A JOB AT THE COUNCIL
Around this time I came to the attention of the British Council. Like many people, when I first heard of their existence I thought they were the British embassy. When I was told they were attending one of my gigs, I did an angry, heavy performance, ranting poems about Thatcher, war and capitalism and, as I walked off stage, I thought the men in suits from the British Council would ignore me and never want to see me again. How wrong I was. The men in suits jumped up, saying, ‘Well done’, ‘You tell ’em’ and ‘We have to use you again.’ And so we began a long relationship.
At that time there was a lot of positive, fresh thinking in the British Council. They wanted to promote the new image of Britain. They were still sending opera singers and Morris dancers around the world, but they were now also using reggae and Asian music, modern dance and literature, and even modern sports to show all aspects of the new British culture.
It would be easy to think that the people behind this progressive thinking were all young funky things. Some of them were, but there were also a lot of older workers who for years had felt restricted to promoting what some (including me)would consider a colonial relationship. They now felt they could break out. One of the old guard told me that on the day he started work at the Council they gave him his retirement date and told him exactly how many working days and holidays he would have leading up to that date. He was basically told what he would be doing for the rest of his life.
There were rumours that the British Council spied for the British government, and I personally thought that was highly likely, or at least the local knowledge the staff had of a country could be utilised in times of war, or even in times of peace. I have noticed that the British government always seems to think of peace as a space in between wars . . . still, what I really loved about working with the Council was that they would send me to places that weren’t on the standard touring map.
Most European countries were easy to tour, as was the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. These countries had promoters who could fly you there and pay you, so it was easy to tour them independently. Where the British Council really came into its own was in sending me to countries that normally couldn’t afford to get me there – places like Papua New Guinea or the Seychelles, or locations where political communication wasn’t good but being worked on. So I would go into countries like Libya and begin to build cultural ties with likeminded people.
Travel has always been key to what I do. Not having had a good formal education meant I worked hard to make up for it by meeting people and learning from them. I love reading books about how people live around the world, but I prefer to go and meet the people myself.
Soon after I started travelling the world to perform, I had a conversation with my mum and we realised I was the most travelled person in the entire history of our family. She kept asking where I got the money to afford it, and I kept telling her that my flights and hotels were paid for. She found it very hard to believe and, at first, so did I. But for me it wasn’t about flights, hotels, or even fees. What I found amazing was the fact that I would turn up at a venue in India, Colombia, Zimbabwe or Fiji, and it would be full of people who had read my books or listened to my music. I was always very humbled by this and so, whether I was at home or abroad, I never took a single member of my audience for granted.
There is a common idea that when you go to a new country you can get a good feel for the place from taxi drivers, but I disagree; you get something from them, but it’s usually a very male-centric view. If I want to understand a country I talk to the women. Better still get to know the women. I have been to so many countries where the taxi drivers say, ‘Yeah, it’s great here, we’ve got freedom, we can do what we like’, and then you talk to the women and they tell you the truth: ‘Oh no, we’re not allowed to do this, we’re not allowed to do that, and we have no freedom.’ So I always say, talk to the women. In fact, I think you never really know a country until you’ve had sex in it and got arrested in it. If you’re on a quick visit, you could always have sex with the person who’s arresting you. But what do I know? This is only a theory, of course.
Travelling is how I got my education, but more importantly it’s how I got my compassion. As well as being able to speak to prime ministers and presidents, I’ve also spent time with homeless people and drug addicts in places like the streets of Johannesburg. In India, I spent a day with the deputy prime minister, then later that night I was on the streets of Calcutta talking to the poorest people I have ever seen about their dreams and nightmares. I always felt I had the ability to move in and out of different worlds.
If I was minister for education I’d make it mandatory that children have to travel at least once as part of their education, either paid for or highly subsidised. And I’m not talking about trips to France or Germany; they should go to Africa or Asia or to a completely different culture, where they eat differently, where they go to the toilet differently, where their houses are built differently. They should go somewhere their ‘normal’ will be challenged; somewhere they can really see and learn how different people function, and how much different people are the same.