±«Óătv

Yesterday morning I spent two hours in the company of Professor Nigel Osborne, a man who believes that music can transform lives and that politics and art make for a bad combination.

“That always makes me think of Hitler and his watercolours.” He said with hint of a smile.

The Professor was guest speaker as I joined colleagues from ±«Óătv Scotland for a day-long conference at the Stirling Management Centre on the campus of Stirling University. He describes himself as a ‘creative musician’ because he dislikes the term ‘composer’, but one glance at tells you he’s being modest to the point of absurdity.

Over the past forty years he seems to have travelled the world and always seems to have been in the right place at the right time when history was being made. He was there in Poland prior to the launch of Solidarity. He was chums with as Czechoslovakia broke free from Soviet control. He describes his sense of frustration at watching the Bosnian war unfold on television and so went there to help the orphans who had been left traumatised by their experiences.

More recently he’s been working in Kampala and, indeed, with a special education project here in Scotland. He’s also been working on a music therapy device which will detect a person’s heart rate and breathing and then offer appropriate music to help regulate the rhythms of your body.

He told story after story and I’ll share two of them with you. The first concerned his time in Iran where he worked with students on a project that combined music and dance.

“Of course dancing is banned in Iran,” he explained, “so I had to go to the censor and ask for special permission to perform the work. The censor agreed saying the work could be described as expressive movement – not dance.”

And then there was his bafflement with the cult of John Lennon among those groups who were fighting for democracy in Eastern Europe. Many seemed to see Lennon as a hero because he had “suffered so much”.

The Professor explained that he had actually met John Lennon and that he was a nice guy. But he had been brought up in Liverpool by his Aunt and his suffering was nothing compared to the people behind the Iron Curtain.

“Then one night I found myself shouting ‘you’d be better off with Lenin than Lennon!’