In my first novel, A Bridge Of Straw, a pivotal scene takes place in a club in New Orleans.

A few people have asked me about that scene, and how accurate it is. So here is the story of The Rebirth Brass Band and Frenchy, an artist.

My wife and I booked a holiday of a lifetime, two weeks in New Orleans, just before we planned to have kids. As it happened, she fell pregnant shortly before we left – rather frustrating for her as it meant she wasn’t able to partake in the amazing (and seriously potent!) New Orleans speciality cocktail, the Hurricane.

A local Bristol jazz DJ, the wonderful Tony Clarke, had recommended a particular New Orleans record shop, run by a friend of his, Lippy. Sure enough, Lippy recommended plenty of fabulous music recommendations, from jazz to blues and even a zydeco album I still put on occasionally!

He also told us which bands to go and see and, crucially, suggested we go to see the Rebirth Brass Band at The Maple Leaf club in Uptown New Orleans.

Lippy gave us one specific instruction. The club was not in the most salubrious part of town. Get a taxi to the door, he said, get out of the taxi and straight into the club; when you leave, phone for a taxi, get straight in and go back to your apartment. Under no circumstances do you walk down the road looking for a taxi.

We got the message.

We arrived at The Maple Leaf at 11pm. The club itself is two rooms joined by a door near the front. We got our drinks, went to the side of the room in which the band was to play, and waited.

There was no stage, and the only lighting was a lightbulb dangling from the cord towards the front of the room. To our right, a stepladder stood in front of a canvas, which was attached to particularly tall easel. A spotlight attached to the easel was bent over to illuminate the canvas.

Slowly the room filled, and men holding various brass instruments started to congregate at the end of the room. All of the Rebirth Brass Band had been playing gigs elsewhere in central New Orleans that night, and were assembling at the Mapleleaf to blow until the early hours.

Eventually, the room – now full of smoke of questionable origin – went dark as the trumpet player reached up and unscrewed the lightbulb. The Maple Leaf equivalent to the house lights going down.

To our right, the artist – known as Frenchy – ascended the stepladder. As the Rebirth begans to play, so he began to paint them performing.

The ensuing two hours remains one of my three top gigs of all time. No amplification, the drummer standing behind a kit consisting of a snare, bass drum and cymbal. Bass provided by a tuba, and a brass front line.

Each song would start with a fabulous melody, then various soloists for minutes at a time, creating an extraordinary wall of intricate noise. Somehow, by some kind of miracle, everyone would suddenly burst back into the main melody at the same time, without so much as a glance at each other. The symbiotic relationship between player and instrument, and between the players themselves, was extraordinary to behold.

I think it was Billy Connolly who once said that anyone who expresses an interest in being a politician should be automatically banned from being one.

Another great line is from Edie Brickell who said in her song I Do ‘I want someone to follow who doesn’t lead the way.’

The Cult of Personality

The great leaders of people who have an idea which touch you, which speak to your core values. They elucidate that idea because they believe it.

Unfortunately, it is so often in the nature of people to then worship the person above the idea.

This cult of personality means that positions of authority so often attract people who want to be heard, rather than people who necessarily have anything interesting to say.

Opening Up

I’ve taken lots of advice on how to promote my books. I am told that people want to understand the person behind the writing.

I’m really not comfortable with this. This might sound disingenuous – I know that come across as a person who wants the limelight, who wants to be on the stage.

I used to play guitar in a covers band. We played lots of parties and balls, often to hundreds of people. It’s true, I loved being on the stage, and I loved watching people having a great time because of how good the band was.

So I did enjoy being on the stage, but not to be watched or applauded (aw heck, a bit of praise is always nice!).

I like getting up to share ideas, I like discussing ideas, I’d like being at the heart of a discussion. I am, however, deeply uncomfortable with being the centre of attention.

Somebody once called me a high functioning introvert. I think this is a great expression, describes somebody like me, who wants to be in the discussion, to join in the debate, but not be the subject of it.

This is at the centre of The Vanishing Point. The business leaders and politicians, the celebrities, who want fame for fame’s sake. How would they react if there was an opportunity for just one of them to be at the centre of the biggest event to happen to mankind?

And who would we turn to then, who would we choose to really lead us?

Do You Need To Write?

Clearing out a corner of the cabin in our garden from which I work, I recently rediscovered the novel that I wrote when I was aged 21, in 1988.

It’s a complete first draft entirely typed out onto a portable typewriter that I bought as a student.

It was interesting to read it again. It is terrible, but without it, I would not have written my subsequent novels. There was, however, a gap of over 20 years before I started writing fiction again.

My Muzzy Head

In 2010 I went to the GP with what she termed a muzzy head. She suggested we take some blood test to see what might be wrong with me.

I went back for the results two weeks later, and she was pleased to report that they come back clear and there was nothing wrong. She waited for me to leave.

I said that whilst I was pleased she had found nothing wrong, I still have my muzzy head. I mentioned that one website suggested that it might be a mild form of depression.

The doctor gave me a form to take home and fill out. She asked me to bring it back completed two weeks later.

I will never forget sitting at the kitchen table as I unfolded this tatty and much photocopied piece of paper, headed ‘Depression Questionnaire’.

The first question asked: how many times a week do you feel like killing yourself?

Noticing What Was Missing

Around that time, a friend, who was training to be a life coach, asked if I would be a guinea pig for her to practice on. I confess I was a little cynical, but agreed to help her out.

Those three sessions changed my life. We realised that the one thing I felt I wanted to do I was not doing, and that this was what was causing me the depression.

Filling The Void

So I started writing again. I created the space by taking Wednesdays off, and began writing what became my first novel, A Bridge Of Straw, published three years later.

Six months after I started writing again, I realised that the muzzy head had gone.

I truly believe that to write something great first of all I need to write quite a lot of rubbish. Neil Finn calls it the rule of 9 – out of every 10 songs he write, 9 aren’t very good, and 1 is. But he has to write those 9 to get to the 1.

I’m glad that I finished that novel when I was 20, and I have no regrets about stopping until I felt I had something to say.

I do wish, however, I had restarted earlier!

Although The Vanishing Point is not a science fiction book, it does contain certain elements of that genre. This is a novel of ideas in topics such as finding meaning, destiny, and the future of humanity.

There is also the topic of time travel. Now, this is a notoriously tricky issue to deal with in fiction. Many a gaping plot hole has been created by the introduction of a character being able to travel through time. For example, once Dumbledore had given Hermione the Time Turner, all she needed to do was go back far enough and kill the young Voldemort. Time travel can be very tricky.

In The Vanishing Point, I believe I have solved the narrative problems caused by time travel.

Aware that this would a rather bold claim to make, I wanted to get independent verification. I therefore put my time travel idea to the geek test.

My brother’s step son, Jack, is extremely bright, and extremely geeky. I’m not being rude – he wears his geekiness proudly. He is the sort of person who regularly debates the intricacies of the Marvel cinematic universe on Reddit forums.

I asked him his view on my time travel solution. “Leave it with me”, he said.

A few weeks later he called me. He said that he had put my solution to his fellow geeks. They had debated the idea, and trying to find flaws in my logic, or holes in the argument.

He was pleased to confirm that they could not find anything.

I had passed The Geek Test!

In his book Humankind, Rutger Bregman illustrates how people are, at a basic level, decent.

Reading this in lockdown at the end of the year long pandemic, and having spent three years writing a novel (The Vanishing Point) about the potential end of humanity, it was a message I really needed to hear.

In my work with The Eternal Business, where I advise companies on preparation for sale to Employee Ownership Trust, the concept of purpose features highly. There is a lot more interest in working for purpose not profit these days. This is especially true for the younger generation, who are much more einterested than my generation was in working for businesses with a strong sense of purpose, rather than just to make money.

The capitalist economic model that has been a default since the industrial revolution has created huge wealth and opportunity from which we all benefit. It has also, however, come at enormous cost. Standards of living have raised by an incredible amount around the world, but wealth has become increasingly poorly distributed.

And, of course, there is the small matter of the anticipated six mass extinction of all life on the planet.

Self Interest

One assumption that is the absolute heart of freemarket economic theory is that of self interest. It is self interest, so it is assumed, that drives people to want to succeed, be rich, and buy expensive things. It is self interest that makes us want to set up businesses, to compete with each other in order to see who will be the winner, with success defined in economic terms by who is the richest.

The trouble is, it turns out that this assumption (like so many in traditional economics) is incorrect. Some people are driven by self interest, for sure. But, as Humankind tells us, most of us are not.

Compassion and purpose

Rutger Bregman shows that far from wanting to compete with each other, our natural instinct is to help each other.

This means that the free market system at the heart of capitalism does not benefit all; it benefits those few who are driven by self interest.

This is why we have situation where, at one point in 2020, it was estimated that it would take a budget of $256bn to reverse climate change and prevent the extinction of humanity. To put this in perspective, the three wealthiest people on the planet could afford to cover this between them and still have $10bn left each.

But they haven’t.

There is hope, though. There is a real movement for new economic systems, to change how capitalism works. Employee ownership putting control and profit in the hands of the employees; B Corps; Donut Economics; the Ellen McArthur Foundation. And many, many more.

Purpose and wellbeing are two of the buzzwords in business right now, and I for one hope this continues for a long time to come.

Somebody wise once said that you measure what you value, and you value what you measure.

There is an old expression, originally used by dodgy backstreet London tailors: ‘Never mind the quality, feel the width’. It is the amount of material you’re getting that matters for the money, not the quality.

If you measure cloth by the yard, it’s the quantity you will value.

In economics and politics, the main measure of the success of an economy is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In every budget as far back as you can see, the focus of the Chancellor is the forecasts for the increase in GDP over the coming period.

Let’s take a scenario. Suppose the Government reverses the ban on handguns and automatic weapons. Sales of guns massively increase. Once a neighbour starts walking around with a gun at their hip, so you feel you need to as well. Gun crime increases, so now owning a gun is seen as a necessity.

As a result, GDP will increase. Other indicators – crime and wellbeing spring particularly to mind – would reduce.

If we measure money, it means we value money. Instead, we should be measuring wellbeing, in its broadest terms. This is the work of the Centre for Thriving Places, for whom I was a director and trustee for several years.

Measure What We Value

At the heart of the books I write are ideas. The notion of personal destiny and meaning. Whether it is acceptable to do something extreme if the intention and outcome is good. I like my books to be about something.

Among other things, The Vanishing Point is about understanding what it is that we value and that matters most to us, away from all the distractions that the modern world throws at us.

Let’s leave the last word on this topic to Robert Kennedy from a speech he gave in 1968:

“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”