East Midlands Business Champion Ali Sinclair helps Charity Shop DJ spin his business out in new directions.
Andy Jupp is a man in demand. His alter-ego, Charity Shop DJ, is known all over the world, with appearances at major music and arts festivals in the UK; an appearance at Australian World Music event WOMADelaide and the recent Latitude Festival in the UK; an exhibition based on his musical tours of India, and numerous community projects aimed at bringing people together through a shared love of music. It’s doubtful, though, whether this exciting project would have taken off as it has without the support of East Midlands Business Champion Ali Sinclair.
The Charity Shop DJ story starts almost a decade ago. Andy Jupp inherited a box of old vinyl albums and, leafing through them, realised that the music that he had left behind was a potent way to get to know his late uncle better. Andy had always been passionate about music and this idea grabbed him. As he said: ‘The idea started when my uncle died and left behind what I call “the world’s worst record collection”. It featured random cover versions of singers, populist songs from the cheapest labels, non-mainstream funk that wasn’t Beatles or Rolling Stones but rather a personalised emotionality’.
He took these, and other ‘easy-listening’ classics, memories of older music bought from charity shops, and remixed them in his own studio. From there, Charity Shop DJ started taking music into charity shops and then into old people’s homes, playing the music that the residents enjoyed and listening to their stories. Later, with the assistance of a music lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, Andy brought children into the old people’s homes so that the different generations could share and discuss each other’s musical tastes. This attracted the attention of the Arts Council, who saw the project as an important cross-generational project that had the potential to draw a wide variety of people together through music.
The idea was also extended to a day at the Houses of Parliament, where MP’s were encouraged to bring their favourite records, play them and talk about them. They weren’t allowed to talk about politics, just music, and maybe discover that, as people, they weren’t so very different after all. Many of the people who have come along to the ‘gigs’ have been photographed with their favourite records, creating a visual library of people alongside the music that helped to shape them.
Business Champions is a programme created and funded by the East Midlands Development Agency (emda), which recruits high-calibre proactive business figures. Working with voluntary and educational organisations, Business Champions support projects where a commercial perspective is needed. Andy Jupp recognised that he had a great idea, and had had some success in attracting Arts Council Funding. He didn’t really know what to do with it next. He presented his ideas to a meeting of East Midlands Business Champions in February 2008, hoping to find a mentor who would help him to develop his ideas and support him with project and business management.
Attending her first Business Champions Event was Ali Sinclair, a qualified business coach and Director of In Your Element, a business that offers coaching and mentoring services. Fascinated by the project, she immediately offered her services. Ali’s background is in engineering and IT project management, and she immediately appreciated that Andy needed to understand the importance of working in collaboration with other people, and he needed to develop his project management skills.
As Ali said: ‘Andy had all sorts of questions about business. His biggest need was for coaching that would give him the confidence to take the Charity Shop DJ project on to its next phase of development.’
Their first project together was to develop a plan and a proposal for a major arts event and exhibition in Derby. Ali supported Andy through the proposal phase, and once finding had been approved, she helped with project management throughout. The project, Derby Record Holders, included Charity Shop DJ workshopping with people throughout Derby, people including the President of Derby County Football Club, schoolchildren, church leaders, television presenters and senior police officers. People were encouraged to talk about their taste in music and how it has shaped them, and these workshops were photographed and recorded. Many of the people were invited to come along to an event in Derby’s Bar One, where schoolchildren, pensioners from the Golden Age club, BBC presenters and many others performed DJ sets, while belly dancers, musical performances and a choir also featured. The workshops and events became the Charity Shop DJ Lounge, a month long exhibition at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery that showcased Andy’s work and celebrated the power that music has to bring people together, whatever our musical taste happens to be.
Following the success of this project and others including his musical tour of India, playing the original soundtrack album of Bollywood classic Mughal-E-Azam on his portable turntable, which led to his invitation to perform at WOMADelaide; The Arts Council has identified Andy as a Creative Producer for the East Midlands and, again with Ali’s support, has been able to secure one of only a very small number of bursaries to develop community and inter-generational projects using Charity Shop DJ’s previous projects as a model.
Ali again: ‘Charity Shop DJ is poised for another growth spurt. My work with Andy will continue and I will carry on coaching him, helping him to increase his confidence and improve his methods of working. Already, through the workshops, we have identified other people, artists, other DJ’s, who we have identified as people we can work with to grow the concept further’.
Andy himself is quick to credit Ali Sinclair and East Midlands Business Champions: ‘She helped give us that top-level strategic understanding of where the business can go. Ali’s clear assessment of where we were at and implementation of some very specific coaching skills were invaluable. To have this input from someone in the business sector has meant that I’m now able to understand management and strategic thinking, which is something I’ve never had any formal training in.’