Like many musicians, teaching has been a way of paying the rent when work is thin on the ground. When I was 21 and living penniless in Cambridge (not as a student but as a recently-fired bus conductor), I began giving private guitar lessons. Moving back to London, I continued teaching guitar at a music shop in Sutton, Surrey.
In 1979 I started teaching beginners guitar at Goldsmiths College in their Adult Studies Department (an academically posh term for Evening Classes). The job was for three months and I stayed for six years, by which time I had taught just about every instrument, at every level and style of music there was. Sometimes I was just a page ahead of the students; sometimes a few pages behind them. One day they suggested I became a permanent staff member. I had just had my first play produced (Blues for Railton) and had received a royalty cheque for £240. Armed with this sign of my undoubted future wealth and weighing it up against the job offer, I resigned immediately from Goldsmiths. I have been reasonably poor ever since.
Fast-forward 30 years and I moved to Sydney, knowing hardly anyone and trying to find my way as a composer/director again. Teaching rode to the rescue once more and so for two years I worked in the composition department of The Australian Institute of Music (AIM). Here, for about a year in their degree programme, I taught song writing, lyrics, production and composition; I also held tutorials and gave occasional masterclasses in musical theatre.
Also, in Sydney there is a rather wonderful young people’s arts company that was called BYDS when I worked for them and is now called Outloud. With BYDS and Sydney Story Factory, I put together a project called Root & Branch, which ran for two years from 2017-18 and put writers, actors and other theatre artists with local schools to produce scripts written by young people and performed to the highest standards by professional artists.
This was a most excellent mix of the artistic and the educational; young people (9-10 years old and 15-16 years old) wrote stories, playscripts and poems under the mentorship of professional actors, writers, retired teachers. At the end of each term (4 terms per year) I would draw together all the work and create a production; so in the two years we had eight productions, all at Bankstown Arts Centre. Some were in the theatre, or in promenade form around the arts centre; some were recorded as ‘podcast’ stories; one was a filmed talking-heads project. The basic rule was that, having worked with the students to produce the best work they could, we adults were not to censor the writing; if there was a story about an evil cabbage in an intergalactic war with a mad scientist (and there was…), we had to stage it as the author intended. This of course brought the most wonderful challenges for the performers.
