The Above Average Adventures of an Average Man: Episode 1

From Glastonbury to TED to Boomtown to The World’s Biggest Virtual Music Festival via a Live Stream Gig on a Nuclear Submarine – How An Average Middle Aged Man and His Mates Made A Big Idea Happen.

Unless you happened to have come across it in a festival field, club night, conference or stumbled into it on social media, you won't have heard about this before. The only time I publicly shout about it is when I am in disguise jumping around on stage wearing a knocked-off Chinese fighter pilots helmet and rave paint or lambasting the Sleaford Mods on Twitter as the CEO of an invasive tech company (both of these guises will be explained in due course). I have felt too self conscious to write about it because it is unfinished, imperfect, a bit silly and might not be perceived as any good by people that I admire and respect. This thought fills me with paranoia because in my day job (I work in creative communications as a creative director) I try to project myself as insight driven, strategically smart and business focussed with shiny, successful case studies to impress clients with i.e. a professional grown up.

Since being furloughed, I have had time think about facing this fear. It has dawned on me that sharing this thing that has consumed me creatively for the past five years might be a good thing for 3 reasons; I am looking for a new job and maybe it could open up some conversations, the project thrives on collaboration and maybe someone will read this and jump on board and when I stand back and look at it objectively I realise that for some people it might be an inspiration to help them make their own idea happen.

The experience has been life changing and there are many above average adventures I could share about it another day, if you are interested. I'll begin with how it started and how it came to be.

Beautiful Future

Beautiful Future is a story that I wrote while day dreaming about what the world might look like when I was an actual adult. This was almost 20 years ago, when I was just an adult. Alone with my thoughts, Nokia in pocket, Gorillaz Plastic Beach on my ipod, not a Facebook friend in sight. A time Before Sci-Fi was hijacked by Super Heros , when satire could be identified as an definable genre and parody meant 'not actually real’.

It is a story about a Corporation called OneCor, led by their CEO Gordon Romance, who take care of our needs and desires at the expense of our freedom. Citizens are rewarded for compliance with social scores and lifestyle upgrades, their behaviour monitored and evaluated via a LifeAID in the arm*. All music and art is sponsored (and a bit crap) and unsponsored content (the good stuff) is outlawed with offenders sent for ‘rehabilitation’ at a OneCor facility called The Reflection Village (not like Centre Parks).

*Years later, OneCor's flagship product (it is not actually real, this is all make believe) would be launched on stage at TEDx

In protest at the data harvesting, hyper-neoliberal governance of OneCor, an alliance of 'sonic renegades, punks and misfits' rise from the Box City slum in the shadow of OneCor's glittering New Estates to resist the regime and unite the people. They call themselves W*A*R*S which stands for We Are Red Stars. These Red Stars are not a communist political movement. They are a band, DJ collective and crew of visual artists and party starting rebels that use art as their weapon. The Red Stars wear disco-pimped military fatigues in the field and red boiler suits and rave paint on stage. They evade OneCor by conducting operations onboard a stolen nuclear submarine called The Nautilus Sniper, converted into a music studio and party HQ. Their weapon of mass construction is a sonic canon armed by the W*A*R*S band and designed to knock OneCor spy satellites out of the sky. No blasters or light sabres here. Still with me?

The Nautilus Sniper Submarine - W*A*R*S music studio and party HQ

Franklins Bar in the Box City slum where W*A*R*S perform on stage while their crew recruit like minded souls in the back room

[Concept art by Red Star Kris Turvey]

Fan Boy Antics

My influences for Beautiful Future were 1984, The Prisoner, Blade Runner, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl and Gorillaz). Charlie Brooker was a few years away from the first episode of Black Mirror when I conceived OneCor and Gordon Romance, but I loved his parody website TVGoHome and characters like Nathan Barley. The idea of creating something ridiculous but believable, really appealed. Marrying that up with sensational but almost conceivable technology felt exciting. I’m not informed or clever enough to have envisaged that China would actually one day introduce OneCor’s social scoring of citizens (I guess a lot of smarter people probably did see that coming). I'm not proclaiming to be a Charlie Brooker master story teller or some kind of George Orwell futurist genius. I was just a science fiction fan boy making stuff up, remixing some of these guys stories and putting my own spin on things, for my own amusement.

Gordon Romance, Global Citizen & OneCor CEO. I nicked his name from a mate who used to make up favourable fake quotes from the NME for his band posters and sign them as Gordon Romance, which I thought was hilarious. Now I put his name to articles on Medium.

Rebel Music Makers

Music was a central part of this weird world I was dreaming up. Back then I was the singer in a band called Black Mariah and writing songs like Paranoid Nation and They Got the Guns that riffed on the themes of Beautiful Future. It was important to me that W*A*R*S were creators and makers, not soldiers and killers. Their war with OneCor was fought sonically using music and art, the central Red Star characters were all artists and inventors. The name Beautiful Future I nicked off of one of my all time favourite bands, Primal Scream. It is the title of one of their albums. Years later, one of my mates became the partner of Martin Duffy (Scream keyboards) and I had the surreal experience of revealing this to him after she suggested that I should tell him about the project. A super lovely down to earth chap, he was cool with it and even gave us some of his own music for the project, samples of which will feature on the W*A*R*S first album in 2021 (reminder to self, I need to clear this with him).

W*A*R*S Ritchie Badlands - disowned by his disappointed parents as a young boy, the bass players extraordinarily long arms were an early design glitch for OneCor's Pharmababy program. [Concept art by Kris Turvey]

A Bit Bobbins

After designing the world, characters and drafting several chapters I ended up with an incoherent, rambling journal of words, logos, crappy sketches and unfinished ideas that did not match up to the grandeur of this 'big idea' in my head. Substandard, wannabe novelist stuff. It gave me some ideas for songs and penning a few lyrics but would have been a pretty bad book. I needed help to develop the idea, to turn it into something worth telling people about but I didn’t have the balls to share it with anyone for fear of ridicule. I felt like Marty McFly "What if they say I'm no good? What if they say, Get out of here, kid. You got no future. I mean, I just don't think I can take that kind of rejection". So I buried it for the next 15 years.

Bobbins early sketches [By me]

Then What?

This 90 second video describes what happened next as a bridge to the second part of the adventure below.

So, if you watched that then you know that I have been living out my Beautiful Future dream for the past five years thanks to Propellernet (an amazingly supportive and progressive employer) and a crew of incredibly creative thinkers and doers made up of a growing collective of the most talented people I know. Some I have worked with for years in our day jobs creating campaigns and content for brands. A few of us collaborate alongside this as dead good studio. Some I have made music and performed in bands with over the years (some are now in the W*A*R*S band with me). Others I have met along the way as a direct result of the project and they each bring something unique to the group. Their collective skills include music, script writing, film, photography, design, illustration, animation, creative tech, set and prop building and even radio show production. We come together to design, build and host our immersive festival venues and parties, co-creating experiences which have given us memories and friendships that will last a lifetime. The most enjoyable part of putting Beautiful Future into the real world has been to witness this amazing level of collaboration with these brilliant, lovely people - original Red Star Material, all of them (even the OneCors).

W*A*R*S crew chilling backstage at our Secret Compound in Glastonbury

Another successful W*A*R*S operation, this time hijacking the OneCor keynote presentation at TEDx

Gordon Romance, OneCor CEO, delighting his fans at Boomtown

Sally Smiles, OneCor Head Of People, unimpressed with this citizens Social Score

W*A*R*S on patrol outside our secret compound at Kendal Calling Festival

Steve Baker, Head of OneCor Communications, exhibits the OneCor LifeAID at TEDx

Red Star 02 deploys the W*A*R*S Sonic Canon at a OneCor spy satellite overhead

Resist, Rise, Unite! W*A*R*S cast on the set of our web series

Red Sparks (W*A*R*S Junior Squadron) prepare for the party at Bluedot Festival

Red Star 16 aka Seize, recruiting citizens to join W*A*R*S via our Time Travelling Disco. *Strictly no OneCors

W*A*R*S live is a 7-piece electronic band. I lose half a stone every time we do a show thanks to the helmet and boiler suit. We perform with visors down so I regularly fall of the edge of the stage, too.

Red Star 0880 aka Jem Drogan, leading tactical operations at Kendal Calling Festival

Red Star Joe Meredith aka The Profound Gardner - we found him in a field and he's become our spiritual pied piper. *Top of OneCor's Most Wanted list

W*A*R*S character illustrations by Red Star Sam Williamson

Red Star Lauren Hudson is one of our singers in W*A*R*S. She is amazing but will only perform if the world's largest disco ball is on her rider, which is problematic on board a submarine

Being Gordon Romance on Twitter is fun but can also be exhausting as I can never let my guard down. Steve Mason is the most engaged famous person which is amazing to me because I have been a massive fan of his since The Beta Band. He's even on one of my original mood boards as an example of what W*A*R*S are all about. Most people end up getting it but a few have blocked Gordon including Neville Southall after Gordon identified him as a high ranking Freemason - which is of course a ridiculous thing to say if you know anything about Neville, which I do because I think he's bloody great. Neville, if you somehow read this, please unblock Gordon and go give him hell. We need more Red Stars like you

Our first show was in 2015. We created a boutique music festival in the French Alps and convinced 250 guests that the organisers had been bullied into sponsorship by OneCor energy drink Alpine Milk. On the final night of the event, 20 flare waving Red Stars appeared from the forest, hijacked Gordon Romance's closing presentation, handed out diffraction glasses and saved the party with a blistering, bonkers DJ set. This DJ set-up would later develop into the W*A*R*S live band but we still have a 15-strong, in-character, DJ sound system now, spanning multiple genres of 'rebel music'

[Film by Red Star Alan Stockdale / Foundlight]

After a shaky production build (which I will spill the beans on in a future episode), our W*A*R*S secret compound at Glastonbury 2017 became the must-find venue of Shangri-La. Even Bez and Radiohead stopped by to evade OneCor surveillance.

Yoda v Jawa

Our collective enthusiasm, energy and sheer blagging with conviction has opened doors that I can’t quite believe. Try pitching this thing to a room of heavyweight music festival organisers who have never heard of you or your daft story, as you sit there in a Disco Lid (Red Stars standard issue helmet), visor down, and ask for their trust and budget to build an ‘immersive-theatrical music venue in the form of a secret compound from the near future’ in their field. The video below cracks me up. It shows mine and Sam’s faces immediately after our first meeting with Boomtown - the gods of immersive festival making and the Master Yoda to our Junior Jawa when it comes to their know-how and experience. It should be noted that Sam Zindel (Red Star 05, W*A*R*S bass player, my partner in crime) has run record labels, played in bands and is the MD of an award winning marketing agency. He is renowned as calm personified but look at his face (and mine, to be fair) as we suddenly crap ourselves at the enormity of what we have just let ourselves in for. We have all been totally out of our depth at times but belief and hard work has pulled us through and we have had an absolute blast along the way.

Red Stars 06 aka Rogue Leader (that's me pouting like Little Mix) & 05 aka Sonic Joyrider (that's Sam) - both of us looking a little more self assured on patrol with the Mobile Micro Rave Sound System.

The Current Day

Just prior to lockdown and the cancellation of summer music festivals, we had been looking forward to a return to Boomtown with a new OneCor venue and launching our own immersive club night. The W*A*R*S band and DJs were set to perform on some of the biggest stages in the land and we had finally planned to screen our web series – a theatrical mini movie telling part of the Beautiful Future story. Then coronavirus happened so all plans were put on ice. W*A*R*S hunkered down on board the Nautilus Sniper submarine to record a mix tape for CALM while OneCor launched IZZI to report low scoring citizens breaking social distancing laws and Felicity to take high scoring citizens minds off it all.

W*A*R*S Rebel Disco - our immersive club night at The Factory Live where the audience can go down a rabbit hole into the Beautiful Future story - soundtracked by music from the W*A*R*S band and DJs [Date rescheduled due to Covid, next event will now take place on 15th May 2021, fingers crossed]

OneCor Superstore at Boomtown 2019 showcased 12 lifestyle upgrade products, a Brand Ambassador recruitment centre and a hidden store room - the Boomtown Hackers secret hideout - which festivals Maze players had to bribe their way past OneCor security guards to access. By night, W*A*R*S broke into the superstore to host an off-the-grid party with secret DJ sets and midnight performances from the band.

Back in the real world, with physical events cancelled, people started to get creative in other ways as virtual events and live streams suddenly became the thing (if you didn’t see The Streets live stream, it raised the bar and has really inspired me to think about what we could do with W*A*R*S while playing live is not possible). What started as a summer of disappointment became a summer of opportunity, firstly with OneCor playing a leading role in Boomtown’s Area 404 ARG (Alternate Reality Game) and then shooting an exclusive W*A*R*S concert film for The World’s biggest virtual festival, Lost Horizon Festival that drew a global audience of 4 million.

We are now using that concert film, our web series and festival activation footage to create our debut W*A*R*S album - the format for which I want to feel new, original, exciting and immersive. We have the music and the content done but haven't fully nailed the idea or the platform yet. I'd love to pitch it to a computer games company and reimagine the story as a digital-first world from which the characters, band and music then break out into real world for exclusive, immersive events before going back in again. In keeping with the rest of this sprawling project, our approach is experimental and non-linear. It's like creating a puzzle but making the pieces first rather than the full image and then using those pieces to create the final artwork. This approach feels fun and abstract but sometimes it's maddening. The end result will either be genius or a bit shite. What I love about this is that it's the complete opposite to how I work in my day job where the brief and idea are precise and results driven. With Beautiful Future I get to be an artist with no agenda, experimenting as we go.

We filmed and edited an exclusive W*A*R*S concert film in just 48 hours for Lost Horizon Festival on a bill that included Fatboy Slim, Eats Everything and Peggy Gou.

Things I Have Learnt On This Nuts Journey

The best advice I have ever had is to surround yourself by people that are more talented than you. Beautiful Future ensures that I do just that. Things I’ve learnt so far on this nuts journey:

1. Fear stands between the mundane and life changing experiences

2. Embracing your ego is good for self-confidence and self-awareness i.e. as a reminder to be appreciative, kind, not a dick

3. Dare to show the unfinished stuff, it's the process that is often more interesting to people

4. Be brave, dig in and and do the graft so you can leave a legacy for your kids to be proud of (memories over money)

5. Dreams are things you cant' be bothered to try and achieve

You Actually Read This Far?

If you would like to see behind the scenes of some of our above average adventures, like exploding beer kegs and stranded comrades in desert heat at Glastonbury, a knee-deep-in mud-near-catastrophe at Kendal Calling Festival, a non-stop 48-hour mid-lockdown video shoot for the World’s largest virtual festival and some other very near misses (and hits) along the way - then keep this frequency clear for more incoming adventures.

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