The arts give so much, it’s time for governments to give them support

I haven’t properly tuned in for years, but I paid attention this week. August 2021 promises banging punk jazz (The Comet Is Coming), Mali soul (Fatoumata Diawara) and Brit-pop-goes-Icelandic (Damon Albarn), alongside the tuxedo-wearing, canonical recitals I usually associate with EIF.

There’s also loads of neo-folk, militant theatre and participative dance on the Meadows. And, it seems, there are physical venues to go and see everything in. Life begins again.

And then, it sputters. Part of my existence is being a touring professional rock musician. And every other week brings a rescheduling of a large or small gig on an upcoming date, to some distant slot in 2022. It’s usually because the promoters can’t find a private insurer to cover the upfront costs, if a gig ends up being Covid-cancelled.

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Even the Financial Times wrote an editorial on how destructive this is. £500 million of cancellation cover has been provided by the state to the film and TV industries, which allowed investors to invest and jobs to be preserved. Zero support, of this kind, for performers.

By the UK Government’s own 2019 figures, the performing arts generate £7.9 billion of gross value added, employing 250,000 full-time equivalent jobs, with audiences of 34 million spread across these islands.

So in terms of the multiple forms of wellbeing – from enjoyment to employment – the performing arts bring, shouldn’t our governments step up to resolve this insurance issue?

But Virusworld is so dynamic and unpredictable. And merely human schemes for mitigating risk (financial or otherwise) fare poorly in its wake.

From the same inbox that causes another cut and paste in my gig calendar, comes other dispiriting news. Turns out that the Delta variant of the coronavirus may be particularly injurious to those with the Pfizer jags.

O vanity! I’ve been silently relieved for the last month or so, since my second Pfizer jab, that I now have the best available chance of resisting Covid. I’m a glowing medical cyborg, brimming with antibodies. Thank you, modern science!

Maybe I’d be able, along with a proportion of our audience similarly protected, to stand on the stage of a venue again. It is a good half of my life; I miss it. And in any case, the old resources gauge is needling towards amber. We need to start working again.

But faith and optimism are being sorely tested in this pandemic. The bug itself is non-negotiable: it sprouts and innovates as it needs to, in order to survive and spread. And as it does so, it rips up whatever consolatory story you tell yourself.

For a year, I’ve been hanging onto a big story in my head. You’ll have read it here many times: Covid is delivering a wake-up call from our disrupted biosphere. If the bug jumped from forest to humans, as agri-business smashed its way through nature, spreading swiftly through our world of globalised travel and supply-chains –then we should listen to, and act on, the message being delivered.

Which is? Our consumerism (and productivism) are breaking the safe boundaries of life on this plane. The pandemic reminds us we should be planning an orderly but swift retreat.

But wait. What if Covid-19 didn’t come from a bat in a wet market in Wuhan, but a leak from a secretly experimenting laboratory in Wuhan, funded by international interests (American and French, as well as Chinese)? What if this catastrophe was caused by the same scientific community we revere as our defenders against contagion?

The practice being blamed is called “gain-of-function” research (where the contagion of viruses is deliberately intensified), encouraged by Western as well as Eastern governments. In recent weeks there have been a range of solid reports suggesting we don’t discount this as a source for Covid (listen to the “Lab Leaks” podcast from Radio Open Source for a compilation of them).

SO what does one even do with this information? It’s always consoling to find a whistle-blowing scientist, Richard Ebright of Rutgers University. Ebright has worried about lab leaks for years and lays the responsibility solidly at his own country’s door.

“We have a massive vulnerability to future pandemic emergence coming from the lax biosafety and biosecurity risk assessment standards that are in place,” he writes. “And US activities have been driving international activities over the last two decades.”

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This at least maintains some kind of geopolitical balance in the head, as the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology spirals up the tornado of a new Cold War with China. But at a much deeper level, the feelings of insecurity and doubt this possibility generates are profound.

How does citizenship even work – where we are supposed to exercise vigilance over those whom our taxes fund, or who represent us – when experts and elites are so heedless, untouchable and unaccountable? And deeper than that: how have we let our human ingenuity get so out of control, that we put ourselves in peril every which way?

Do the questions get any bigger? Enter, usually, the artists, performers and story-tellers. I don’t see much operating at that level in the Edinburgh International Festival programme.

But I do note that the brilliantly offbeat theatre company Grid Iron is staging its long-awaited Doppler at the Fringe. Or more precisely, in whatever appropriate forestry they can find.

Doppler is a satire, adapted from a Norwegian novel, where a grieving son decides to take up a quirky, animistic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle just outside Oslo. He becomes a cause-celebre for various interests, though struggles to maintain the purity of his non-consumerist existence.

The clips of it that have appeared online are funny and intense. It reminds you that laughter, however dark, is as nourishing a creative response to nerve-shredding times as anything else. I hope some of the pressures of the age are as delightfully filtered and transformed by the Fringe this year, in whatever form it manifests.

However, I’m a musician, and I like to sing to people. Like many of our peers, Hue And Cry made a decent commercial fist of pulling together live online concerts over the last year. But it feels like there needs to be more enduring structures built for the performing arts in the pandemic era, made from both clicks and mortar. The Scottish Music Industry Association (disclosure: my brother Gregory is on the board) made some futuristic suggestions in their Moving Forward report from earlier this year.

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How about a network of Scottish live streaming hubs, venues equipped and connected for transmission? Some prototype “immersive” gigs, where bands appear in games or other virtual spaces? A national booking app which could encourage artists to using smaller, more local venues – so-called “corridor” touring?

And of course, structures like these would serve many other genres in the performing arts, like theatre, dance, clubs and classical. They would be a national response to the fact that we, performers and audiences, must adapt to a settling reality.

Our presence in the public world has become an episodic affair. And one where it’s never predictable when one episode ends, as these viruses mutate, and another begins.

So real life has become artistic, then – something of a waking dream. All the more reason to structurally support artists whose job it is to explore, to ravel, unravel and ravel again, what it is to be fully human.

As we struggle to become new selves of the viral age, we almost certainly need creators to do their thing, and sing their song, more than we know.

See the full list of events at this years Edinburgh International Festival at www.eif.co.uk