Why Creatives are Cross

 It has always been this way in this country. Creative industries or persuits are treated as a dirty little secret. Never confess that they contribute to the economy. Never encourage.

It is a bizarre approach and one that doesn’t really make sense. When I was 14 I passed grade 8 flute. I enjoyed playing, it made me happy. It made people who listened happy. It might have made sense to encourage that line of career development. This didn’t happen. I was told that I was too clever to waste my time on music. I was told that it was a nice little hobby to have but that I’d never make a living from it. I asked my flute teacher if you were a failure if you taught. He said, “Those that can do and those that want to eat teach. It can be the same thing.” I didn’t really understand. Although I took the careers advice seriously it is quite something that I have made most of my living through music.

When I was at school you couldn’t get a grant for continuing study in Art, Music, Drama or Dance. If you wanted to study these things then you had to self fund. The cutting of grants and making students take out loans has, weirdly, improved the situation for creatives.

Because the arts are treated as a dirty secret there are no secure jobs, pay structures or career development paths for creative people. Therefore, people who go into them find other ways to eat. Sometimes that’s teaching but it might be cleaning, working in a shop, waitressing or care work.  This is how people in these industries survive in normal times.

Now that there’s a virus that thrives on fun these industries have suddenly become not only a dirty secret but also dangerous. Never mind that everyone got through lockdown by making Art with Grayson Perry, watching David Tennent and Michael Sheen’s Staged, playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow while the neighbours clapped and banged wooden spoons on pans. 

It just feels really unfair to people, who have always been forgotten about, to be told that they will have to find their own way through this when government decisions are not allowing them to work. A government who is not prepared to save these industries when they have done nothing wrong  but are more than happy to save banks when they committed fraud and award themselves a £3000 a year pay rise is unjust.

Luckily, the government dropped a careers questionnaire online to help people decided what they could do if their current line of work became unviable. This has caused much amusement. The interesting thing is that it told me I should be a classical musician, although, weirdly, it didn’t ask me if I could play an instrument or even if I knew what a Bach Motet was.

I love the way that it implies there is a pay scale. It might work if they labelled the ends ‘lucky’ and ‘unlucky’. I wonder where Lang Lang might sit on that scale. I’m also not too sure about the working hours. Are they including practice time?