The Wise Why

Original Music is played during this episode with permission from the artists. ‘Do You Believe in Magic’ (Goldwood) is cowritten and performed by Helen Goldwin and Kevin Wooding with their permission and is played at the end of the episode.

Kevin Wooding: Off on a rocket ship.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Here you go. Good morning and welcome to the wise y this morning, as you can always hear, I have my guests in the studio before we even start, which I just love. So, this morning, we are going to have some fun. It’s Christmas. Why not? And yes, I am dating this episode. But you know what? Life is too short to worry about all of these crazy things that they tell you to do and not to do. And, of course, with my guest this morning, that is perfect. So, I am joined by Kim Kevin Wooding, who has known me now. I’ve bought it since I was 17, but it turns out since I was 16. So, there you go. A bit of my past coming into my future. Kevin, please. As always, this show is not about me, so please introduce yourself.

Kevin Wooding: Hello, everybody. Welcome. I am Kevin Wooding, and, uh, I am a musician, composer, a pianist. And I’ve had quite an interesting journey along with that because I, um, ended up exploring other things as well, which have really related and tied together every aspect. I feel that, uh, for me, is what life is about. So, I’m thrilled to be able to have a little chat about it. Alexander Technique and vision work and everything.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Thank you. Thank you. So, this morning, just, uh, we may have some technical issues. I don’t know. I’ve never done this before. We’re going to bring some music in because it would be a crying shame to have a composer and a musician on the show and not showcase some of his amazing music. And of course, I’m privy to this because I’ve heard it since I was 16, when he was teaching sight singing. So, Kevin, you just mentioned that you now do Alexander, uh, technique. But what I really want to explore at the beginning of this is about your music. And I think yesterday we were talking, and you said asked me a question about what is music? Is that right?

Kevin Wooding: Yes, that’s right. What is music? It was interesting because this started back when I was at teaching at Arts Ed, where you were a young student. And, uh, I was given the task of teaching the very, very talented young people how to sing from sight, from the written music on the page. And many of these people were just natural born performers, or they naturally sort of felt what the music should be doing. So, reading and performing, sometimes it’s like, oh, how do we put those two together? Because you can get people who are good site readers, but really can’t perform very well. They haven’t got that kind of extra, what’s it called, the X factor. Uh, and it was interesting because the texts at the time were academic. They were not really engaging. The sense of, like, what is the meaning of this? Why are we doing this? It was more like learn the Centerville, really practice it, learn the next one. And it was like, I mean, it was dead, basically. And, uh, I found that people didn’t turn up to classes. They didn’t feel it was very interesting. And I thought, this is frustrating. Yes, I saw that little look and, um, I started to develop a new way of presenting it. And this was to show people how each of these intervals had meaning to them. So, it was going directly into the emotional landscape of all these performing people. And they loved it. They absolutely loved it. You missed that bit, Kirsty. Yeah, it was really interesting. Um, it calls back into the sort of innate vibration that is within all things we have within music. Uh, every note that you hear has a vibration to it. But it has more than just its single vibration. It has a series of, uh, ever sort of higher and higher notes that are imperceptible to most people. Um, some cultures, uh, like, ah, um, Asian music, Indian music with the Czar and stuff, they really emphasize all these sorts of what they call partials or harmonics above. And I suddenly saw that this was innate within everybody. So, I thought, I’m going to start getting them to explore what these feelings mean between different intervals. In Western music, it’s like, we play this note and then we play this note, and we have those relationships, uh, spelled out. But every note itself has its own etc. What was fascinating is that these young people, I would say, just get yourself very peaceful, just listen to the sounds around. I’m going to play some notes and want to tell me what you see? What do you feel is happening? And there was, like, I’d say about 80%, like consensus. They all felt and saw the same thing, sometimes specific, you know, um, nursery rhyme. Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Right.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Yeah, of course it is.

Kevin Wooding: It has an interval on it. Huh? Twinkle, twinkle. That opening interval, that’s the perfect fifth. And that is a wonderful relationship of two cycles to three cycles. So, it’s two to three relationships. And that is in so many star themes. Star Wars. Uh, what is the universal language that’s being spoken here? The result of this was, um, I suddenly saw that we as a human species have drawn on the vibration, have pulled it together. It has come into different formats across the globe. As I mentioned, uh, Asian music or the, uh, sitar, or the Tibetan monks chanting. They are all about the harmonic series. They’re all about the total vibration of how things work. The planets actually work in the same way in relation to the sun. Um, they call it the music of the spheres.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Listening. I’m loving this.

Kevin Wooding: You put it all together and then suddenly there’s this sort of knowledge that we are part of this, our musical literacy. They’re not talking just about musicians, I’m talking about the people who listen, people who go to the movies and say, oh, I love this, I love the music. The music is crucial to letting your emotions flow with what’s happening on the screen.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Brilliant. Yeah, I remember my mom when I was really, really young uh, before I went to Arts and I was uh, in primary school and she sat myself, my brother and my sister on the floor and played handles water music and made us close our eyes and listen and that’s where my love of music really started. So that’s my mom. Thank you uh, and I remember studying the harmonics when we were doing music at, uh, school because obviously I went to school at Arts as well this brings me on to a perfect point to play a beautiful piece of music.

Kevin Wooding: Can I just talk a little moment of a moment? Yeah uh, so this, this uh, piece of music comes it’s called a Welsh fantasy and it comes from a period when well, I still go to Wales regularly I just love Wales so much. I was going to Wales maybe, um, once or twice a year and spending maybe a week or two there and.

Kevin Wooding: In the middle of the winter when I wasn’t in Wales, I was suddenly I have to call this a dream happened where Wales is full of dragons, right? I had not connected that when I was there. I never even perceived that this was a thing it’s on the flag, for goodness’ sake so I hadn’t thought of it. But suddenly there was uh, in my dream, a dragon on the bed and it was a very real dream. I woke up convinced there was a dragon outside the house, and I was awake the rest of the night thinking this in an imaginary sort of fantasy sort of world and I thought, what is this? And I thought, how can I express the meaning of this? Because it was so significant, it was so powerful and I got a little story in my mind about what it could be about and that’s developing but I thought, I’ve got to get some music down to show what this felt like. So, you can play the music now.

Kirsty van den Bulk: It should come in the background. We’ve got a beautiful picture to bring in as well.

Kevin Wooding: Lovely.

Kirsty van den Bulk: I’m hoping everyone can hear that.

Kevin Wooding: Yeah, you can increase the volume.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Yeah, I can’t hear unfortunately um I think it’s going to have to increase slowly.

Kevin Wooding: Perfect.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Absolutely, uh beautiful. And of course, I spent my whole my childhood in Wales. Um oh, it’s still going slightly.

Kirsty van den Bulk: To miss this bit.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Thank you that was uh absolutely beautiful. I think we’ve lost your volume now that’s a bit strange. There we go there we go. Oh, few that was absolutely beautiful. And of course, I grew up spent all my summers in Wales as a child because my grandparents lived in Llandilo, and that’s just well, they lived in Llansadrwn. Well, anyway, that area, um, um, um, magical, and I’m sure the listeners really enjoyed it. So, an inspiration from a dragon.
Kevin Wooding: Can you yeah, can you believe it?

Kirsty van den Bulk: Obviously, um, you’ve got an accent there. So, I want to talk about the shift from where, um, you came from music to Alexander Technique in The Baits, but I’m also intrigued how you came to England.

Kevin Wooding: Okay? Yeah. England. When I was growing up, uh, my family, it was always a place that you ended up having to go to. It was, um, not only in the family, but it was in the culture in New Zealand, people would talk about OE, which was equivalent meant exactly overseas experience. New Zealand is a very at the time, I mean, it always has been a long way from everywhere, but people, um, didn’t travel even that much back then. Um, it was a little bit more expensive in relation to incomes and that sort of thing. So, a lot of people just were born in New Zealand, grew up in New Zealand, and died in New Zealand, and never actually went even as far as Australia, which isn’t that part of the way. So, my, uh, sister would come over, my brother had come over. I was studying music, and, uh, I had a teacher that I was going to come to over here, um, in the Royal Schools that I was going to work with. And somehow, uh, I ended up teaching at ArtsEd Instead of a set of circumstances, it just sorts of came about and that just happened. So changed my life in that way.

Kirsty van den Bulk: I for one am, so pleased that you came to Arts Ed, that we had that reunion, uh, by David, uh, Wood, and that I asked to meet you. So, um, yeah, big shout out to the big man there. Um, um, so, moving on, I really want to know about the leap, because it is a big leap, and some people talk about quantum leaps, and I call them Alice moments, but there is a huge leap here from music to Alexander Technique to The Bait Method. So, can you explain? Because for some people, not even heard of Alexander’s Technique or the Bates method.

Kevin Wooding: Yeah, well, just before leaving New Zealand, I had a serious car accident. Suppose it’s just a bit of sort of unlucky circumstances and slightly sort of poorly planned road markings and everything. It was a very familiar bit of road that I knew very well. It, uh, was a motorway. So, I had head on collision on a motorway. Uh, the motorway itself had drawn end, uh, for a tunnel from what was four lanes, um, two on each side, uh, down to three. So, the one I was on was a single lane going into the tunnel. Done this many, many times. No, cars in front of me. Not a problem. What I did not know was that there it was sort of about this time of the year in, in New Zealand. It was November. Um, it’s warming up, there are thunderstorms. There had been an enormous downpour just around the openings of the tunnel and probably the land all around, of course, but the cars had dragged a lot of water into the tunnel. When I drove up to the tunnel, perfectly dry, I was maybe 2030 minutes later. Um, it was warm, so all the water just simply evaporated. And uh, the tunnel itself curved and came around the corner. And when I said there was no traffic, there was literally a bank of traffic completely stationary in front of me. So, I just thought oh, that’s fine. I put my foot on the brake and I aquaplaned went straight into the cars coming towards me. And I hit maybe five cars in total. Um, no one was seriously injured. You know, I was standing in a I’m standing, sitting, I’m sitting literally in a cubicle thinking, what’s happened? You know, I I had obviously been out. I’d been either knocked out or in shock or something. Um, quite something. It was, ah, a sort of moment where you don’t really realize what’s happened to you. And uh, there was quite a long saga, which I’m not going to go into because it’s going to take up the rest of the show. Um, but yeah, it was very dramatic moment when a few days later, I was able to speak to one of the witnesses and he asked me which car I had been in and I told him and he went completely silent. And, um, I said hello. Hello, are you there? And then there was this sort of horse whisper as he said, I thought you were dead.

Kevin Wooding: He had seen me with eyes wide open, mouth wide open. I had a cut on my head and the head, it bleeds a lot. So, it just looked really bad, like something out of the zombie movie. It was like that moment. Um, it started to change things in my perception of how life was working. It wasn’t like a dramatic near-death experience like that. It was near death because I could have one ah, second this way or one split second that way or that way. I would have been up against the, um, tunnel wall instead. Something else would have happened like that. But um, I was very lucky. There were cars there to cushion my flight, as it were. And uh, yeah, um, it changed things very oddly. And it’s only in the last decade or even the last few years that I thought, oh gosh, there are all sorts of details there that sent me on a different track. So, when I got to Arts, I was like on the same track I thought I’d always been on. But it started to divert because I was no longer thinking, I’m going to be a concert pianist. I was thinking, oh, I’ll come back to that in a bit, but I’m going to do this now, since it’s interesting. It’s, um, fun. So, things started to shift, but there were two significant things that happened. One was I had a knee injury. Because your foot is on the brake, you get a lot of impact through that right leg. And the, uh, other one was that I had just had a prescription for my glasses, a piece of paper, just before the accident. So, I hadn’t made the new glasses up yet. They were legal for driving still. There was not a problem there. And a, uh, week later, after the accident, I got the prescription made up and I got the glasses, and they weren’t strong enough. And I thought, this is weird. They must have made a mistake at the factory. So, I went back to the optician. I said, can you please check these glasses against the prescription? And he said, no, these are perfect. This is exactly the prescription. This is let’s test your eyes again. And they had deteriorated by another half a diopter. So normally that might take place over two years, not over a week or a week and a half. And I said to him, well, I’ve just been in this traumatic car accident. Has that had an effect on my eyes? And I remember he said the very words were, oh, no, your eyes have nothing to do with the rest of the body. And I have to say, I was 22 years old. My literal thought was this is a scam 20 or 22. You just let me jump into kind of all sorts of things. But I thought that had to be pardon the kind of term, but a very short-sighted way of looking at what had happened. And I couldn’t afford another pair of glasses, so I kept these ones that were slightly too weak. And, um, within a year, my eyes had gone back into them. And I got a test a year later and my eyes were fitting the glasses rather than the other way around. Uh, this raised that question. The knee, uh, manifested two or three years later when I was on the cycle tour. And I just sat down in the morning eating a huge amount of pan au chocolate and this sort of thing, and I couldn’t stand up. And my knee was excruciatingly painful, just out of the blue. And it went on. I thought it would go away just as quickly, but it stayed for two, three, four years like that. And in the midst, I had an x ray and was told I was getting arthritis. So, all these things put music a little bit on the side and said, I have to look at what’s happening to me and see what I can do about it. And, uh, that led me to the Alexander Technique to help me to use my body better. I changed diet. I changed the way I was eating as well. And, uh, I came up Scot free from all the problems. I mean, it was bad enough when I was at the doctors when they finally did an X ray and looked at it and said, you’ve got the beginnings of arthritis and, um, you’ve got about 90% chance of being in a wheelchair by the time you’re 30. Uh, I just said no. I’m not doing that.

Kirsty van den Bulk: It’s inspirational. You went off and found alternative ways to move. And we studied, uh, a little bit of Alexander Technique, uh, as ours because it was about movement based, but obviously not as far as you’ve gone out. And it’s quite in depth. And I know some people, uh, will be listening on this who’ve got a back problem or an injury. If you could just expand a little bit more about what Alexander Technique does.

Kevin Wooding: Yeah, it helps you become aware of what it is you are, uh, doing. Um, it’s a very curious thing because I know what I’m doing. I’m rushing off to the shops. I’m doing this and that. It’s not that. It’s the way your body relates to gravity. If you go to a singing, um, teacher or if you go to a violin teacher or something, they will talk about your technique in relation to the instrument, whether it’s yourself, with your voice, or if you’re a sports person, your technique in relation to your tennis racket. So that is one thing, but everybody relates to the planet. It’s done in an enormous variety of ways with all the, uh you know, every person has their own little foibles little quirks about how they think their body needs to work. And it feels familiar and as if there’s nothing wrong until some problem starts to appear. What we do in the work is just get a person to literally stop, to be exactly where they are, and then to see if with that pause, that little moment where you don’t have to rush. I mean, one of the big issues is that everyone thinks, well, I’m generalizing, of course, but I should be getting on with that. I should be so the mind is pulling into the future. The body tries to reflect that and gives you a feeling of anticipation. So, there’s sort of this subliminal level of tension on the person that is so normalized, uh, that it feels extraordinary when you stop because you suddenly realize what you’ve been doing. So, we sometimes call it unlearning because, in a way, you learned from culture, from the way the world works. We’ve got a very complicated culture. You know, it’s really, we haven’t changed that much from, you know, what human beings were like sort of, you know, 40,000 years ago. There hasn’t been that much actual change. But the culture around us, as it develops, I mean, the music I was talking about before, um, that’s a form of emotional technology that helps us to understand our emotions, but it’s actually made us able to express and connect. No other species has done this to such a degree before. So, the Alexander Technique, as I said, gets you to stop and puts you back where your primal self actually is most at peace.
Kirsty van den Bulk: You’ll know where from tennis players, right?

Kevin Wooding: I am, um, yeah, I’m super excited about this. Uh, I approached, um, uh, a lady from the, um, tennis professional, uh, WTA m Women’s Tennis Association, someone that had already made inquiries about working with vision. And I said to listen, would you like to do an experiment with me? Because I’ve had people who have come to me for Alexander, for sport? Well, not for sport, north, because I’ve got a backache, I’ve got a back pain. But they’ve found aspects of their sport improve. The best story, I think, is the fellow who came to me, and he didn’t seem to make much real impression. Uh, he didn’t speak much about what was happening. And I said to him one day, what are you actually getting out of this most? What do you feel is happening? And he said, oh, I’d run better. I said, oh, really? Tell me about that. And he told me this amazing story where he was in a race, he was a triathlete, and they run all over the countryside, and he crossed over a, uh, um, style. The whole pack was coming in, so they all had to go and turn one after the other over this style, which is like a little set of steps over a fence. And, uh, he got onto the field and ran across it, and he found himself completely alone. And he said, well, the field was pretty tricky, but when I turned around, the rest of the pack were either lying down on the field, falling over or getting up. They were not able to run across the field. He had just sailed across. And he said, my feet, I didn’t even bother. I just let them do what they know how to do. The problem on the field was it was muddy, and there were rocks hidden in the mud, so you didn’t know whether you were going to land on the ground or on a little kind of hidden step or something to trip on. He just ran straight across, and he said, this was down to the technique. I said, well, doesn’t that sound like some kind of really primitive human being who’s just able to sail across something fit? No problem. It’s fun. It really is interesting.

Kirsty van den Bulk: It does. I can remember the little bits we did, and it is about kind of realigning, and as you said, relearning. And some people will think it’s mumbo jumbo but it really isn’t. It kind of links back to Taylor Ism and a whole load of other things. That I know some people don’t like Taylor ism, but obviously, as actors, we studied that. So, it’s just really interesting to hear you talk about it. And I’d like to touch slightly onto the Bates method just so that people understand what it is, and then, um, ask you about your AHA moments.

Kevin Wooding: Ask me about what? Sorry?

Kirsty van den Bulk: Aha moments So, where you’ve headed up, actually, maybe just how the song came about that we’re going to play at the end of the episode.

Kevin Wooding: Absolutely, yes. Okay. So, I was just going to mention one more thing about the technique. There has been a very good longitudinal study done for it in relation to back pain. It was very successful.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Shying away there.

Kevin Wooding: Yeah, I just remembered you’ve told me this yesterday. I’ll look forward to you when you come for your lesson. Um, uh, it was about 500 people, or over 500 people going through lessons. But they also did it in relation to massage, GP led exercise. They had a scheme where they did six, um, weeks or six sessions of Alexander, followed by GP led exercise that was quite successful. So, the, uh, average the control group average number, uh, of days of back pain per month was 21. And with the GP led exercise, that went down to eight. Uh, with the Alexander plus GP led exercise, it went down to eight. GP led exercise alone had virtually no beneficial effect. Maybe three or four days, maybe 18 days a month or something like that. I can’t remember exactly. The people who did massage was about 15 days a month, and the people who did 24 lessons, it was three days a month. Cost effectiveness meant that they went for the six lessons plus GP led exercise as the best way to do it. Uh, thriftily but, uh, it’s very effective. It’s wonderful.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Brilliant. Thank you. And yes, I do look forward to relearning how to align the body so that I don’t ever go back to where I was a couple of months ago. Yes. All right. Point taken. Is, what are you on there? Everyone knows the Baits technique because I can see that we’re running out of time. So, I want to touch on the Baits technique, and I want to hear about your AHA moments.
Kevin Wooding: Yes. Okay. Um AHA moments. You have to remind me what those are. Um, so with the vision work, uh, it was an Alexander technique that I first experienced a shift in my vision, um, quite dramatically. So, I was brought up from the table, um, maybe several months in, and I could see perfectly. I talked before about the prescription I had. Um, I didn’t know what to do with this kind of knowledge that stress had caused my vision to deteriorate. Uh, so when that happened, I thought, oh, there must be some system that actually looked into eyes and how the eyes relate. And so, I went into looking at this vision work, uh, hard to summarize in just a few words. How many minutes have we got?

Kirsty van den Bulk: We’re okay. I’m not going to cut the I want to touch on everything there, because what you do is extraordinary. There is nobody that I know that does what you do, which is why I asked you on the show.

Kevin Wooding: Yeah, that’s lovely. Well, it’s really good. Yeah. Um, I went off to lessons and started to explore. If you look at the orthodox way, it’s mostly about the physicality of things. So, they look at things in terms of optics and lenses, but it’s not a purely physical process for any being, whether that’s a human being or some other species, to actually figure out what is being sent in. I mean, the miraculous thing about the eyes, um, they have two different pictures. They’re slightly different. They send this into electrical signals all jumbled up on top of each other. And it’s miraculous that it is sorted out. If you see, uh, uh, I don’t know, something coming towards you, like a car coming towards you, your mind doesn’t jumble it up with like, oh, that wasn’t there a moment ago. So, what is it now? It tracks. It knows exactly what’s happening, when and where. It’s extraordinary what the eyes can do. Uh, they take up an enormous amount of energy. Um, the visual cortex is around about 44% of your brain’s entire energy consumption. If you open you know, as soon as you open your eyes onto a complex scene, the glucose requirement, uh, goes up by 50%. You know, it’s just it’s a phenomenal system. So, we look at the way the mind is interacting with the eyes. That’s what the Bates method does. Um, it’s got its detractors and controversies, of course, but a lot of it’s just misunderstanding. People don’t really know what it’s about until you actually do it. Uh, I always think that the fellow who developed it was maybe sort of 100 years or maybe 200 years ahead of his time. There’s still more we can do with it.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Thank you. I love the way you’ve kind of explained quite succinctly about how the brain and the visual cortex works. I’ve never really thought about that. So, I like that. That’s got me thinking and that I’m very resident for my gas stones. We have had a comment from Morin this morning saying good morning. So. Good morning, Maureen. It’s lovely to see you. Well, hear you. Um, so, AHA, moments. There must be moments you’ve already talked about a few. The moving, the car accident, moving to England, being a sister arts Ed, uh, moving to Alexander Technique. Your knee when you can say, hey, I was listening. Uh, your knee when you were on the on your cycle. Um, so is there anything within that that you haven’t told us about where there was a real, uh, harm moment where you went, yeah, I’m, um, on the right path, or. I’m completely on the wrong path.Kevin Wooding: Well, okay. So, there’s one really kind of order, AHA, uh, moment starting with the Alexander work, which was I thought the Alexander work was about remedial process. Sort of like, you’ve got a problem so that you can fix it. So I went in thinking, I’ve got a knee problem. When I first heard of the Alexander Technique, my piano teacher, um, had had what we call a spectacular, um, performance injury. She, uh, was in her debut recital. And, um, she said, it felt like two guns went off in my arms. She could still play, but she knew something had been like, snapped or crossed or some, you know, the adrenaline. The show must go on. She could still play, finish the concert. And the next morning she woke up and both arms were black and blue with bruises from fingertip to shoulder and ballooned to twice the normal size.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Wow.

Kevin Wooding: And, uh, this was, you know, for a very long time, this was like a career ending injury that she didn’t know what to do with this. And, uh, about two months in, she had been whoever she went to see about the problem, they had never seen anything like it. It was extraordinary. This was, uh, RSI, repetitive Strain Injury in its most extreme form. You get sometimes people talking about, oh, yeah, I had some bruises appear, but it’s where the the lubrication for the tendons has literally run out of steam, or it’s been clenched tight with so much tension around the activity in the arm that it has literally worn itself out. And, uh, the tendons start to cease, they start to not be able to function properly. And she was obviously not functioning, but still playing and causing a huge amount of damage. But, uh, yeah, she finally went to an Alexander teacher. They weren’t really that well known. This is maybe late 60s, early 70s. They hadn’t been quite I mean; you can get Alexander on the NHS here in the UK. So, um, you have to push for it and look for it. So, she went to an Alexander teacher, and within half, uh, an hour, these swellings, which were still there two months later, had almost completely disappeared. And this was unexpected, not only to her, but also to the teacher, if you didn’t expect that. So, when I was, um, uh, looking at this work, thinking, well, this is all about remedial fixing problems, I had my first lesson. My teacher started working on my head and neck, and I saw my problems down by my knee. And she said, well, yes, that’s right, but we look at the big pattern first, which is the relationship between the head, neck and back. That’s what we call the primary control. If that is working well, the other patterns start to sort themselves out. So, they said, your knee is a little pattern. This one’s a big one. Okay. So, I went home first lesson, I went home, sat down, played the piano, and I could play better. Oh, I didn’t expect that. How’d that happen? So, this kind of makes me excited when I’m working with people who are not actually physically injured and actually looking to improve their performance. It works even more effectively as a preventative from injury, rather than one that says, oh, I’ve now got damaged, I know I’m going to look at this thing that’s going to help me.

Kirsty van den Bulk: I love that. Uh, I really do. Mel Horsey just popped in and said, happy greetings to you both. This has been a fascinating listen, which was lovely. Did you notice I didn’t put my glasses on?

Kirsty van den Bulk: I always put my glasses on. So, we get to turn the table and you get to ask me a question, and then we’re going to play this amazing song. So, uh, you get to ask me anything you want, and I never know what this is going to be.

Kevin Wooding: Okay, well, I don’t know either. Okay, so you’re going to come for a lesson, apparently.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Um, I think that we signed up to that on air. So yes, it would appear I am going to come for a lesson.

Kevin Wooding: Fantastic.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Okay. We’ll call that the question. So, obviously, the person who is singing this song, who you co-wrote, um, the song is called Let Me Get This Right. Do you believe in magic?
Kevin Wooding: Yes, that’s right.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Yes. Not what I’ve been calling it for the last 24 hours. Um I went to school with Helen Goldwin. Uh, she we both were at school at Arts as pupils, and she was an incredible is an incredible talent. And you can actually see her performing. And I forgot to check where she is. She is in her show, uh, over Christmas. So, I will put that into the comment on the links, uh, if you like the sound of Heaven’s voice. She’s an amazing performer. Um, Kevin, over to you to tell us more about this incredible song.

Kevin Wooding: So, this is do you believe in magic? It’s, uh, a song that Helen approached me with some harmonies and some opening, um, melody, and I think some words she had already. I can’t remember exactly, but we went over it for quite some time, just looking at the way it could be developed and did recordings and then approved it, improved it, and, uh, we then, um, got it ready. And, uh, a little bit later, he said, I’d love to do some animation, get some animation done on this. So, we have a full on video with an animated story being told about what’s happening for this little boy who is actually modeled by his wonderful son, uh, Ethan. And, uh, you know, you don’t see him in person, but you see his animated form.

Kirsty van den Bulk: Okay. Um, as they say, role VT, Music playsKirsty van den Bulk: So, thank you for that beautiful, beautiful song. Um, and thank you for testing my skills on streamer this morning because I have never done anything quite like that. So, thank you for the challenge. Uh, thank you for, uh, being my guest. I have thoroughly enjoyed this. Um, Mel has said, is this song an animation up on YouTube? Of course, it is. I will put the links into the comments as well. It is available written and co-written by Kevin and Heaven Goldwin, who I went to school with. And of course, Kevin taught me to sightseeing. I didn’t bunk off all the classes.
Kevin Wooding: She did. She did.

Kirsty van den Bulk: I was a choir girl and I have been taught to sightseeing through the choir. So, I’m going to get myself there. Yeah, I’m guilty. Thank you so much.

Kevin Wooding: Thank you. I just say one little thing. If, um, people are searching for the song on any kind of downloading platform is available on many uses, uh, the word Goldwood with the title it will find because so many songs and things are out there called Do You Believe in Magic? So put Goldwood in and you’ll find it brilliant. Thank you so much. Kirsty. Thank you.