I Wanna Jump Like Dee Dee

You know those times when you’re ambling along – disconnected from the real world with your headphones on as is the norm these days – trying to ignore the gazillion things that run through your brain every minute, forgetting to look both ways, behind you, above you, before you cross the road, and then some music comes on and stops you dead in your tracks – hopefully when you’ve crossed the road! –...

It’s fascinating to look at the entire creative evolution of an artist - how they started and where they are now. Of course, looking at what’s been going on in their life, can feel quite invasive and voyeuristic, like prying into the inner sanctum of life, but hey, all in the name of research!  Music and art (although I’m by no means an expert) often feels subjective and open to interpretation and...

Way back when, maybe 8-9 years ago, I had been researching what sort of skills humans would need for the future, given that we were experiencing big changes in technology, demographics, stuff like that, the sort of things that would affect the world of work. One skill or attribute, whatever you want to call it, was adaptability. Workers were, and still are, being asked to do many different things...

I think gravitas is a rare but really important attribute to have, especially when the world is so fucked up, chaotic, volatile, reactionary. Gravitas. Presence. I wanna be around people that have the ability to give off positive energy in this way. Scott Osment is one of the most blistering, powerful and accurate drummers I have seen. I’ve seen him in two very different bands – Deaf Club and Glas...

Nostalgia is something that I ponder a lot as I get older – I’ve got way too much time on my hands. But it’s such a layered emotion of experiences, some vivid, some half-forgotten and some probably embellished. The band you never got to see live. A long-lost lover. How good you didn’t look in that army surplus jacket. Summer road trips. Friends lost. That gig that ended in a riot.  I’m gonna read...

Over the last 10 years, I’ve been undergoing a - for me at least - massive transformation and I’ve been thinking a lot about what identity means – the identity that I present to the public, the identity that I present to my friends and family and the identity that I present to myself. With that comes a need to face yourself if you are going to find freedom.  Our brains like to compartmentalise thi...

So here’s a couple of questions for y'all…how much do you think improvisation, self-consciousness and self-belief are connected? How do you get into that flow state where inhibitions are shed? And can an improv state of mind be a skill that can be learned? I’m asking this with a bit of self interest as I have two practices that I’ve approached from completely different directions – cello and...

It’s fascinating to look back at the catalogue of band like Crocodiles , not that there are too many bands like Crocodiles.  There’s the consistency – the tunes, the hooks, the harmonies, the feeling of escapism There’s the unexpected – the sonic departures, the reinvention, how they make a new Crocodiles record always sound…just kinda Crocodiles… how they throw you an entire record of covers that...

The opening paragraph of Justin Pearson’s first book “From The Graveyard of the Arousal Industry” tells a story of how, when his mother had just given birth to him, that another new mother asked if she wanted to swap babies – her Frank for Justin.  I’m not sure that JP himself is sure of the truth of that story, but hey, we live in a world where fewer and fewer people, certainly in government, med...

https://www.iwannajumplikedeedee.com I Wanna Jump Like Dee Dee is the music podcast that does music interviews differently. Giles Sibbald talks to musicians, DJ’s and producers about how they use an experimental mindset in every part of their lives. - brought to you from the mothership of the experimental mindset™ - cover art by Giles Sibbald  - doodle logo and art by Tide Adesanya, Coppie and Pas...

I remember starting an Arts Lab a few years ago – just before Covid started actually - with a group of people here in London, based roughly around the counter-culture arts labs of the 1960’s – Jim Haynes was the main guy behind that movement. The idea was to bring together people who wanted to challenge the corporitisation of the arts, draw, socialise, talk about culture, put on cultural events or...

Allen Saunders was an American writer and cartoonist who once said “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans”. It was later popularised by John Lennon in his song, Beautiful Boy. Saunders first said this in 1957 and I guess how I see this is that many of us still spend time planning ahead, creating goals and objectives, trying to weed out uncertainty, only for that uncertainty to...

Whilst conducting my meticulous research for Gail….I was taken back to 1980 - my year of transition that was painful, perplexing, exciting, scary – a tussle between my heavily Top of The Pops Top 40 oriented collection, my classical cello playing and a new, emerging, Through The Looking Glass world of punk, post-punk and hardcore.  Not easy bedfellows for 12 year old me, I can tell you. One of the...

Before I started this podcast, I was kinda rudderless. Didn’t know what I was doing with my life. When this idea came up, the feeling was “Who will want to listen to me talking about mindset, about my worldview, blah blah blah”… I was dragged into doing it…my self-confidence and self-belief were pretty low. I’ve talked to amazing artists, many of whom, with incredible bravery, bare the inner sanct...

Over the last few years, I’ve been heavily influenced by some of the work that my partner has been doing around decolonisation, particularly in the field of yoga.  It’s led me to think about how this applies to music and my own relationship to music.  I’ve realised that my own classical cello training from way back when, the exams I did, the framework that I was expected to adhere to, were a weste...

When I got into thinking how mindset and, in particular, how an experimental mindset was fundamental to navigating a complex and volatile world, I was intrigued with the way scientists approached their work – for example, not being tied to goals, or pre-determined outcomes and analysing the data from their experiments – and how this could be the blueprint for our own life journey – living your lif...

I’m always trying to work out why certain artists hit me as soon as I hear them. There are some that are a mystery as to why the fuck I like them. Like, why am I still in love with Anastasia’s Welcome To My Truth after all these years?  But I can tell you what I love about N8NOFACE's  @N8NOFACE music – it’s primal, raw, subversive, underground, heavy, manic, chaotic, stuttering, exciting, sur...

I’m really into this notion of music being your friend for life and how certain songs represent a particular point in your life, good or bad. There’s one song that sticks in my mind which represents such a dark time in my life. And now, looking back at it, I can see how much I’ve changed and sometimes it’s hard to play that song. I’ve played and sang other composer’s songs in front of people - let...

One of the pages on Leigh Heggarty's website is called “Me Me Me, it’s all about me”. A cursory look through this and the other pages would most clearly identify someone who has lived a substantial part of his life very much NOT promoting Me Me Me, rather being very self deprecating and perhaps uncomfortable talking about himself or what he has achieved in life. This all sounds very familiar...

As someone who has played the cello in my much more youthful days and is ineffectively trying to resurrect past glory, I fully appreciate Kishi Bashi's love of the violin and the way he uses that instrument in his compositions. You can literally hear it cascading through every release he has done – from the Room for Dream EP to the epic music and soundtrack for his film Omoiyari.    He is an...

I’ve long thought about our individual persona or personas and this idea of ever evolving identities …for example, people who have work and non-work personas: the arsehole in work, nice as pie out of work; the surprising competitive aggression at the work social bowling alley do, the extroverted party goer (ok, so there might be some substance impact for that one) – kinda like Henry the mild manne...

Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to work out why certain things in my life have turned out the way they have. Friendships has been a particular thing that’s been on my mind, in particular why I’ve tended to let some slide. I’ve had occasions where I’ve reconnected with lost friends and family and realised just how important they are. Having said that, I do think that the way we handle fri...

One of the things that I was looking at about 7-8 years ago was the growth of the term ‘multi-hyphenate’ and how, with us living longer lives (well, that was the case up to 2019, I think Covid has probably affected that a little), more people – and across all ages - were moving away from the stable job, linear career trajectory and into a more multi-hyphenate way of working which involves doing mo...

So, as hopefully my faithful and long suffering subscribers will know after 120 + episodes, the whole idea behind this podcast is about the importance of mindset and specifically how an experimental mindset can help us to navigate the world today, a world that is becoming more complex, more volatile, full of more and more contradictions and where outcomes are less and less predictable or certain....

I'm gonna keep this one brief. Stress Positions would have been in the list of identity shapers for 14 year old me. No question. They are hands down one of THE most potent and important bands right now. They will pulverise you with their musical and lyrical intensity. And in 30 years time, people will be talking about Stress Positions as they did - and still do - those pioneers of the 80s har...