MR: Mark Ryes
CD: Carl Davis
AD: Alan Dick

MR: I’m sure everyone remembers that ‘E.T.’ theme tune. Well that clip was provided by the BBC of ‘Proms in the Park 2005’ and was of flamboyant genius conductor Carl Davis. Hello there I’m Mark Ryes, welcome to today’s entertainment show. Well this year’s ‘Proms in the Park’ is being held on the 9th September and is sponsored by National Savings and Investments. Once again, Carl Davis is leading the BBC concert orchestra through this year’s spectacular summer event, and I’m very pleased to say that Carl joins us in the studio now. Alongside him is former professional musician Alan Dick, now an independent financial advisor who specialises in financial planning for musicians. However, while Carl may be firmly at the top he still remembers his humble beginnings, and Carl, let’s start at the beginning if we can. How difficult is it, would you say, for a musician to ensure that they have a viable career in music?

CD: Well there are, there are various strata within the profession. I mean I would say that the first level is a practising, performing musician: you play, you get paid. And then there are various structures within that that you can get involved in structures that are more organised to help, like if you are a member of an orchestra in which you have a contract, you know, you can be assured of a stream of income. And perhaps, it’s not so secure now, but if you go into broadcasting orchestra, that’s even more because that will take in things like pensions and sick leave and paternity or maternity leave, things like that, that are built in. So that is the kind of nearest you get to a job. If you are outside of that, if you are freelance, that’s really tricky because that really depends on your ability to get a job at all, and you cannot predict, and that’s what’s very hard for people like accountants to understand, that you cannot predict what your income flow is going to be. Sometimes it’s terrific and sometimes there may be very lean periods, you know.

MR: Jenny’s sent this question in on exactly that topic. She says ‘How important is saving for an aspiring young musician? Is saving the key really?

AD: It’s crucial, I mean – if you don’t know what you’re earnings are going to be in future, then you have to have something set aside to see you through. And again what Carl’s saying here about the different strata that you can be in, for somebody who’s at the normal level and maybe has a regular salary coming in from an orchestra or…

MR: So a jobbing musician.

AD: A job-type musician. You know, they might want to have something like at least three months of earnings or salary set aside.

MR: And that doesn’t even take into account pensions, as you say, paternity/maternity, it doesn’t take into account all of that, so when you, when a musician starts out presumably they need to talk to an independent financial advisor such as yourself. To be able to look at all these different issues, it’s not just money to live on is it?

AD: Absolutely, there are various different professions that they can get help from, I mean they need the help from a good accountant as well. A good financial advisor or planner to help them actually figure out how far the money’s going to go. The accountants can take care of the short term issues of the tax and things for them, but the planning is more about the longer term strategy, and they also need a good lawyer, because the contracts that you’re referring to here, you know if you get into certain things where you have freelance and you’ve got contracts or you maybe have recording contracts – a good lawyer can get you, can save you a lot of trouble later on. So you do need to find good advisors from the outset. It’s a lot easier not to get into trouble than to get out of it later.

MR: You’ve actually got a website that people can go to if they’ve got specific questions as well, for your company, haven’t you?

AD: Yes, our website 42fp.com. And on there, what we tend to concentrate on is long-term investment and long term planning. But the biggest thing people need to get – and this is true of all careers, not just musicians, but because of the nature of music it’s particularly pertinent to them – the first thing you’ve got to do is figure out what it is you actually want to achieve. Now there’s a career…

MR: Fame and glory and bags of money I imagine most people set out for.

AD: Okay well – why? You know, that’s the next question from that. Why? What do you want?

CD: Well that’s politics.

AD: What do you want to do with this money? Because that determines how much you actually need. And unless you know what you’re aiming for, then everything else is just, you know, buying products off the page.

CD: Well very often you don’t know, because being in the arts, and you know, music, painting, theatre, writing, you know, you don’t know the way it’s going to go very often, and so this is a hard balance to achieve. You know you may have a period when, you know, you’re red hot and you’re very committed to what you’re doing and then you may go off it, and it may be something different. You don’t want to do that any more, and that may be something that was profit, you know, you may suddenly have a terrific dip, and it may never recur, you may have peaked and that’s it. Or you may go in another direction. And I think it’s really very hard, I don’t envy you at all, because I think it is very hard because sometimes it’s swimming, sometimes it’s fluid, and you don’t know really where that person, who has been so spectacularly successful, a year ago – where did it all go? And it can change. And it isn’t actually working out your years. I mean it could be, if you were a performing musician, especially if you’re in a structure, but if you say ‘I’m a writer’, if you’re actually, composing, let’s say composing, let’s take in not only, you think of a composer as classical composer, but let’s say all kinds of composers – song-writer composer, someone who does jingles, someone who does pop music purely, whatever, film music, television, which I did for many years - the one thing financially that I think is very important is that composers and writers, in that we associate with music, like Lewis’ are protected and do get, do have a structure which I think is probably the envy of most other professions, which are the collection organisations, and if you actually can organise your writing life, either through a music publisher or even just on your own, or create something on your own to which you are able to structure yourself, get around to thinking that if you actually register your work, once you’ve reached a certain level, so that your right have become [inaudible], with either the Performing Rights Society or the Mechanical Copyright which have to do with recorded music. Then it’s possible to have an income stream which happens on its own because they are set up to monitor the way things go, and that is a really enviable aspect…

AD: And most people do have issues though, because earnings go through phases of popularity, you know, songwriters for example, they have huge income from it, massive income in a very short period, then it dries up, then maybe a cover version of this song by somebody else later on is maybe featured in a movie or something and it gets a resurrection – you’ve another stream of income.

MR: Carl we’ve got a specific question from Jo who wants to know how easy was it for you in your life when you were starting out, how easy did you find the financial side of it early on?

CD: Oh, impossible. I’m a catastrophe; I’m a walking catastrophe, because I am someone 100% committed to doing it, you know, to making the thing happen.

MR: And a lot of creative people are.

CD: Yeah, I think the people who have succeeded are, you know, the idea of cost of something, saving. I’m very tough, I’m really a kind of spoilt brat, but you know, people around me punch me and pummel me and say ‘you’ve got to, you’ve got to think about it’…

MR: So you’re saying it’s important to get the advice then?

CD: Yeah, you really have to be, because you can’t be living in cloud cuckoo land, eventually you do have to pay your rent or your doctor, or the health plan. All those things have to be done, and then you may have children, you know, life impinges. And you really do, so I really kind of have survived, you know, by the fact that people did help me, and did attempt to organise my life. But I’m just an enthusiast, I like performing, I like writing, I like conducting-performing what I write.

MR: Well you put it all in, because you married an actress as well – Jean Boht best known as Nelly Boswell from Bread, and had children and so…

CD: And grandchildren!

MR: Indeed.

CD: We’re waiting for number three! Come soon!

MR: Excellent. So you’ve got the whole point of, you were a family where you didn’t know where you didn’t know necessarily where the next income stream was coming from.

CD: Well again it was up and down. I mean Jean is a freelance actress, you know, also has periods which are fallow and then periods where she’s working non-stop, and again, those are the good years, and then you have times that are lean. And it’s tough to think, I think one thing that was very interesting in my life, is that I grew up in New York. And in New York the mentality, the kind of family and people I came from were people – they never thought of buying anything, they always rented. When I met Jean and we married, she comes from a background which wasn’t more or less affluent than mine, but she grew up in a tradition of buying a house, and the first thing we had to do was buy a house. Certainly as soon as there was the first child.

AD: That’s a traditionally British thing.

CD: It was traditional, it was Northern, it was…the whole thing, and the means to doing that are really quite, really not difficult to achieve that. Once you’ve actually taken the first step on this property ladder, you’ve got something, you’ve got a commodity that you can actually use. You can mortgage it, you can do all sorts of things, you have actually acquired some property. And this makes a huge difference on how flexible you are in the day-to-day living.

MR: And Alan it’s not so complicated. If you talk to the right advisors it’s not so complicated. We’ll come onto that in a moment. Did you wake up one day Carl and just know you were going to be a conductor? Did you know the route that your career was going to take – that you were going to compose and be a conductor or not?

CD: It took a while, it took a while to evolve what I was going to do. It was always very clear to me, that it would be music, that that was it, and in my background and tradition, coming from New York, there seemed to be no barrier to what kind – what did I want to do? I could play, I could conduct, I could compose, etc. There were kind of models in my life, in particular someone like Glenard Bernstein who had that kind of sort of, virtuosity, and wide spread of interest, and that became a sort of model in a way and I said, you know, well look at what Glenny’s doing, look what he’s doing – West Side Story, New York Philharmonic, his big television show talking about music and so on and I thought, I took that in rather a lot. I started by playing a lot, learning to play piano, and I was very greedy, I wanted to play everything, I wanted to learn everything. I was very hungry for repertoire. And I had mates, I had mates who were similar – singers, people who were studying opera, people doing…so it was mostly classical, mostly in that line, musicians who were chamber music, and then there was a sort of miraculous day, there was a sort of moment when I knew, and I don’t know, it’s a very odd story, I very rarely tell it now. But I’ll tell it now, why not, but I very rarely do. But it occurs to me that it’s apropos of a moment – I was on tour, I was already working precociously about 18, I got some really quite major jobs touring with a beautiful first class chorus conducted by a man called Robert Shaw. I’d go into a town, and at that point we were in Philadelphia, and I went into a music shop because we were playing chamber music, which was the same programme night after night. If we got there a few hours early we would amuse ourselves. And I went to buy something, and there was some blank manuscript paper and I felt this tremendous hunger and desire to write. I wanted to fill those pages, you know, I just suddenly thought ‘God, that’s what I’ll do’. So I did, I bought the bit of manuscript paper and then because I was day and night with singers and musicians, I started writing something, and they all said ‘That’s rather’, just on the bus, as we were going round the States on a bus, and then it was fun, it was very exciting, and they, you know, I would write, they would play, you know, it was terrific. And then I thought I better stop the playing and become a composer, if I’m going to be a composer, it’s back to school.

MR: We’ve had a couple of questions in, in terms of Peter wants to know ‘Has it changed a lot these days?’. If he wants to become a composer and conductor, you know, what’s the route now with that?

CD: Well, we now have to separate the two, because the life of composer is not exactly the same, or is very different, from the life of a conductor, unless you want to do both which is unusual. A composer’s about writing and it’s about being solitary and it’s about all the things you do, you know, it’s like being an artist who’s painting, being a writer, you know, that’s one thing about yourself and how you want to express things you see or know or feel, and if music’s going to be the way you do it, then you’re a composer.

MR: Is it a question of doing a music degree, that kind of thing?

CD: I think that, well, I would be lost, and one wouldn't have even started unless I had had conventional music training. Of course, there are now ways to kind of get round it but I don’t think you can really touch the heights unless you do. Unless you want – that’s writing a certain kind of music – if you are interested in pop, if that’s the way you’re going to express yourself, that’s something else because there, you know, knowing all the things you need to know to be a classical composer are not exactly relevant to creating a pop song. That’s another skill, and there again, the tools by which you develop this are now radically changed because of the introduction of electronic and computerised instruments, so these instruments can help you play, can help notate what you play, and so on, and be manufacturing all sorts of songs which, all sorts of sounds, which don’t require you to actually play them.

MR: But I guess that makes it so much more expensive these days, if you’re going down that route?

CD: I don’t know, I think in some ways it could be cheaper because…

AD: I think it’s cheaper for a lot of people.

CD: I think it’s cheaper.

AD: Because you don’t have the overhead of individual musicians.

CD: Yes exactly. You know you don’t have the cost of a string section, when you can produce your string section on your instrument. So this is sort of the death of live music as far as I’m concerned because you can’t duplicate the human factor, you can’t duplicate expression, individual interpretation, the things that happen spontaneously. A machine cannot be spontaneous…maybe you can program that!

MR: You don’t have machines at Proms in the Park, and BBC Proms in the Park is sponsored this year by National Savings and Investments. Helen wants to know how you first became involved, because this is your third season isn’t it? How did they first approach you?

CD: I think the people who were producing the program had already employed me, doing on radio things like ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ and doing this kind of mixed bill program, which is variety. Yeah and then, and because I had made this cause about thinking that, it was always a very interesting spread for me, that kind of program, which you have some classical music, some concert music, some opera, something from a musical, some pop music, all sorts of…instead of looking at music horizontally, of Bach, you know, Bach, and then, okay, rock and roll, you know, that way. I used to think, why can’t a concert cut the cake really, if you think of them as layers, cut the cake, slice it that way so you get something of all kinds from Bach to rock and roll, and all stations in between. So I think that attracted them knowing I could cope and, not only cope, I actually like it.

MR: And that’s the key, and you’re enthusiasm comes out entirely in what you do, and we can see that. Rachel wants to know, do musicians in an orchestra have to buy their own instruments, and if they do, you know, does that hold people back because of the expense there as well?

CD: I think that that is probably the greatest investment a musician has to make, but again it depends on what it is. For instance, you could own a very expensive piano but you don’t have to move it. In other words, there’ll be some aspect of that, but that’s quite exceptional. In the case of certain instruments like strings, which very often players are looking for an historical instrument, like a Strada Various or any of those really good things which have been for a museum as well as for a thing, is enormously expensive. They very often are supported in this by either the dealer or sometimes because they are so rare and so precious, they’re almost given it as a gift or they’re loaned it. They lend it, they’re lent it, there are variations on how one would express that. And so in a sense it’s a precious trust. That’s sort of in the string line. Age on other instruments is perhaps a disadvantage; I think you don’t want an old tuba you know.

MR: We’re coming towards the end of the program so I’m just going to ask you some quick fire questions here if that’s all right. James has just emailed us here, saying ‘Where did you get the jacket?’ to start with, and have you ever had to sell yourself short as a composer because the finances just weren’t there. In order to make a living have you had to do things you didn’t want to do?

CD: Well I very often do things on spec, on speculation, knowing that there might eventually be a return if that’s the only way I could do that, or because I was really passionate about wanting to do it.

MR: Okay, I mean you must come across that Alan, people having to do jobs that they don’t necessarily want to do in order to make a living as a musician?

AD: Absolutely, yeah. Quite often on the composer side as well, you know, you deal with composers who do want to do TV and film, particularly film, but they have to start out doing jingles, and adverts, and anything, because it pays the bills and allows them to build a studio, and we were talking about the equipment, you know, the electronic equipment – it pays the bills to put that into place to allow you to compose the more complex things, and it’s all just a process you’ve got to go through.

MR: I don’t know where the time’s gone, but I’ve got time to just ask you one quick question. 50th anniversary of premium bonds from National Savings and Investments this year, one of the reasons why they’re involved in BBC Proms in the Park. Now of course, Ernie allows you to win with National Savings and Investments, anywhere between fifty pounds and a million pounds. If you won the top prize, what instrument would you buy, what would you do with it?

CD: I’m not sure I would buy an instrument, I suppose I would say I would buy time, but you can’t do that either. I’d probably just upgrade everything, I would go for the best of everything.

MR: And you’re a musician too Alan, what would you buy?

AD: Probably buy myself a very nice old Gibson Artstop jazz guitar, but I think the thing about the idea of a million pounds, is that we’re all conditioned to think that this premium bond type win is enough to set you up for life, and in actual fact, it doesn’t go very far if you want to start living that lavish type of lifestyle. You can set up a very nice, comfortable lifestyle to get you started, but if you’re going to go out and blow it on things like that it doesn’t go very far.

MR: Thanks very much for that. Well if you want to find out more about BBC Proms in the Park and how your investment and your money can work if you are a musician just go to this website: www.nsandi.com/youandyourmoney. Guys thank you very much indeed – Carl Davis and Alan Dick, thank you very much indeed and we’re going to play out with another piece of Carl from Proms in the Park last year, doing what he does best. The flamboyant genius, Carl Davis.

Alan Dicks top tips, for aspiring musician’s, to survive the financial challenges?

1. Know you goals unless you know what it is you wish to achieve you can’t devise a strategy - as George Harrison said “if you don’t know where you are going any road will get you there.”
2. Be realistic, I am referring to thinking in real terms rather than headline rates. Real terms are the returns you make on an investment after inflation. Will your investment outstrip inflation? It needs to if your money is to grow in real terms.

3. Think and plan long term and have the courage to stick with it. We are not conditioned to think long term and though we know we should invest when markets are low and sell when high, we are all wired to do the exact opposite of this. There was a study conducted in the US by Dalbar which calculated that the average return on the stock market was 12% per annum but the average investor only received 2.7% return because they were buying and selling at the wrong time.