in industry.

And it doesn’t work in music.

Today, as I type, 120,000 new songs have been uploaded to platforms on the internet. Most will never be heard. Most will never make the people who spent time and money and hopes and dreams recording them any return.

Yeah, but it’s not about the money. It’s about the art …

There are enough cautionary tales from music history (and also the history of publishing, film, the arts and business) to know that everyone who ever heard that and believed it ended up poor.

If you go into music, or writing, or acting or whatever because you want people to tell you you’re wonderful and special (and most in those trades go into it for precisely those reasons…), stop. Go and find a really good counsellor - not one of the ones calling themself a counsellor on the internet and really drill down into why you have such a fragile self-image and such low self-esteem that you cannot function without a stranger telling you that you’re wonderful.

If you go into music, or writing, or acting or whatever because you have something to say, please … shut up. The world is now full of people with something to say saying it all over social media - and most of them don’t know that they’re spectacularly unqualfied to be commenting on what they’re commenting on. You’ll be of more service to humanity staying quiet. People with something to say have caused more of the world’s ills than any others from Caesar to Hitler and covering all madmen, religious fundamentalists, do-gooders and administrators in-between.

If you go into music, or writing, or acting or whatever because you’re of a particular psychological trait (clever, but clever enough to know that you aren’t clever enough; praised for being ‘artistic’ at home by parents who don’t have enough time to actually engage with you properly, sit you down and tell you a few home truths about the world; and you think, like a Pete Doherty, that a few poorly-digested literary references and an even more poorly-digested belief in the artist as a romantic figure should mark you out for special treatment by the world), see above. Pete Doherty is not a romantic figure. He’s a drug addict. The Libertines succeeded in spite of his behaviour, not because of it; and playing and singing out of tune is not a corollary for passion. It just means you’re bad at your job.

If you go into music, or writing, or acting or whatever because you realise it’s a skill and a trade like any other and therefore there’ll always be some money to be made in return for practising your skill or trade or helping others practise theirs … well, you’re on the right lines. Movie stars come and go. Camera men and Grips and Gaffers turn up for work on time every day, double bubble after five, it’s going to cost you for shooting at night and / or weekends.

Me? I do it because I can and I want to. I’d love everyone to love it but if it gets to the point where you’re listening to something I’ve recorded or reading something I’ve written I already thought it was worth starting and more importantly worth finishing. I’ll be happy and charmed if you get something from it, but if you don’t, if it’s out there, I’ve already signed off on it.

Songs For Separation is like my friend’s sculptures. Their value lies in the fact that he was a recognised artist, using skills it took him decades to develop that can’t be easily replicated by a computer or a machine, working in a difficult and demanding medium (bronze) and that there will only ever be one of each. Their worth now lies in all of these things plus the fact that the Royal Family have bought them.

In other words, the less there is of something, or the higher the price tag people put on something, the more (some) people will value it - something that holds good for everything from illegal drugs (prices go up when availability is low) to gold, diamonds, luxury goods and beyond. At some point, the last wild tiger will be shot and killed precisely because it is the last of its kind and some Chinese businessman will pay through the nose for the poor furry sod as medicine to ‘make him strong.’

One of the reasons that rock n’ roll took off in the fifties was because the BBC and other British institutions had a tight stranglehold on what they felt was representative culture plus the fact that there were equally tight controls on the import of luxury goods - including musical equipment and records. Music was The Light Programme, Listen With Mother, and the theme tune to The Archers - an everyday tale of land millionaires that has jumped so many sharks during its run that the World Wildlife Fund are taking the residents of Home Farm in for questioning. If you want to hear the genuine raw sound of the fifties, even into the sixties, you had to know someone with the record. Bland, pappy music was what you heard on the radio. Mantovani and Anglicised and therefore anaemic versions of popular hits. Records, though, were events. Elvis might have gone into the Army and been neutered, and Jerry Lee might have married his 13-year old cousin and been marginalised, and ‘Rock around the Clock’ might have been recorded by someone old enough to be the father of the teenagers listening to it, but when you heard it, you knew it was the real-I-am.

And it was raw, illicit and scarce - which is all you need to make people want more of it.

(See the above point about drugs, which drug dealers know all too well).

People don’t value music anymore because it costs them nothing. Streaming services give it to them, essentially for free. That I was releasing a new album wasn’t met with Oh, where can I get it but send me a link and then just plain bemusement when I said I was only doing a physical release.

But while it isn’t in the Royal Collection and it isn’t made of bronze, there will only ever be forty copies of the original release of Songs for Separation.

Because I value myself, and what I do has worth.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The Origin(al) Stories Journal was launched to track the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind decision here. It has continued as a collection of posts drawn from my personal diaries, project journals, and process notes. Showing how I’ve found a path to doing something, often via experimentation, missteps, false trails and blind alleys, these posts do not offer definitive insights into any of the projects on The Landing Stage. They are just postcards from the ongoing journey.

Have a great day, be a positive force, and tell those you love that you love them.