One evening this week, I had one of the strangest conversations I’ve had in a good few years. The basis of it was a feature in a local council bulletin which promoted the use of local shops in the form of a “Buy-Local Campaign”. The up-shot of this was that the local council were trying to encourage local people to spend their money in local shops in the spirit of building a mutually supportive and co-operative community (within a “credit-crunch”).

A friend of mine who runs a local music shop emailed the publication to express (within a sensible, intelligent, fair, and balanced argument) how much he considered this article to be hypocritical, as the local authority (from which he accepts up to 8 work experience pupils a year) never ask him to even offer a quote for projects or when they want to buy instruments, and that they take their business elsewhere.

A disgruntled local public sector worker (whom I respect and undertake some teaching work for) shared with me how ridiculous they felt this email was, and didn’t consider it even necessary to respond to, taking strong exception to the fact that they had been asked (by the local council) to respond to such an argument. This conversation brought out my own personal feelings towards this matter, and led me to share my own thoughts on the fact that I was never asked to record or produce anything beyond small scale recordings for the local authority. The response to this (within the conversation) was to be told to my face “I’m never going to ask you to record my music ensemble”, “you can’t do that Nik”, “I’ll call in some specialists”. Naturally I refuted this claim, stood my ground, and logically argued that this was an assumption based on nothing tangible but I later considered that such a logical argument in the face of such crass ignorance was never going to work. Where an assumption has been made based on nothing, I was never going to successfully argue a point logically. Logic had been discarded at the outset of the conversation. The initial point that the local public sector money wasn’t being spent with local businesses (or indeed, a business run by a person who had invested a lot of time and commitment to the local authority) was absolutely lost at this point. This led me to ask me two, very serious questions which had much furthur reaching implications than the immediate conversation:

How is this kind of deeply embedded belief formed?

How are these deeply embedded beliefs ever surmounted?

Through my studio (The Audio Design Workshop), I’ve been asked to record and produce a variety of projects over the years by this person, for and on behalf of the local authority. I’ve made them aware of all the things I can offer, but I’m still looked upon as the person to call for small jobs, never a bigger or more substantial project. Ironically, the next project I’m going to record is a large scale work with a large scale budget which most probably eclipses the annual budget that the “nameless” public sector worker has to play with! I'm offered this kind of work because I only ever demand the highest standards of myself. The quality and consistency of my work is something of which I am proud, and examples of the recordings I have made are available to anyone who may express an interest, all produced to the highest standards possible. My studio is equipped with the latest and highest standard of recording equipment available, and I’m regularly consulted by a number of industry professionals on a number of production and recording matters. Aside from this simple and irrefutable fact, why would I claim that I could undertake any work that I couldn’t back up to a person for whom I already undertake other work? Why, under any circumstance, would I wish to compromise the work that I already do by claiming that I could do something that I couldn’t back up? I guess when I’m talking to someone who has opinions based on nothing but unfounded assumption; this is not a question which actually applies. “The way things are”, has already been decided.