One of my favorite things about being a teenager was being in a band with my mates Ben, Ron, and Billy.
That’s them, left to right, with me second from left looking manic in the picture. Our mate Cosmo took the photo. I’m a lousy musician and I hate to practice. I don’t have the patience for it, for some reason. We hardly ever played live to an audience and our group didn’t even have a name. We’d play in a shed next to Ben’s garage on Friday and Saturday nights and play covers of songs we liked. We even made up a few songs of our own. It was riotous fun and a wonderful creative outlet for us from the demanding pressures of school life. Being brutally honest about my deeper motivations as a teenager it was also quite fun to take one’s, er, romantic prospects up there to listen to us play sometimes. I enjoyed sharing the secret of being in a band nobody ever saw play anywhere. Further narcissistic statement alert: The crazy thing about watching the eight-hour Beatles documentary Get Back was how it took me…back…to that shed.
When you’re young, you don’t always have the words for how you’re feeling. But if you’re together playing music, you can “work it out”, to quote The Beatles. The documentary re-taught me a lesson about how to work with people under stress. It’s important to prize the joy in the situation as much as you can, and to be just grateful for the opportunity to make music. That’s particularly true if you’re not sure where it might all be going. The joy of making the noise together is the simple perfect thing.
I bring the same spirit into my most successful working relationships.
When the Beatles get together at the start of the film, they’re facing a few challenges. John’s new girlfriend keeps showing up to practice. She seems more persistent than most of her peers in that regard. Old resentments about who gets to make the big decisions resurface. There are fallings-out. But the band work through their issues by talking them through when they can. There is a deep well of patience and tolerance and understanding. The band plays through its issues when they don’t have the words to resolve them. They seem to realize that while they’re all aging fast, their history means something more. There is preciousness in their moments together partly because change looms. Or, as Paul sings on Two of Us: “You and I have memories longer than the road ahead.”
What a beautiful testament to the value of deep, long-term relationships. Making the album seemed like a daunting task for the group when they first sat down. But by maintaining faith in each other and loosening their grip a bit, they got there. They learned to trust their own abilities again. It is a film about the process of a group of strong individuals coming together to produce something bigger than the sum of their parts. And it is an exploration of what works and what to avoid in going through a process like that.
I’m still good friends with my bandmates from school. Ron is my kid’s godfather. Ben sent me a terri-cloth t-shirt recently because it reminded him of Sean Connery’s early appearance in the movie, Goldfinger. Enough said. And I took my family to stay at Billy’s lovely house in Italy over the summer. He was amazingly generous. We played Monopoly and I didn’t even cry. That’s personal growth, right there.
Like the Beatles, most organizations I work with are riddled with complex interpersonal dynamics. One comes across the occasional monster ego. But the work, the reason everyone shows up in the first place, is too important to get stuck. And that’s where I try to come in and be most helpful. I loved being in a band, even if I was a bit of a narcissist about it. It also taught me how to work with groups whose dynamics are complex and long- established. I have a strong ability to read people and situations that even freaks me out sometimes. Those abilities were nurtured in that shed in Croydon. I like to remind people: What they really show up for is to make great music together. The rest is far less important.
In the end, the last episode of the documentary is so gleeful. I had a smile on my face for half an hour watching the band play on the roof of the Apple building on Savile Row. They could hardly believe they’d made it up there and how good they sounded. I hope you get a chance to watch it over the holidays, even if it does mean subscribing to Disney Plus. Likewise, I hope you get the opportunity to perform at your best with the people you do that best with, very soon. Here’s to the value of working relationships, and to “getting back” to them, somehow. Whatever that looks like in your life.
