Future Bubblers is an expansion of the Gilles Peterson and Brownswood Music ethos. It’s a talent discovery and development idea put together in collaboration with Arts Council England, with a focus on making in-roads into new areas, geographically and musically across England.
Amy Frenchum is the Events Manager and Special Projects at Brownswood Music, and Worldwide Project Manager at Future Bubblers
What issue were you aiming to address with Future Bubblers?
At Brownswood we really wanted to focus on the grey no-man’s-land area between ‘unsigned’ and ‘signed’ and look at how we could develop talent outside of London. We nurture little music communities all around the country and we want to change the idea that you need to move to London to survive and thrive.
We’ve swerved the ‘traditional’ music education models a bit and done things our own way. We try and give new artists the opportunity to learn through experience and develop their own unique journeys rather than trying teach a specific approach – very few people have a linear route into the industry, there’s no A to B pathway.
How have you benefited from having young talent involved?
We’d never accessed public funding before and it was a bit daunting, but we had great support from specific people and we’ve managed to stay true to what we wanted to achieve - we’ve done it in our way, with our own energy.
Future Bubblers has been such an enlightening and rewarding project to work on, and it’s been so liberating as well. It’s completely free of any commercial pressure enabling us to take such exciting creative risks. It’s also just so wholesome to work with artists that are not jaded by the industry and still think anything is possible, genuine talent only develops if we can protect that and nurture it.
What would you recommend to other organisations who are in the same position you were when you were starting out?
It’s so important for businesses to stop and think. Even if you’re happy with your present business model you still need to make space to reflect and think about the future. Who are the people investing in the artists and workforce you might work with tomorrow? We wanted to be active in developing those people, not just waiting for them to fall into our lap.
It’s all well and good having talent development programmes creating a new generation of creative, forward-thinking, ground-breaking artists, but if the same progression isn’t happening in the workforces of music businesses, we’re storing up huge problems for ourselves as an industry.