Episode 13 — Worldwide Washboard Registry, autistic art, rockets and zydeco
This episode is a three-part tour through autistic joy, corrugated metal and cosmic trumpet. Steve first talks with poet and artist Maddi Crease about her project Autistic Joy and how to make sound and storytelling that centre autistic listeners — from sensory-aware mixes to identity-first language and rejecting lazy stereotypes about neurodivergence.
Then it’s over to Louisiana and New Orleans with washboard player Alex Macdonald for an Entertaining Noises deep-dive into Zydeco, the washboard as an instrument and the Worldwide Washboard Registry; followed by London’s own space-trumpeter Robyn Rocket and her inclusive night Robyn’s Rocket at Cafe OTO, where disabled and non-disabled artists and audiences share the same adventurous, noisy room on purpose.
What we cover
Autistic Joy & sound design: Practical ways to make audio more accessible and joyful for autistic listeners, with Maddi Crease.
Neurodivergent storytelling: Why identity-first language matters and how sound can welcome or exclude.
Worldwide Washboard Registry: Alex Macdonald on becoming one of the very few professional washboard players and documenting the tribe.
Zydeco & washboard technique: From Clifton Chenier’s legacy to rubboards, spoons, duct tape and lock-tight grooves.
New Orleans realities: Bourbon Street vs Frenchmen Street, tips, tourists and survival as a working musician.
Robyn’s Rocket: Space trumpet, sensory tools, access riders and making experimental music nights genuinely inclusive.
Music as access tech: How rhythm, texture and volume become tools for communication across different brains and bodies.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pritty. I'm a musician, composer and performer from London. And this is my podcast, Steve Pritty on the origin of the pieces. Hello, Musically Curious folks, how are you doing? I hope you're well. Lovely to be back in your ears. Thanks very much for all the feedback. As always, for the last episode, we had, of course, the legendary Frank Turner. Frank Turner on the show last episode. If you don't know Frank Turner, he is an incredible and very, very successful singer-songwriter, I guess, former punk slash current, what would you call, folk punk artist, I guess, for one of the better description. Really fantastic performer, all-round good egg, and an absolute fountain of knowledge about UK hardcore, which is why I had him on the show, because we were talking about UK hardcore and I made a UK hardcore track with my friend John, which I played him. And if you haven't heard the episode, do go back and have a listen to hear what he thinks. Spoiler alert, mixed reviews. So thanks again to Frank. And of course I had the brilliant Ashlyn Parker from New Orleans, one of the most accomplished jazz musicians and trumpet players I've ever met in my life, working and living and educating in New Orleans. So go back and check out episode 12 if you haven't done that yet. Coming up on the show today, we have another very varied and jam packed episode. We have three guests on the show. Three seems like too many, especially from the point of view of editing them all together, but it's been a blast. They're all really fascinating folk with a lot of different insights and perspectives on music, on the different uses it has, why it's important, where it comes from, how we can make it from bits of household equipment, as you'll hear shortly. And today we've actually got a bit of an autism special. It is Autism Acceptance Month in April. I'm recording this in April, 2024. It's Autism Acceptance Month. I've been working with some fantastic autistic artists and musicians, including Robyn Stewart, AKA Robyn Rocket, who runs fascinating nights of music and performance at Cafe Oto in London. So that's coming up towards the end of the show. And another guest who I'll talk about shortly. But meanwhile, there's also quite a major diversion in the middle, back to New Orleans again, to talk to one of the world's foremost washboard players. That's right, the washboard. So we haven't had a kind of entertaining noises section on this show for a little while. If you're new to the show, that's where I get people to showcase their instruments, talk about their instruments, and kind of demonstrate how they work and what function they have in the musical universe. So stay tuned for that, an incredible washboard player all the way from the streets of New Orleans. But first, as I say, I have yet another guest, an incredible guest, who I have been working with on a project recently called Autistic Joy. So I'm Maddi Crease, and I'm a poet and an artist. I live and work in Essex. And we met because I'm running a project that's about a lot of lived experience to do with autism. I'm autistic myself, and came up with this project titled Autistic
Joy, which is a poetry project. Thinking about some of the less talked about sides of autism where things can be experienced in a really nice way, in a really positive way, in a unique way. Yeah, I guess for me, it became very quickly that autism is such a sensory thing. I wanted to make sure sound gave the right tone, so it gave a joyful tone. And I wanted to make sure it was something that people could audibly enjoy, especially given that a strand to the project is sound without visuals, that the film is one aspect to the project, but part of the project will be on a listening bench, things like that. So it was really important to me to kind of make sure, I guess, that the sound design was joyful, was clear, was accessible, so it wasn't too varied in the sense that someone wouldn't be in physical pain hearing it if they were autistic. So, when you say someone wouldn't be in physical pain hearing it, there's something you and I talked about quite a lot, right, about how to approach the sound design of it. So, as a non-autistic person myself, that was something that I don't normally have to consciously think about, I suppose. Having that extra consideration of, oh wait, this is a film by someone with autism for, well, for everyone, but particularly for people with autism as well. So, it's got to be really accessible for them. And so thinking about the accessibility from a kind of sonic point of view is a really interesting thing for me to do. And when we met, you talked a lot about how important that was and how to approach that. So, can you just expand on that a bit? What does that sound like for an autistic person? I guess for me working on this project, I was working throughout with a small focus group of my autistic peers. So, I kind of had a small demographic who were kind of telling me maybe perspectives that even I hadn't considered. And I really wanted to keep them kind of at the heart of the concepts. And so for that, I knew that I needed to make sure there weren't massive variations in sound, nothing too bassy, nothing too high- pitched. And I guess it's really interesting because I suppose, you know, in sound, neurotypical people, so people who aren't autistic or with another neurodivergent condition, might really experience a slight irritation if it sounds really high-pitched or whiny, or might be made jump in a horror movie when there's a loud noise. But I guess we kind of dial that up to 100 when you're autistic and have sensory needs. So, you know, it's all the things that you might notice on a very subtle kind of level, amplified. And of course, you know, there's new ones to that and there's changes to that. And people might find things difficult that others don't. And it's hard to kind of encompass a really pleasant experience for everyone all the time. But it was really, really important to me to make sure that some of these very clear to me and key things were kind of considered when we were recording sound. I was very conscious as a non-autistic person of writing the music for this and not being necessarily as aware as I should be about those sorts of things. And so having someone to help me through that and to consider that is really important for this project. But actually, I've also found it for my own kind of practice as a
musician and composer, I found it kind of really interesting thinking about the access, basically. Because often when you think about access as a performer or as an artist, you're thinking about wheelchair access or you're thinking about whether you need a trigger warning or any of those sorts of things. But thinking about sonic access is a kind of a new one on me, but a really important thing. Something that I've been very conscious of is when I'm working with you or working with other people with autism, what the language is, and we had a discussion about this, I think it was over lunch, wasn't it? Where it's like, okay, what's the, as much as there can ever be a right way of saying, like what's the right way to describe people with autism? Is it people with autism? Is it autistic people? So I guess for most autistic people, it is autistic people. And the main reason I found that certainly from other people's opinions has been that autism isn't something you're going to catch and it's not something you're going to cure. And so it becomes a part of a person's identity because, you know, this is going to be a part of them for life and it's not going to change. And it's also not an inherently entirely negative thing. And so we look at it, despite it being technically a medical condition, you know, it's still with the mind primarily. And so we look at it as part of our identity, I suppose. So then we use what's called identity first language, which is autistic person, whereas person first language, which is what's used kind of normally for me as well, because I work in mental health would be person with autism or person with depression. But the main kind of, I suppose, logic for why people tend to prefer autistic person is simply that it's not going anywhere and it is a part of me. And then similarly, there's things like high functioning, low functioning, people are thankfully starting to phase out of using these labels now, because the thing that happens with low functioning labels is that people get treated with less respect. They're low functioning, they're not paying attention, they're not focused, they're not with it, whatever you want to say. And what happens with high functioning labeled people is that they don't get the support they need, they're high functioning, so they don't need support, they're functioning basically really well. And so it's really interesting when you kind of strip those labels back and say, well, these are two people who are, you know, both are autistic, both have different needs, is that you actually get kind of that contrast of, yeah, you get acceptance, but you also get support needs met, you get kind of all the good stuff goes on with the shift in language, which is a really interesting kind of catalyst. And what you and I talked about is the difficulties around and the frustrations for you around people saying, oh, yeah, I'm a bit autistic, or oh, yeah, I'm a bit like that, or, you know, that sort of thing. And I just wondered if, because as a lot of musicians, and, you know, we all have it as it to a certain extent where there are some of those traits that I suppose are stereotypically associated with autistic people where you think, oh, well, their social functioning is a bit different from the rest of it. And a lot of those things do apply to musicians. But I thought you had a really interesting point on the day that we
had together where you was like, well, it's kind of a bit insulting to say everyone's a bit autistic, you know, so I wonder if you could just talk about that for a minute. You think of it on a factual level and autism as a brain type almost, you could say, you know, they haven't proven anything, they can't mark it per se, but we can see very clearly that this is something that is making people's brains, I suppose a lot of people say function differently or wired differently and that they're just different. So if that's the case, can you be a little bit different, but still not autistic? Or can you be autistic, but a bit normal? It doesn't work like that, you know. So autism is one of those things that is binary in the sense that you have it or you don't. But the autistic spectrum is kind of where that myth comes in. And people like to think of that, again, with the functionality labels, someone's very autistic or someone's not very autistic. And so, you know, with that being said, someone could then be a bit autistic, I suppose. Whereas in reality, the autism spectrum is kind of like this circle and it's got all these points coming out of different spikes. And so someone might have one spike that is, say, a social interaction in a really busy environment, and they might be really good at that. So that doesn't affect them much, it's a tiny spike. But they might be really sensitive to touch, so that's a massive spike. And so when you think about the spectrum that way, rather than not very to very, it kind of becomes a bit more personalised, but also kind of shifts that idea that, you know, you can be a bit autistic or you can be kind of autistic, you know. That's a really clear way of putting it. With musicians, a lot of us can be basically quite rude. It's because you do have to have a certain mindset to be able to lock yourself away in a practice room or whatever. And so a lot of the time you do hear musicians subscribe to say, oh, yeah, but they're, you know, we're all sort of a bit, a bit autistic. Whereas that's, that is not a fair thing to say, right? Like, our neurology is an enormous spectrum as a species, right? It's enormously, it's enormously diverse and we should recognise that much more, but we shouldn't necessarily use autism as a label for people who are, you know, able to lock themselves away in a room and be by themselves for hours or, you know, or people who are not very good socially. Like, there may be some, there may be autism there, but that's a, that's a kind of whole different category. Is that, is that right? Yeah, I'd say so. And I mean, I guess I've got a couple of points off of that. One of which is, it's not just an autism thing that we see this happening. I guess we see it with a lot of disability and maybe less blatantly, but someone might joke, even something stupid like, oh, I think I broke my back lifting that box. It's the most stupid example, but we know they didn't, and yet they're still saying it. Same as I think I'm a bit autistic. You kind of not, but you're still saying it. But also, the fact that I find a lot of creative people from the way I interact with them, and that my knowledge might be autistic, autistic people are very
creative. And that's kind of a reverse stereotype, I suppose, because a lot of autistic people were told, you're very rigid, you're very factual, and you're not very creative. But actually, when you think about it, like socially, we have to jump through hoops and work our brains in new ways constantly to try and understand what's going on, which takes a hell of a lot of creativity, you know. So maybe a lot of autistic people are creative, and vice versa, a lot of creative people are autistic. Not having a diagnosis doesn't mean it doesn't exist, you know. But again, it just really all speaks to this, like, what is a spectrum is neurodivergence, right? And there's no, there is, by the nature of who we are as a species, there is a kind of mean, there is an average down the center, I suppose. But really, probably more people than we have traditionally thought on some degree of that spectrum. But the point is that isn't the autism spectrum necessarily. It's just that people think incredibly differently. And the more we can understand that, the better, right? You know, and autistic people have a particular condition that makes them present in very particular ways. But I suppose, is it fair to say that, yeah, that the spectrum of kind of neurodivergence is very broad? Yeah, but yeah, but autism is a particular condition within that, that is a sort of subcategory of that breadth. Yeah. And I think when it comes to having a condition, it is binary, it is yes or no. However, in the way people present, it's definitely not a ones and zeros sort of thing. You know, there's lots of different formulations of how someone could come across because they're autistic, or they could have ADHD, dyspraxia, any other condition or anything else really that would change the way they come across. And sometimes these things interlap. I've had a lot of mental health difficulties for a very long time, personally, which I consider disabling. And so it's really interesting because this is probably the first project I've done where I've really dedicated some good time to it. That's an overly positive project where it's going, you know, these stereotypes we have all lean towards the negative. So now let's say something nice almost, you know, feels more right when it comes to autism than it does mental health. Because like I say, autism isn't going anywhere. I can be as negative or as positive as I want, and I'm still going to be autistic. So I'm a his or her try and find something, you know. The world is so bright with us in it. Listen, before we go, you must tell us where people can check out the project that you are leading on and that we've worked on together. Sure, so you can find me on Instagram or Facebook. It's Maddi Crease Poet. And then if you want to come along to the screening of Autistic Joy, then go to Eventbrite, filter the location to Southend Onsea in Essex, and search Autistic Joy. Yeah, and it's gonna be at some point in the future, it's gonna be available on YouTube and that kind of thing, right? So, yeah. All to be defined, but will definitely be somewhere, and I will keep people in the loop about that on my social media as well. Lovely, thanks so much Maddi, that's great.
Thank you. So thanks again to Maddi for that fascinating insight into autism and music and art. Do check out her work as she mentioned. But now it's time to head back over to New Orleans. Now, if you're new to the show, you should know that a few weeks ago, I was in New Orleans for a week or so, interviewing all manner of fascinating people. Do go back and check out some of the interviews we've had on the show. The full interviews, by the way, are available on my Patreon. You can sign up for either $1 or $5 a month, varying levels of benefits you get for those things. But there's all sorts of great benefits and also you help support the show. So if you're ever interested in hearing a bit more from these brilliant guests that I'm getting on the show, do go over there. There's also all the music that I record for the show is available there and all sorts of other stuff. As I said last episode, with that longer term, I'm trying to build a bit of a community. It's gonna be a hub where you can ask me questions, you can suggest things that I look at, people I talk to, that kind of thing. So head over to Patreon or just originofthepieces.com. It's all linked there. Anyway, I was over in New Orleans and checking out as much music as I could. Quite a lot of it I had booked in advance or I knew what was gonna happen, but also I know New Orleans, I know how it works. And I know that to be honest, there's only so much you can plan. And so it was with Alex because I was just walking along Bourbon Street one day. I heard this fantastic music coming out of one of the bars on Bourbon Street as I was walking past. So I sort of poked my head in, had a beer and was just entranced by this fantastic band. Here's a little snippet of them now. And you can hear that brilliant virtuosic washboard playing from my guest, Alex Macdonald. So when it came to the break in the set, I went up and had a chat with Alex to see if I might be able to interview him over the coming days. And he very kindly agreed. This was one of those classic New Orleans situations where we then met, I think it was the next day, went for an interview by the Bayou, had a really nice chat. But of course, I wanted to hear the washboard, and it transpired in typical New Orleans fashion. Alex had actually forgotten to put his washboard in when he picked me up to do this interview. So very kindly, he agreed to another little interview the next day, which is why this next segment is in a couple of parts. There's one day where we're sitting chatting about some of his background and the history of the washboard as a musical instrument. And then the next day, I got him to give me a demo backstage at one of his gigs. So yes, this interview is in two parts, bit unusual, but there we are. Anyway, enough from me. This is Alex Macdonald. Would you mind just introducing yourself? I am Alex Macdonald from New Orleans, Louisiana, professional washboard player, extraordinaire. I can testify to that. You know, obviously the washboard started out as a device for cleaning clothing, but it evolved into a musical instrument. At some point, I can't pinpoint when exactly, but it started a lot in the
bluegrass scene. In the 1940s, a Zydeco musician, a Louisiana musician, basically he drew the shape of the ideal percussive washboard. He drew the shape in the sand with his metalworking friend, and that's kind of how it came to be. And with the Zydeco music first, it started out with just an accordion playing the blues. And over time, the washboard showed up as percussion, and then drums came along, and bass, guitar, piano, and. Rock driven as to the Zydeco is more the kind of blues and funk driven. I'm interested in the sort of geography of it with the river and with the history of New Orleans and stuff. It's almost like the flip side to jazz in a way, isn't it? In the sense that jazz has got all those influences as well, but it's just a different expression of that. Yeah. And is that largely to do with the instrumentation? Yes, and there's some bands that do crossover. I think for one would be Terrence Simeon. I think he won the first Grammy for Zydeco years ago, and he's definitely got more of the world sound incorporated with it. It's not difficult music, but it is very specific. And I've just immersed myself in it for the past almost 23 years. Played with about six or seven different bands, and there's your traditional Zydeco, which is more of the jitterbug, jump blues, kind of high energy. And there's the dance hall Zydeco, which is a little more laid back that really caters to the dancers. And the dance is actually has a lot to do with the genre as well. The instrumentation, the big two are the, it can be a single row accordion or a chromatic, like a big chromatic piano accordion. But that's the big two is the accordion and washboard. And that's kind of the draw. So accordion and washboard are the two, the things that drive the band, but then things like guitars. This is definitely incorporated. That all came later in the history and the evolution like that. So the very earliest stuff would just be those two things, accordion and washboard. And washboard and drums. Right. They have the bass side on the accordion and that usually takes care of the low end. And it's quite a virtuoso instrument as well, isn't it? Like when you take a solo, it's really... It can be. And I've had some drummers remark that I almost play melodically. And so how many spoons do you have on your fingers? Just two. One on each hand. Spoons. Yeah. But your individual fingers play as well, right? No. No, really? Just it's a... Primarily to keep a groove on my right hand, I strum like a guitar. I was 12 years old at one of my father's gigs and just got picked it up and got really good, really fast. And I'd played the guitar since I was about 10 or so. Just learning how to strum and make bar chords. And that's helped a lot.
You were saying your parents are both musicians. My late father was a guitar player. My late mother was a singer. Right. And my mother's name was Lee Little Queenie Harris. And she was like blues and deep funk, kind of New Orleans vibe. You learned playing around your folks, your parents? They were major influences, I will say that, just to see that they could do this for a living. And in the later years, they had to take all real jobs after gigs kind of dried up. And so the washboard, just coming back to that for a sec, because there's a couple of different types, right? You said there's the wooden frame and then there's the metal one. Are they associated with different styles or? The wood frame is more with the bluegrass and jug band music. Can you explain what jug band music is for those who don't know? Like a banjo, a wash tub, bass. And a wash tub bass is literally a wash tub with a broom handle in, right? And a string. One string. Oh, not that dissimilar from a Wemmola. Yeah. And a lot of those players, they put cymbals on their fingers and kind of tap along the scrub with that. Yeah, because that's what I was thinking when you said, you know, but you only got one spoon per hand. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, but those guys, I think I've seen individual fingers tapping stuff out. And they can get technical with it. Sometimes they'll put like little bells and a tiny cymbal on the bottom and I've just I've kind of kept it bare bones for from, you know, pretty much all my career. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I guess I wouldn't say it was my goal to just keep it bare bones, but I've just there's a, you know, just a certain amount of technicality that I guess that I've developed to where I just felt I didn't need any of that stuff. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I'm just, you know, every day, thinking about, you know, every time my feet hit the stage, just a prayer answered. You were saying you've been lucky in that you've mainly just been a bit of musician. You haven't had to supplement it with other jobs. Again, very fortunate to be able to do this for up to five days a week. And it, you know, it pays a living wage. And you're saying you've toured, you've toured all over the world, played washboard. Yeah. You must be in a very small minority of people who've toured the world by playing washboard. Yeah, there's a couple of us. The Worldwide Washboard Registry, it's a bit of a tongue twister. It really is. When I was, when I was inducted, there were 600 of us registered all over the world. But there's maybe, maybe 10 of us that actually do this full time for a living. And yeah, wow, that's, yeah, that's not many people think that can't be true of many instruments, I guess. You know, only only 10 people
like playing full time professional. I mean, the role of music in New Orleans, you're talking about playing on Bourbon Street. Now, for those people, like a lot of people listening won't have been to New Orleans, won't know New Orleans. Maybe you can just explain a little bit about the kind of dynamics of music in the city. Of course, a Bourbon Street that caters to the sing-along, very tourist driven. And you do have to kind of cater to the crowd on that one, as opposed to Frenchman Street, the patrons out there, they're seeking out the jazz and the funk and stuff like that. Of course, on Bourbon, there are moments, musical moments. It's mostly just the four of us kind of catching like, hey, good job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, in my experience, I had a weekly house gig on Frenchman for about five or six years. It was just way different. The crowd was definitely there for the music, not necessarily coming up and screaming a request at you, mid-song, which can get annoying. It can get annoying, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've had my fair share of annoying gigs, but just seeing you the other day, I can see that the crowd that happens on Bourbon must get a bit, a bit leery up in your face. When I saw you guys, because I think it was the middle of the day, it's like 1 p.m. or... And the crowds, the way that it's set up is that the doors are kind of open to all... Open air, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you're playing inside, but the doors are open, so you come, people go in and out. So the crowds, they're not really fixed, are they? That, you know, people kind of coming in, drifting in, staying for a little bit, drifting out. Oh, there's no cover charge at any of those clubs, really. So it's just kind of wander in, wander out. And if you strike a chord, so to speak, with the patrons, they'll hang three, four hours, you know? Yeah. And we are able to accept tips as well. So that helps out a lot. And we get a stack of cash every week. They used to, years ago, they used to pay us every night. And I think they started seeing the downfall of turning a musician loose at two o'clock in the morning with two or $300 in their pocket. Come to work the next day, oh, I'll spend all my money. Which is, you know, there was a learning curve there with getting paid once a week, but then, you know, you're able to kind of find a way to live off your tips. Yeah, yeah. You know, go to the bank when they do pay you. When the money comes in, right, I see, I see. But again, coming back to that thing of people coming in and out, is that I think that for non-musicians, it can look a little bit kind of bleak that would be not many people there or, but you know, my experience as a musician is that it is what you make of it, right? Like if you're with a, so maybe you can just speak to that.
Like if you're with a group of good musicians, yeah, sure, like you want a good audience, but you can still have them. The crowd feeds energy to the band and makes us play harder and better. But in the summer months down here, it is a little bit slow. It just cause it's so god awful hot down here from like, you know, basically May to November here in the Southern United States. And it can be a little disheartening. You know, guys like we played Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, those Thursdays can look kind of bleak. Some of the summer months, usually, that's when you take an odd job or two and to kind of supplement it. Because our days will be cut until the fall. Basically, the football season starts. Close our eyes and imagine a thousand people in front of us. I've been talking to people quite a lot this week about the difference between, for whatever better term, like high art gigs, in other words, like playing concert halls, playing theaters, that sort of thing versus playing in bars, which is more, I guess, some of the term that keeps coming up here when I talk to people is the service industry, musicians, in that sense, a sort of part of the service industry. Absolutely. And I think with the record bubble bursting years ago, I think music has kind of turned back into a service. And I do get out and tour other places where the crowd is there to specifically see your band. And that makes it worthwhile. Can I get that taste? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, but actually I imagine for most of human history, probably musicians have essentially been more on the service end of things than the art end of things or somewhere between the two. I think it's probably, even though that maybe feels recent because the record says probably if we go back to traveling minstrels in the middle ages or whatever, it's probably not a million miles different. Given what we do, the bars you saw us in, it's kind of, it's almost like a blue collar kind of vibe. And again, I'll go right back to it. It's just I'm very fortunate to be able to do that for a living. I think when we talk about those, those bleak gigs, and I've had my fair share of bleak gigs, but as all musicians I have, I think, but every job has got its bleak aspects, right? Yeah, the days are all bad. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, so I think that's the way I try to approach it. Like, you know, some gigs are more fun than others, but at the end of the day, most of the gigs that I do, I feel very lucky to be up there playing music for a living, you know? Yeah, man, it's an interesting way of life. Yeah. I will say that much. And I think it almost is more of a way of life than a job, in a way, because it is a job, a highly experienced professional with, like, you know, 20 plus years of experience or whatever. It's very much a lifestyle as well. I think it's 51-50, 51-49 or something like that. Yeah, but again, thank them. I love you, stars. And I'm able to kind of even work a day. And it's been like that's pretty much my entire adult life. I started doing it full time when I was 17.
Yeah, I can't wait to hear the board up close. When you're ready, if you might just like showing us the gloves, showing us the whole set up. These are run-of-the-mill baseball batters. And I was using fingerless biker gloves for a while, but my knuckles were still getting torn up. Right, yeah, because you're scraping away, right? They were Rawlings batting gloves, and you can see still, I have to put tape here, and otherwise they get torn up. And these are relatively cheap. Yeah. So I can, yeah, I replace them every few months. And the spoons are Bullion Dominion spoons. Very specific spoon manufacturer. Medium weight. I get them by the gross at a restaurant supply store. I have an account with them and everything. And actually, I need to bring them like a headshot to put up in their office. You're their best customer. Well, yeah, I strike it with the tip of the handle, actually, and you can see they get worn. Yeah. And I have to replace them. I pretty much wrap a new set every day. And the right hand tends to get a little more worn than the left hand. That's what I lead with the right hand. Yeah. And accent and subdivide with the left hand. Yeah. And yeah, just wrap it in about a half inch of duct tape so it protects the inside of my hands and hold them like this. I was imagining you were playing with a kind of bold bit of the spoon, but you play with it with a handle. With the tip of the handle, yeah. And yeah, it's just the same method I've been using pretty much since I started in 2001. Wow. And you get Yuri Geller to bend those spoons for you? I bend them about 90 degrees. It keeps my wrists straight. And maybe you can show us the... Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah. The piece de resistance. Exactly. And these washboards are made of stainless steel, and there's different gauges, and the different gauges pretty much dictate the, I guess, the space of the corrugation. Yeah. I believe this is a 22 gauge. And I think the higher the gauge, the closer the corrugation. And it can get loud, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a big old bit of metal. I mean, it just looks like kind of corrugated iron you might see on a roof or something. And is it specially made, custom made for you? It is not. They come a lot straighter than this, but over time from my body heat and the friction of the spoons, they start to kind of conform to my torso. Yeah, I see. Right. And a kind of armor. Yeah. Yeah, I dampen it with, you know, with duct tape and stuff
like that, because there's a ring about it. And the tape on the, I guess on the shoulder hooks here is not only for gripping on my shoulders, but it also dampens the sound, because when I put it on, this is inches from my ear. Yeah, metal vibrates and yeah. See, that's why you got tape on there. So there's a method to the madness, and I tape it down here so my pants don't get tore up. Yeah, of course, because otherwise that's going to get sharp, right? And how long does that last you? Do you have to replace this very often? Every year or so. Maybe two years, depending on how often I perform. But yeah, it's the money maker. Yeah, the money maker. Okay, I'm going to ask you to put it on if I may. If you listen close, you can get a few different sounds out of it, and I can also dampen it with my torso, or there's like a subliminal technique that I use. I take it away from my torso. And it gets kind of more of a ring, more of a hollow ring to it. Oh, I see, yeah, so it's not resting against your body. So it's basically, you know, against my torso and away from the torso. And if I... That kind of action, you know. And you were talking yesterday about upstrokes and downstrokes. A bit like a guitar, right? Yeah, with my right hand, this, you know, basically a strumming guitar and the accent on the left hand. Get all fancy, subdivide and all that. Yeah, of course. Just like any percussionist, right? Like a conga player. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. And it took me probably close to 10 years to figure out how to not play on top of the music. You know, like playing with a band, finding where my puzzle piece fits in. Can you just like slide in with any drummer, or do you need to, you have a better relationship? I can slide in with any drummer. You know, there's a few of them out there that are like a percussionist drummer. That they know where to leave space, and I know where to leave space for them. And it's a lot of fun to play off. Yeah, because you've got a little bit of space to do your own thing. And we can get very complex syncopation out of it. And even the Latin kind of, you know, especially when we do that in unison, that's a really cool sound. Yeah, but it is. Latin grooves must really kind of lock in once you get where you're going. Would you mind just giving us a bit more of an extended demo? That's awesome, that's so cool. And I've only got one other thing to ask you, which you should definitely feel free to say no to, and that is, I wonder if I could have a quick... Oh, absolutely. Feel free to say no, I know what it's like. Absolutely, that's fine.
Yeah, all right, maybe I'll come around here. You cut your fingers around? Yeah. And so it's sort of a scrape down here for the one. Yeah, for the downbeat. And everybody does it different. It's like you got to kind of find your own, anybody playing the guitar, you're not going to play exactly like Stevie Ray or exactly like Jimmy. You're going to play like you. Yeah, I see, I see. And over time, it took me, again, about 10 or 12 years to really make it my thing. Yeah, okay. And there was the first drummer I ever worked with, with Corey Walters, she remarked pretty much about 10 years deep into my career, because I started very young when I was 17. And, you know, she remarked and said, you know, back in the day, when you were a kid, you were just kind of trying to hang out and jam, but you've really made this your own thing. It's just amazing to have seen it evolve like that. But that's, I think that's one of those things that there's no shortcut, right, to that thing. No matter the practice you do or whatever by yourself, it's about time and working with other musicians. And that's how you find your own kind of voice, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So we go. It is loud. It can be a little awkward when you first start, for sure. So. Terrible, terrible. So is it down like this? Actually, it's, you're gonna pretty much, you're gonna like slam the right hand down. More like strumming a guitar. So kind of down... Doing the fills, yeah. And I've been doing it so long, it's just become kind of second nature. Yeah, of course, of course. And I've had really no formal training with that, so I wouldn't be able to give lessons. No, of course, but where do you go for formal training on the washboard? Nowhere. No, no, no, on the bandstand. I have had sit downs with people showing them my technique and having them video it and study it. Yeah. And they kind of, they take the basics and just kind of do their own. You gotta make your own technique. Of course, of course. Just practice again, isn't it? Wow, it's great fun. And I started out, it was literally thrown into my hands like, go. There's the board, there's the spoons, there's the band, go. Right, right, play along, off you go. And that's how you learn, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, thank you so much. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Into the fire, exactly. Great fun. Brilliant.
Thank you so much. Yes, sir. That's great, man. Amazing. There's some interesting injuries. When I first started out, I sliced my nose right here. I was very young. And taking it off? Yeah, from basically, just not even realized it, and then I feel this trickle down my face. Rock and roll, man, rock and roll. But it's because these are quite sharp, right? They do get sharp, yeah. They're almost like shivs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you'd be put in a solitary confinement for having that in prison. Nice one, man. Thank you. I won't take up more of your break, but thanks, man. Thank you. And my thanks once again to the amazing Alex Macdonald. I'm not sure how many of you are listening to this show for information about The Washboard, but you got it anyway, and I hope you enjoyed it. That's what I'm trying to do with this show, bring a whole variety of music from all over the world into your musically curious ears. So go and seek out some brilliant Zydeco music. There's a lot of great stuff you can find online or even better if you get a chance to listen to it live and maybe you'll see a Washboard player like Alex or maybe you'll see Alex himself if you're in New Orleans or if he's touring back over here again soon. So my final guest for this episode is a musician and I guess a promoter. She runs her own gig night, as she'll talk about. I'll give a bit of background as we're chatting. I've known Robyn for a good few years, and I've seen her career go from strength to strength. I'm a great admirer of hers. And of course, with Autism Acceptance Month upon us, I thought who better to have on, as well as Maddi, of course, earlier than Robyn, Robyn Stewart, who is an incredible musician and music promoter, I guess. She runs this great night that she will talk about in our interview called Robyn's Rocket at Cafe Oto. She's just a fantastic person to have in the industry and to have worked alongside over the years. And anyway, enough from me. Over to Robyn Stewart, AKA Robyn Rocket. My name is Robyn Rocket. I play space trumpet and I run a series of gigs at Cafe Oto called Robyn's Rocket. What do you mean by space trumpet? I put my trumpet through guitar pedals. Well, so I was also very inspired by Andy Diagram, who you like probably in the mainstream world is known for playing in James, but also Spaceheads, which is the first band I saw him play in. And that's really what got, really sparked my interest of the idea of putting a trumpet through guitar pedals. And then I saw you do it. Yeah, and so I guess that, I think a lot of players I've seen use them, they often they melodic players and you're very good at coming up with melodies. And like, yeah, like I would say that you and Andy can both do like proper trumpet playing. I would describe myself like more like, I can make atmospheres and nice kind of soothing things.
And I really enjoy doing that. And I'm in a band called Dean Rodney Jr. and the Cowboys. And it's this guy Dean and he wrote like 52 albums in lockdown. Like it's his way of like making a diary. Like he just, he's very like makes loads of work all the time. And he wanted to have a band. And yeah, so with him, sometimes I play bits of the tune. But normally I'm just like the cherry on top and I'm good at that. So I'd say that I've kind of like found the thing I can do. And it's not the typical trumpet. Like when people think of trumpet, they always think of it as being very loud in your face. And it's not that I can't do that. But I don't know that I particularly enjoy doing that. I like classical music to listen to, but I didn't really enjoy playing it. And then later on I learned, oh, the thing about that is my eyes are always moving up and down. And so it makes reading music, written music is written on five lines. And then the relationship of the notes are written on or between the lines. Sometimes the notes have lines that are going in there, like the note might have a vertical line and it's sitting on a horizontal line. And that's really difficult to read if your eyes are constantly moving. And I didn't realize that until I was much older, like in my late 20s. And then I was taught to learn things just using my ears. And then that opened up the whole world. I started playing the cornet when I was eight and I loved it. And I would do my practice every week, half an hour every day. I loved it. I really loved it. And then, but then by the time I was like 15, I'd got to about grade three. And so in music, there's like eight grades. And then there's some stuff you can do after that. But essentially, there's eight grades. And I suppose that maybe you do one a year ish. But I just wasn't really progressing. But I obviously loved music and I was making music all the time. And I had a keyboard. I don't come from a family that had loads of money. So my lessons all came from because I had disabilities. I had disability living allowance. And so my parents used that to pay for me to have lessons and pay for me to have my own cornet. And that was actually really good because the cornet and the trumpet are right handed instruments. And my cerebral palsy is in my left hand. So it was good for strengthening my right hand. It was like physio because I rely on my right hand for everything because my left hand is not as usable. So it's actually really good for me. And it's also like as an autistic person, it's good to have something that is social because if you're not very good socially, if you have a skill, like being able to play music or something, that can buy you kind of social money, if you like. I mean, not literal money, but like... Social access. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like if people, if other people value you, then they'll be a bit more forgiving about your social difficulties. They'll get to know you. And if people get to know you and they realise what kind of person you are and that you might not be the
person they might have originally thought they might have written you off as being a bit rude or not caring. So by being able to play a musical instrument, you have more opportunities for people to learn who you are as a person. And then when you make a social mess up, then they're more forgiving because they realise what kind of person you are because they've got to know you. And so they're looking at the overall picture of you. So I think that was a very good use of the money. And I don't remember exactly what happened, but somehow my mum had to take early retirement because she has a back condition and she was a teacher and she couldn't stand up all day anymore. She had to spend a lot of time lying down. Like for a long time, she was pretty much bedridden. And I think she used some of that money to get me a keyboard and this keyboard you could overdub. So what that means is I could play like a left hand part with my right hand and record it into the keyboard. Then I could play the right hand part of a tune with my right hand like so. I could do everything on my right hand and I could just record it on top of each other and then play them back. And so then I had this keyboard and so then I was writing my own songs and then I was recording them on tape. So I was always very interested, but then because the classical stuff didn't work. And I think also some of it was like the education of the teachers. I grew up in rural Suffolk. So the access to music education, I mean, there was music education, but it was all very kind of, you know, kind of narrow in terms of the expectation of like, well, you will be able to do this, this way. And so it wasn't until I joined this big band and jazz, obviously, is, you know, comes from blues and blues is a very oral tradition. People would go down the pub and then they would learn from each other. You know, tunes like someone plays on the piano and someone would learn it that way. So it wasn't written down. And then so that means then when you learn things in that way, you like, you don't have to read it. And then that opened up a lot of doors for me. And it's the same with using guitar pedals. Now thinking about it's kind of obvious because where do people learn about how to make sounds with guitar pedals? YouTube. YouTube isn't reading YouTube is all visual. How do you navigate around YouTube? You click on the thumbnails. I mean, maybe other people navigate by reading the titles of videos, but I navigate using pictures. And YouTube, of course, is connected to Google and the Google search engine is really good. So if you're not good at spelling and because I'm dyslexic anyway, so the fact that YouTube and Google are connected makes a big difference because Google is actually very good at guessing what I want to say. So I can type things into the YouTube search bar and find out information that way. And that's good also because I'm a bit slower at learning things, so I can watch the YouTube video over and over again. But I found that the pedals that I most kind of got on with were stuff that either had a strong visual element or they were simple, like they had four knobs and not too many settings and I could navigate around them.
So you referred a couple of minutes ago to the fact that when you were playing music as someone with some disabilities you've described, that you were able to communicate in a different way. I just wondered if you could maybe expand on that. And I suppose as part of it's really, I guess, maybe two parts of the same question. If you wouldn't mind just for the listeners, as much as you feel comfortable talking about the disabilities that you have and how that interacts with what you've just been talking about. Yeah. Well, I've got about 10. So I have cerebral palsy on the left side of my body, which means that essentially I've got brain damage and the right hemisphere of my brain doesn't talk to the left side of my body very well. So it makes me too floppy and quite wobbly. And I have lax ligaments. So ligaments hold your bones together and mine are too floppy. And I have poor muscle tone, which is, if you think of it like if someone didn't go to the gym ever and didn't do any exercise, the impact that would have on their muscles, that's kind of what poor muscle tone is. So that's like your baseline and then you have to work to have tone in your muscles. For some reason though, building an ombresure, which is the muscles that you use at the top of your mouth for creating sounds on a brass instrument, for some reason I could build those up really well. So I have autism, which for me means I'm very sensitive to sound and I'm not very good at reading like body language and facial expression and I find the subtlety of communication very difficult and I think that that can make me come across as a bit not reading the situation. I had this thing which I can never pronounce right, but it's kind of nostalgic, but that's the thing where my eyes are constantly moving up and down. I only ever see one eye at a time. One eye is for short vision, like reading, the other is for distance. I've never heard of that. Yeah, and I switch between them, but I don't know I'm doing it. I mean, that's been all my life. Your brain just fills in the gaps. Yeah, it just does that. And I have a squint and I have Botox in my squint about every six months to make my eyes straight. I have dyscalculia, which means that I struggle with maths, dyslexia, which means I struggle with reading, dyspraxia, which means I'm very clumsy, and my short-term memory is not great. So like when I first meet someone, if they tell me what their name is, I've already forgotten. And that's really like, I think that's one of the things for me about, I'm always at the front. Some of that is because I'm short. I'm like 152 centimeters or something. And I'm always at the front of gigs. And maybe some of it is because if I was further away, like the person speaking, I've probably forgotten what they've said. But the fact that I'm in the front and I'm having such a like intense experience, like that experience is happening for like half an hour. So I'm taking something in and I'm remembering it as an experience rather than as a piece of information. So I can remember having a conversation with somebody. I remember that they told me their name. And I remember how they spoke to me, like how it made me feel. I might remember like what
they smell like or what their clothes were like or what their shoes were like, but I don't remember their name. I also have prosopagnosia, so I don't recognize faces. So when you cut your hair short... Yeah, like I had to like learn how to, or when you change your shoes, like I mean in the house it's not such a big deal because I know where I am. I have a long enough short-term memory to remember where I am and what I'm doing. But some people when I don't know them, they will learn their shoes. The saxophonist Alabaster de Plume, he's a very tall guy. And for ages he had, I think they're Adidas trainers that had a glow in the dark tongue. And so the way I recognized him was tall man, glow in the dark tongue on the shoes with white stripes. So I'd have to build a catalogue. But then if people get new shoes or they change their shoes, and then that made me feel a bit anxious because that's kind of like someone's like, you know, they've like suddenly put on loads of makeup and they're like dressed as a clown or something. It's a category change almost. That's fascinating. Thank you for being so clear and articulate about your various disabilities. And going back to the initial question, to what extent has music been a sort of tool for you to express yourself? I mean, music is always a tool of expression, right? And it is for anyone, whether they're neurodiversion or have disabilities or not. I think emotionally, music is really important for me. Particularly when I was younger, I had a lot of like bullying. Because basically I was bad at pretty much every lesson in school, including music. I was fine in primary school, I actually did really well. I was in the special needs classroom. That worked really well for me, small group of people. And I found my niche, I was useful because I was very good at learning computers. I could learn how to do something on the computer and then teach someone else how to do it. And I was always so small that I was kind of sweet. Year 10, 11 kids were kind of quite like me. I was kind of sweet and they would, you know, open my drink for me and you know, because I was all little. But then when I went into high school and I was in a mainstream school, I was useless at everything all the time. So not only was I socially useless, but I was also useless at everything else. And that was a massive problem. They had a school hall with a grand piano and I would often go and like gravitate to the grand piano and just sit and play. Or sometimes when my mum had a meeting after school, I'd go into the music room and bash about on the drum kit and sometimes my mum would have to come in and tell me to like be quiet. Because it made me very frustrated, I think. Looking back, I just seemed to be this person that was rubbish at everything all the time, like everything. I wasn't really making friends and I wasn't doing well and I found everything very difficult and overwhelming. And now when I look back, I'm like, oh, I was just overwhelmed all the time. I recently got a diagnosis of ADHD and I started taking medication for it. And I was like, oh, if this is how everyone else experiences it, well, yes, I can see how now I could learn things and I wouldn't be able to drive a car without being able to take the ADHD medication.
Like I really struggled with focus and that's how I can see. It was probably quite annoying. I wasn't very good at anything and I was quite socially lacking. So music was a way that I could express those things, I think. But also, I think, emotionally processing things. Because sometimes I might not necessarily even understand stuff. But I think you take it in. I work with special schools quite often. And there's obviously a range of autistic people. And there are autistic people who have learning disabilities. And in some parts of the world, that's called intellectual disabilities. And within that group of people, there's people who, without having a learning disability, don't speak verbally. They communicate in different ways. But sometimes when I go into these schools and the teachers, you know, I'm like, these young people that you're working with, regardless of whether they can speak or communicate in a, you know, fashion that you understand, they have feelings and the way you treat them and speak to them, that goes in. Even if you don't understand what someone's saying, if you think about animals, they don't understand what we're saying to them. But they will avoid people that speak to them unkindly, or don't give them food, or go towards people that are kind to them. And the same with babies. If you're a living being and you have feelings, it's really important, I think, that you treat the person as you would want to be treated and as you would want to be spoken to. Even if you think, oh, this person doesn't understand, or oh, it doesn't matter, but it really matters. Like, I just think that's like a universal thing. Language is so much more than just the comprehension of it. The meaning matters, but there's something that you understand at a deeper level, I think. Just bringing it back to music for a second, how does music interact with what you're just saying about the difficulties with communication non-neurodivergent people have and how has music kind of helped you or maybe hinted you, I don't know, in some of those communicative challenges? Yeah, I think music really cuts through all of that stuff. I think music is like a very almost primal way of communicating. It's before language comprehension. There's something different about it to spoken words. So I worked for a while with Oilly Cart, who are a food company, and they go into special schools. And I remember in the training them saying, you know, you'll get less feedback from these young people than you do, you know, with other audiences. And I never found that. I always found I got the feedback is different and the intensity is different. And you really have to like do, they call it whole body listening, I suppose, where you're using your whole body to receive whatever signals that young person is giving you. And I felt like other young people, that was the thing I loved most is sitting down one on one with a young person and playing to them and just responding to them. And to other people perhaps, the way they moved or looked at me or responded to me might have been very small, but I was like very connected to that person. So I think that music can be a tool to communicate.
And I think because that is how I learned to speak. My mum played the guitar and sang to me. It can be a tool for communicating specific experiences. But I think it can also just be a way of humans and animals maybe connecting with each other in a way that maybe you can't in another way. I think it's very special and important. And I think that if you look at around the world, how people use music, I think people use music in ceremonies and different ways that I think suggest that there's something else about that tool of communication that you can't get through spoken language. I think there's something about music played with instruments that don't have language that allows for a different level of communication and different connection between living beings. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that's really, really beautifully put. And that's pretty much exactly the thing that I've been saying on this show and to anyone who'll listen for years is that, yeah, music has that almost unique ability, I think, to cut through and go to places that language can't. And again, we often, I think, we get lost in music with the technicality of it, particularly reading music, you know, can be very valuable. But again, as I've talked about on this show a bit, it's a very limited way to understand music if you think that that's what music is primarily, it's like dots on a page. That's cool, that's great. It's a very handy tool for communicating music for some people, not for everyone, as you've said. But it's not really what music is. It's a way of passing down music along the generations. But a flawed way, and a way that doesn't work for everyone. And really, for me, a lot of the time, just the kind of sonic characteristic of a particular note or whatever can communicate at least as much as a piece of sheet music can. And I think with your music that we worked on together a few years ago, and what I've seen you do so much and so well since, it kind of fits, I guess, in that almost sort of ambient sort of space, but it's very meditative. It sort of just speaks to you in a way that you couldn't possibly notate, even if you wanted to, really. I mean, you can kind of get a few of the ideas down on paper maybe, but you lose so much in doing that, because you're losing all of the kind of sonic character of it and everything the minute you write it down. Anyway, I just want to move on to talk about your amazing night, because you mentioned earlier you run this great night called Robyn's Rocket, which is your stage name. Can you just talk a bit about what that is, where the idea for that came from? I wanted to create what I described as an inclusive, conscious night. So it means that you think about who's not in a space, how to welcome them in, then you welcome them in. You ask for their feedback, and then you do whatever the feedback is as best you can. And that's not just disability. So Cafe Oto is a gig venue in East London, in Dalston. And it's all on one level. It's a big concrete space. Yeah, it's kind of industrial, brutalist sort of space, isn't it? Exactly, it's brutalist, yeah. But the sort of music that goes on there is mainly pretty
experimental, but mainly pretty avant-garde. Yeah, it's definitely a space for exploration and avant-garde music and I guess noise music, things like that. But I remember there being a gig there, and I wanted to go and I just couldn't. I was just like, I just feel too nervous to go to this place. And then a few years later when I started going to gigs, and I'd turn up when the doors opened, which is about half an hour at least before the actual band starts. And then I'd be on my own and I'd just be waiting around. I was finding going to gigs quite difficult, hard to predict and make sense of. I was going out a lot in Deptford and my mates were putting on music and I was going to this jam run by a guy called Ray Wong. And then I met a lot of people through that. That was really the first time where that social capital thing really worked for me. It was like, then once I'd learned to improvise and I could go to jams and improvise, it was like, oh! Like, it was quite unusual for a trumpet to be there. So I was going there and then I was like, oh, maybe I could do a night there. And they said yes. And then at the time, like 2017, it's less so now, but it still happens where gigs were very like, my heart and soul mates would be playing to like mainly audiences of people with learning disabilities and autistic people. And then my depth of mates would mainly be playing to audiences of people without learning disabilities and non-autistic people. And to me, that seemed like a bit strange because I thought people should mix more. And I met this guy, Richard Phoenix, who works with heart and soul, and he'd coined this phrase integrated gigs, where you have a mix of people with and without learning disabilities and autistic and non- autistic people, both as artists and in the audience. And I was like, oh, I want to do that. And he'd done this project called Constant Flux, where he took bands on tour, bands who had members with learning disabilities. I was very inspired by what he was doing. And then I got invited to a conference, and I met the guy that ran Cafe Oto. And I got his email address. I just started sending him my music. I was like, you know, I've got about seven bands. Do you think I could put on a night and they could all play? And he said yes. So that was the first Robyn's Rocket. The brutalist thing is cool for a lot of people, but it really doesn't work for me. It was too dark. And also, I thought, there's a lot of white middle- aged men here. And that's cool. But where is it all the other people? Quite right. I mean, as a white middle-aged man myself, I'm aware of that when I go to places like Cafe Oto. And obviously, I would want white middle-aged men to feel really welcome as well, but it should be for everyone. And I was just like, yeah, maybe I could do something about this. So I coined this phrase, inclusive conscious. And then I started working with Cafe Oto to make these gigs, but also to try and make things better generally in the music industry,
just like locally, like things that were close to me that I could do something about. Earth and Hackney, they've got loads of steps. They've got like an amphitheatre, and it's got loads of steps. And I was like, look, this black gaffer tape that you put on the edge of the steps, that's good, yeah, but if you put white, it makes it easier to see. So now they've just put white gaffer on. Just simple things like that, borrow these ear defenders and have them at the coat check and lend them to people and just ask people to bring them back, and they did. It's really simple stuff. And then I did some work with EFG London Jazz Festival, changing things that were close to me that I might be able to help more people to be able to come. And so we're still doing Robyn's Rocket. So I always program a mix of artists with and without learning disabilities and autistic and non-autistic artists, whereas have two visual artists working together, creating projections on the ceiling and on the walls, like two walls, I think. And yeah, we turn it into a homemade spaceship and we lend out ear defenders and sunglasses and we have rocket badges so people can choose how much communication they want. It's amazing. It's amazing. I've been to it, to the gigs, but I've also done it once. There's lots of things that I think are amazing about it. But I think the fact that it's so inclusive is important, not just for your night, but for the industry more widely, right? And it's made me think about when I'm putting on gigs or when I'm doing my own gigs or having a comedy band doing gigs or whatever. It's made me think a little bit harder about inclusivity and things there. And I'm sure we don't always get that right. But it's just in the first stage feels like thinking about it. And then, you know, that's no good unless you actually do something. But at least having that awareness and thinking. As you say, with things like start times, you know, are we communicating that properly so that people can make informed decisions? Even if it's not people with disabilities or neurodivergent people or autistic people or whatever else. Even if it's just parents who've got babysitters, you know, I'm a parent myself. Things like that, just thinking about the audience in an inclusive way. And so I think everything you've done with this is about bringing people in, whether it's people with disabilities or with autism or whatever situation they're in, or whether it's just people without any of those things, but just people who might feel shy about going to gigs or whatever it might be. I think it's incredibly important. But also the thing that really struck me was that the pack that you give to artists, I found really, really interesting. There was something that was particularly about sound checks, about how a sound check works, because I think you pointed out that not everyone who's going to be playing that night has done a sound check before, knows what a sound check is. There's so many bits of advice on that sound check sheet that don't just apply to people who haven't done sound checks before, but for me, having done however many countless hundreds of sound checks over many years, I've been a professional musician, a lot of that advice could really apply to a lot of my colleagues I've worked with over the years, just about
respecting each other's time, about being polite, about being patient, about knowing when to stop playing and shut up. All of those things that I just thought, this is such great advice for everyone, never mind people who have not done this before or people with other challenges. Yeah, so from when you played, which was probably about 2019, I used to send people a big Word document, but people said they felt a bit overwhelmed, which I think is fair enough. So now we've got kind of like an online portal, I suppose. It was just a bunch of web pages, but they're kind of nicely laid out. But there's the accessibility in TechRider. So when you do a TechRider, it's just what tech you need. So like if you need a particular cable or... A particular mic or a fold-back speaker so you can hear yourself, etc. And then within that, there's also like a section where people can write their name and their pronouns. That's important. And then there's the AccessRider, which is in the same survey monkey we use, and you can put pictures in it. We use a noun project for icons. And it's very easy to make everything pictorial so people can check what they want using the pictures. And then the AccessRider is just what do you need to be accessible. And we split the experience up. Obviously, this is for artists, so like beforehand, what information do you need? Do you need someone to meet you at the train station or the bus stop? And then when you get there, what support do you need for the soundcheck? And we give a range of options. And then during the gig, things like how can we let you know that your time and soundcheck is up? You might think, oh, that's obvious. You just like wave at the person. But not everyone might see you waving. So some people, you might need to like put your hand on their shoulder. But obviously you need someone's consent before you start touching them. Because for some people, that could be very triggering and that could create like a trauma response. So you just need to ask and then have a way of just giving that information to the people that you need. So you also need the person's consent to share that information, like with the sound engineer, with the person that's doing stage management, just so that everyone's got the same information. And I mean, obviously it doesn't, it's not, it doesn't always work like a hundred percent, but we're doing our best. Sometimes things do go wrong in soundcheck, but you know, we have these times and time for change over, so that we try and give everybody an equal chance. Because too many bands go through, especially when they're first on, they'll last the soundcheck because it's in reverse order, and they only get a couple of minutes, the soundcheck, and that's not really fair on them. Everyone is equally as important as one another, because we're all making this night together. But also we have, like now we have a survey that people fill out afterwards, so people can give feedback. I've learnt, rather than giving a time check of like, this soundcheck needs to be over in
five minutes. It's like, you know, okay, we've got one hour and 30 minutes before doors open, like things like that. Like, you know, so it's like, it's always an ongoing thing. But the social story gives you what the sensory expectations are, like it's going to be loud. You might want to wear ear defenders. You might want to go out for this particular bit if you are sensitive to sound, because in soundcheck, sometimes there are sounds that we can't control because something goes wrong. So soundcheck, if you're sensitive to particularly high pitch sounds, you might not want to be in the soundcheck space. We can't always control that, whereas at the gig we can. And then there's a social story for what to expect at the gig as a musician, and just things like you need to be there just before you play, not just at the time you play, because you're going to be introduced and you need time to get on stage. And we make a social story for the audience as well, so that they also know what to expect. I think it's just such a great idea, I really admire you for putting on that night and doing it in such a brilliant way. And as I say, there's so many musicians who have worked with and audiences who could really do with that and who could really, we think we should all take a leaf out of your book on that. So yeah, I think we should probably wrap up I guess. So you've got some gigs coming up? If people like the sound of this, as I hope they will, because it's a fantastic night, can you tell us some dates? The 7th of June, which I think is a Thursday. 5th of September is a Thursday, 15th of November I think is a Friday. So you've got the whole series already booked in and these are all at Cafe? Stream it so you can watch it on YouTube. Fantastic. And yeah, you can go to the website, it's cafeoto.co.uk or robynsrocket.com. Robin is spelled R-O-B-Y-N. That's right, Robyn Rocket. And you're just showing me a brilliant new video which I think is out yet, but it's going to be, which you've made yourself with your music with a great band as well. So yeah, keep an eye out. Thanks very much. That was so fast. So there we are, thanks again to Robyn. Her music is well worth checking out. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thank you so much, as always, for tuning in. As always, feedback is welcome. Ratings are incredibly helpful. We've got a lot of five-star ratings coming in. Thank you so much for that, it's really kind. Please do keep them coming. Reviews, star ratings really help. But what helps even more, of course, is joining my Patreon, which you can sign up to. If you go to origininthepieces.com, that's a kind of good hub for all of that stuff. And sign up to my Patreon for either one or $5 a month, depending on the different perks you want and how much money you are able to afford. That helps me to make this show. It's a lot of work, as you might imagine, putting three different interviews together for an episode and making different tracks in most episodes and all that
sort of stuff. It's a huge amount of work, so I really appreciate your little contributions. If you're able to make them, they really help me to keep this show, hopefully, interesting, varied. Thanks, as always, to Angelique Kidjo and Hackney Colliery Band for the track that I wrote with Angelique. That is the theme tune to this episode. And thanks to my guests, Maddi Crease and Alex Macdonald, and of course, Robyn Stewart, aka Robyn's Rocket. We're back in two weeks' time, as always. Thanks very much. Stay musically curious. See you next time. Bye.