In Conversation With Alex Blood

In June 2020, we interviewed Alex Blood as part of our series ‘In Conversation With…’. Below is an overview of Alex’s interview. You can find the recording of the interview on our IGTV. Find us on Instagram at @junctionartsUK

Alex is a Derbyshire based songwriter, musician and facilitator. Alex spoke to us about his musical journey, and his thoughts and passion for music as a tool for mental health and how he thinks artists can be of service to communities.

Alex’s describes his relationship with music as overpowering and realised that he needed to make music a career as a survival mechanism. The first step was as a performing and recording artist building a national profile as a hip-hop artist and then working with bands.

At this time, he also started working with young people, people who were struggling with school or out of school. Using music as a way for people to use their voice and helping others express themselves as music had helped him in this way.

Recently Alex has re-focussed his work to help others and working in the community. His most recent project ‘Consetll8’ was an ACE funded project based on the metaphor of constellation and interconnections. Working with Derbyshire towns and venue and artists to create an interconnected web between these.

After 15 years as a musician and facilitator he is now specialising into music and health. He has recently completed a MA in Music Therapy at Derby University and will be establishing ‘Derbyshire Music Therapy’. The interpersonal side of his work informed the decision to pursue this new direction in his work.

Through his master’s degree Alex found that he doesn’t have the drive to promote himself as an artist anymore and helped him realise that “music helps us make shared sense of our experience”. Music is a form of communication and connection for people.

Alex has found that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic digital ways of communication have not worked well for sharing music together. He has been keen not to jump into reactive measures at the moment and has taken to time to sit with the loss of live performing arts.

Alex spoke about the power of music in therapy, through his masters he had been working in care homes and hospitals with older people and learning old songs that evoked memories for people and brought back things that families thought were lost.

Alex and JJ spoke a lot about the power of music and how it is with us throughout the whole of our lives and how much it can help us express or emotions. We even got a bit of a performance from Alex so go watch the full video to see more.