Another music in a different kitchen

I hear voices. Saying things like, ‘You’re an idealist, yet when you want to highlight something like singlemindedness, honesty or other useful brand qualities, you choose people like Lou Reed or Bernard Bresslaw as examples. What about Martin Luther King or Gandhi or other ethical supermen? Or, why not just successful people from the world of business?’ Well, as much as I admire the world-changing luminaries, I sometimes find it difficult to relate to them. I also think it’s somewhat pretentious to be dropping Barrack Obama into every conversation. My influences are personal. They are never going to be Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates or Richard Branson. I get my drive from the renegades, the real and fictional. Mark E Smith. Rab C Nesbitt. Tom Waits. Estragon and Watt from the work of Samuel Beckett. The guy selling the Telegraph & Argus in Bradford city centre, whose eyes were so deepset they seemed press-studded to the back of his head. Much of my branding work lies in social and environmental change with charitable and public sector organisations. I can respond to the ‘I have a dream’ and ‘Yes we can’ statements as much as the next man. I even write some of them myself. But I get my inspiration for my work from the way my imagination plays on certain conditions of humanity. There is a theme here. And it’s probably something to do with the taboo of mental illness. Having met and befriended my own demons, I feel a great empathy for others who are struggling with theirs. So, I can understand the Kron Man who picks up the mouldy cabbages in the final minutes of Lichfield Market more than I can understand Sir Alan Sugar. I can come to terms with the plastic intonations of the Cone Man of Carnaby Street more quickly than I can with Princess Diana. What can I learn from The Economist or The Spectator that is not better said in songs by Mark E Smith called Eat Y’Self Fitter or How I Wrote Elastic Man? The people I select to discuss in this blog are not chosen because I need to pick somebody from today’s birthday list. They are people who are meaningful to me. In my branding work, I seek to break through people’s outer crust and journey on to the centre of their earth. I’ll only stand a chance of doing that if I put myself into my writing. And the only way to do that is to put everything that has meaning to me into these words. One man and his blog.

Mark Griffiths http://www.idealconsulting.co.uk/