Music is everything.
Not a metaphor or figure of speech.
It is the literal truth how I experience being alive.
They say all art is an act of self-revelation.
I didn’t fully understand that until I stopped and looked at the shape of what I’d been writing for all these years. It was all in there — the joy and the doubt, the passion and the fear, the hope that keeps arriving despite everything, the loneliness, the moments of standing by when I should have stood up, the love, the heartache, the anger, the wonder. The whole soup.
Every song has been an attempt to tell the truth — about myself, and about the world I was watching. And somewhere in that truth, other people seemed to find themselves.
That’s how it’s always been. The music arrives, and then I find out what it means.
— A Kid —
I grew up inside music. The Serenaders — my grandad’s marching band, the best in the world — were the first world I knew. The discipline, the precision, the collective fire of seventy people who all knew exactly what they were doing and why it mattered. I played trombone. I performed. I felt, from the very beginning, what it meant to be part of something bigger than yourself.
The songs came later. And when they came, they surprised me.
I wrote a song called Gary’s Theme — for a boy the system had written off, a child whose talent nobody had thought to look for. It contained three lines that turned out to be about me too:
I am a voice for all those who have none,
Darkness I turn the lights on.
It's who I am.
— A City —
When I looked at the shape of the songs I was writing, a pattern emerged. Every one of them was a call to action — against homelessness and loneliness, against the silence around children whose voices weren’t being heard, against the comfortable indifference of people who had decided that changing themselves was someone else’s job.
How? A song about the thousands sleeping rough on Britain’s streets and millions living with loneliness.
Don’t Follow Me — about the unwillingness to take responsibility for your own transformation. Extensively played on BBC Radio.
Gary’s Theme — about a system that writes kids off, whose talents nobody had thought to look for
It seemed like there might be an album in this. An album that could spark something.
So I made it. SPARK.
And then I brought it home to Derby.
One hundred pupils at Mickleover Primary School recorded on LionHearts with me and performed on stage at the Spark concert.
Key council and business leaders in the city gathered around a shared vision — Project Cultural Campus — which went on to secure major funding for creative groups and crossover businesses across the region.
The song How? became the theme tune for a local homeless charity that raised thousands of pounds and brought over fifty people off the streets and into temporary accommodation.
And on the night of the Spark concert, the support act — musicians Matt McGuinness and Eileen Wright — walked away with an idea. Within months, the three of us had formed a CIC organisation called Furthest From The Sea.
Eleven years later: ten annual free music and arts festivals in Derby, attended by over fifty thousand local people. Thousands of regional artists given a platform, a strategy, and a stage. Hundreds of schools involved. A creative and community infrastructure that didn’t exist before one album asked a question and a city answered.
SPARK gave birth to something that is still burning.
— A Continent —
In 2012, my wife Jules and I helped create a conference called Awakening to Animals — two days of speakers exploring the bridge between animal science and spirituality. One of the keynote speakers was Linda Tucker, founder of the White Lion Trust: a woman who has dedicated her life to protecting the most sacred animal in African legend from extinction, from canned hunting, from the trophy trade.
Jules and I met Linda the night before the conference. Within an hour it was clear we were kindred spirits. We began working together immediately.
The songs that followed — Children of the Sun and LionHearts — became something neither I nor Linda had planned.
Children of the Sun became the White Lion Trust’s official anthem, and has played its part in bringing millions of dollars of funding to the conservation of white lions in Africa.
And LionHearts?
LionHearts mobilised an entire continent — inspiring campaigns that helped make canned hunting and trophy hunting illegal.
A song. An anthem. A law changed.
That’s what music can do when it finds the right cause and the right people.
— A Legend —
I barely slept the night before.
They’d put me up in a hotel in Buxton and I lay there in the dark — excited and petrified in roughly equal measure. I was a huge fan of the show and an even bigger fan of Cillian Murphy, long before Peaky Blinders took him to another level entirely. The following morning I was going to be acting in a scene with him. I didn’t eat breakfast. Call time was six-thirty.
What nobody had told me — what I genuinely didn’t know until much later — was that this was the very last scene of the very last episode of the last series. The final scene of Peaky Blinders. I didn’t understand the magnitude of it at the time. I just knew what we were doing, and I was terrified.
A hundred and fifty crew members already set up at seven in the morning. Lighting rigs. Camera positions. A fire engine on standby. An enormous truck from which you could hear and occasionally smell six white horses. Director Anthony Byrne walking me through the scene — my role in the last season of Peaky Blinders — including, as it turned out, the very last scene in the very last episode — was Dr Halford’s henchman. In this scene I was sent to burn down Tommy Shelby’s gypsy wagon.
We did a couple of rehearsals. "OK, take ten everyone" said the Assistant Director.
About twenty yards away there were a couple of big rocks. I got a coffee and sat down to wait for the next scene. And Cillian Murphy came and sat on the rock next to me.
Twenty minutes that I will never forget for as long as I live.
One of the nicest men I’ve ever met. One of the most genuine, humble, intense, charismatic people I’ve ever encountered. But we just talked like two blokes. We got into Radiohead — how much we both loved them, how haunting Thom Yorke’s voice is. He asked if I had kids. I told him about Luke and Sam and Rosie. He told me about his wife and his kids and how hard it was being away from them for seven or eight months at a stretch.
Me and Cillian Murphy. Just two blokes on rocks in Buxton. Talking about Radiohead.
Then he asked if I had any other projects coming up. And it just came out of my mouth — I told him about my grandad, about the Serenaders, about the story I’d been trying to tell for a year and a half, the place I’d got stuck.
And he turned to me, placed his hand on my shoulder, and said:
"Just do it, David. Seriously. I can see how much it means to you. It’ll be great."
Then he stood up, said "see you later" and walked off.
Eighteen months later — I made BAND. One of Six from ten thousand chosen by NETFLIX.
Maybe I should have thought more about it, huh?
Five takes.
A match thrown into the face of the camera.
Running down the hill as Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby chased me with a gun at my head.
Then, time for the pyro-guys. Everyone clear back!!
A massive bang. Flames everywhere. And Cillian Murphy and the director and the producers disappeared into the blackout tent to watch the playback.
And once again, Cillian Murphy turned. And looked at me. And motioned with his head.
"Come and see this."
He had every reason not to invite me in. He did it anyway. That consideration. That kindness. To a bloke he’d met that morning on a rock talking about Radiohead. I will never forget that.
Standing there in the middle of all of it — two hundred crew members, six white horses, a fire brigade, Cillian Murphy beside me — I felt it again. The same thing I’d felt before in rooms where everything was aligned. Where every person knew exactly what they were doing and why it mattered and how it connected to every other person around them.
My grandad knew that feeling. He built it in Derby, with a marching band, on stolen hours between railway shifts.
And thirty years later, on a hillside in Buxton, with six white horses and a fire brigade and Cillian Murphy beside me in a blackout tent —
I felt it again.
Same principle. Different world.
This is what the art has always been for me.
Not performance for its own sake. Not creativity as decoration. A way of finding out what I already know.
A way of doing, with music and film and the full weight of everything I’ve felt, exactly what I try to do in every room I walk into.
Lighting something up. And making sure it holds.
If you want to know what this looks like when it meets a room —