Music – Oliver Pickup

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 29)

TL;DR: May’s Go Flux Yourself asks what we owe the next generation as exam season collides with the AI-driven collapse of entry-level work. The skills needed to excel today, and tomorrow, do not appear on any SATs paper. They start with AI agnosticism.

Image created by Nano Banana

The future

“Managers keep using the inevitability narrative: get on board with AI, this is happening whether you like it or not. That creates antagonism. What you need is AI agnosticism – not love. Love has its own dangers.”

Freddie, my tremendously tall, multi-talented, sport-loving 11-year-old son, completed his Key Stage 2 SATs in mid-May, marking his last meaningful contribution at primary school (unless he is offered the title role in Matilda, which would bring the curtain down in unique style). The final half term will involve a “residential” on the Isle of Wight, sports day, films, and partying. Quite right, too, before the step-up to secondary school, and academic intensity, in September.

Exam season is here: GCSE candidates are in the thick of it, A-level students are weeks away, and undergraduates are sitting end-of-year exams up and down the country. Halls full of pencils and pens, clocks, and the same broad assumption: that whatever the test is, the children sitting it are being prepared for the world they are about to enter. The assumption is increasingly hard to defend.

The SATs papers test spelling, punctuation, grammar, reading comprehension, and arithmetic: five things machines have been doing flawlessly for longer than Freddie has been alive. Spellcheck arrived in the 1980s. The pocket calculator obsolesced mental arithmetic when my parents were at school. Grammarly’s red lines have been correcting me for almost a decade. Generative AI has made the absurdity of rote learning and the limitations of traditional pedagogy hard to ignore. We test 11-year-olds, by hand, in pencil, against a clock, on tasks the device in their teacher’s pocket performs in a blink. It is the educational equivalent of awarding driving licences based on how skilfully a candidate can read a paper map. A useful test, once. Increasingly an antique.

I am not, however, arguing against foundational skills. A child who cannot read, spell, or add up is a child the labour market will fail, whatever AI does next. You have to know your times tables before a calculator is a tool rather than a crutch. You must understand grammar before you can spot the moments when an AI’s confident sentence is, on closer inspection, a load of codswallop.

The grab-the-calculator-before-understanding-the-maths approach is a fraction of what most of us are doing wrong with AI, and what we risk teaching the next generation to do wrong even faster. The chatbot works for the expert because the expert knows what the answer should roughly be. For everyone else, it is the equivalent of a sat-nav for someone who has never driven the route. You arrive somewhere. You have no idea how you got there. You could not find it again without the device. And maybe that is fine for helping us move from A to B, literally, but the same logic, applied to thinking, leaves you in a strange place. You produce the memo. You file the report. You sit in the meeting. And at no point have you formed the view that the document defends.

We are, as a country, very good at training children for skills that machines have commoditised, and very bad at the ones machines cannot do at all. John Amaechi OBE, Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter Business School (and a former NBA star), made this point on the stage at the Institute for the Future of Work‘s Making the Future Work conference on 18 May.

Amaechi’s diagnosis was that we have two broken framings of AI and need a third. The first is the inevitability narrative, captured in the quotation at the top of this newsletter. It is the dominant tone in the AI conversation right now, from the World Economic Forum in Davos to the staff away-day, and Amaechi’s point is that it does the opposite of what its users intend. Tell a workforce the wave is unstoppable, and you do not produce adopters. You create a queue of people waiting to retire.

The second framing is the opposite: pure enthusiasm. The eager early adopter who, in Amaechi’s diplomatic phrase, has become a deferrer of AI. “There are workplaces where people are getting results, and either because they are busy or indolent, packaging them up nicely and sending them off. There is risk and danger to that.” (I was amused to see “slopper” – “someone who relies too much on AI chatbots to make decisions, find out information, etc.” – was a new term introduced by Cambridge Dictionary in April.)

The first framing produces resentment. The second produces work nobody has read. What is needed, said Amaechi, is the disposition between the two: AI agnosticism.

Telling 11-year-olds that AI is inevitable and they had better be good at it dodges the question we should still be asking. Good at what? “AI skill”, like “leveraging digital” or “blue-sky thinking”, is one of those phrases that sounds substantive until you ask anyone to point to it. As Sana Khareghani, Professor of Practice in AI at King’s College London, who chaired a panel on AI adoption at the IFOW event, put it: “I haven’t been able to answer when someone asks ‘where can I get this skill?’ Where is it?”

It is nowhere, because it is not a skill. It is a habit. You acquire it the way a sommelier acquires a palate: by tasting, repeatedly, in the company of someone who already has one, until you can tell the £8 bottle from the £80 without checking the label.

Anne-Marie Imafidon CBE of Stemettes, who also spoke at the IFOW event, calls the relevant habit discernment, one of four Ds in the framework she uses to train her own team (delegation, description, diligence being the other three). She also makes the broader case for what she calls the C-skills, the things AI has just turned from soft into structural: critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, and citizenship. “These are core to what makes us human,” she said, “but also what allows us to challenge the AI and use the tool in a good way.”

(Regular readers will know I have my own Seven Cs, which expand the same instinct: collaboration, communication, compassion, courage, creativity, critical thinking, and curiosity.)

So what should we be building, between the SATs at 11 and the labour market at 21? One of the most thoughtful answers I’ve heard recently came from Fiona Aldridge, Chief Executive of the Skills Federation, which represents employer-led sector skills bodies. Fiona has three children, one has just turned 15, the middle one is doing A-Levels, and the eldest is sitting exams in her second year of university. Fiona is, as she put it to me, worried about their job prospects.

“It is just going to become more and more competitive,” she said of the job market. Graduate vacancies in the UK are down by around two-thirds since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, according to Adzuna. Some 16% of 16- to 24-year-olds are now out of work or training, the highest figure in a decade. “Even if we got the most perfect education system up to 18, the idea that you would know and do everything you need for the next 50 years of working life is just mad. Most of the jobs they will do don’t exist yet. Or the tools won’t.”

Her proposal starts from the problem itself. A senior figure at a large financial services firm summed up the problem to her recently. “’We need fewer graduates with no experience, but we’ll need more graduates with five years’ experience,’ they told me. Now, you just can’t recruit the labour market like that. It doesn’t add up, does it?”

It doesn’t add up because we’ve designed the university as the preface to a career rather than its first chapter. Three or four years of lectures, essays, and examinations, followed by a sudden expectation that the graduate will, on Monday morning, behave like someone who has already worked. The model survived as long as employers were willing to absorb the cost of turning graduates into useful people. They no longer are. AI has eaten the bottom rungs of the professional ladder; offshoring took most of what was left. The first job no longer exists in the form it did when Fiona graduated, and pretending otherwise is the central evasion of British skills policy.

Fiona’s fix is to borrow the model the NHS has been refining for three-quarters of a century. “We do this with doctors already. Nobody wants a doctor with no experience. But they do want lots of doctors with several years of experience. So when we train doctors, we have a different model that builds the experience into their training.”

The medical degree is not, in other words, a preparation for the work. It is the work, performed under increasing levels of responsibility, supervised by people who have done it for longer. A junior doctor on day one of foundation training has already spent years on the wards. The certificate at the end is not a starting gun. It is the noting down of something that has been happening for half a decade.

Translate this to the rest of the labour market and the consequence is direct. “If lots of entry-level roles are going, and internships are harder to get,” Fiona said, “universities have to think much more about how to design their courses, so the things you’d have got from a first job, or from an internship, are built into your study. So when you start, you’ve got more of that experience.”

This strengthens the bridge between education and employment and gives higher education a chance to justify the £53,000 in debt it currently asks its UK-based students to carry, on average. The point of a degree, under this model, is not to certify readiness for work. It is to be work, under supervision, in increasing doses. The graduate emerges resembling a junior professional, not a promising school-leaver with extra reading.

Fiona is clear-eyed about what it would demand. “It is a real challenge, because universities already find it hard to get employers to engage and offer meaningful work experience. So we must be really creative.” Employers would have to commit time and supervision that they currently outsource to whoever lands the graduate scheme. The reluctance is structural, not philosophical. Companies want experienced workers without paying for the experience to be acquired.

The medical profession solved that problem by making the public pay for the training, on the reasonable basis that we all benefit from doctors who know what they are doing. There is no equivalent settlement for accountants, marketers, journalists, or engineers. Yet the case for one, as graduate vacancies vanish and as AI hollows out entry-level work, is becoming the central question of the next decade of skills policy.

We have, in short, two choices. We can continue producing graduates who are theoretically ready but practically helpless. Or we can rebuild the bridge between the lecture hall and the labour market, brick by brick, and decide between us, employer, government and university, who is paying for the bricks.

The reform would do something else, too. It would teach the one habit Fiona thinks British education most reliably fails to instil: the confidence to keep learning after the certificate has been awarded. “I don’t have a doubt I couldn’t pick up a new technology if I needed to. That’s the product of an education system that taught me I know how to learn. My worry is that we teach too many children that they are not good at learning, and that as soon as they leave school, they can stop.”

She has one further argument with awkward implications for Whitehall. Skills, she says, are necessary but not sufficient. The young people in the West Midlands she worked with at the Combined Authority often had unstable housing, lived in poverty, or lacked the bus fare to reach the job a councillor had announced for them. Her conclusion is that the only level at which housing, transport, and training can be discussed in the same meeting is local. “We are the most centralised developed country in the world. No one else does it like this.”

The West Midlands, in her telling, was an instructive size. “Small enough to make really good decisions, but big enough to have big enough budgets to actually do something about it.” The principle generalises. Nation-states are too big to know where the bus stops are. Councils are too small to fund anything that matters. The unit that maps to a labour market is, in most cases, the city region. Britain has, with great reluctance, started building these. Cancelling them now would be the equivalent of laying the foundations and selling the bricks.

Fiona’s argument is that we know what to teach. Darius Norell, who set up coaching and training company People and Their Brilliance in 2009 and runs the Radical Employability programme, explains why we don’t teach it. I first met him in April, alongside Fiona, at a parliamentary roundtable (again facilitated by the IFOW), where he was brilliantly provocative.

Chair Lord Knight asked what policy should change. Darius’s answer was: “There is budget for qualifications. There is budget for vocational training. There isn’t budget for the deep mindset work that is the foundation of everything. Everyone knows it’s important. Everyone can see it’s foundational. And yet almost nobody is doing it.”

We have, in other words, line items for the fruit and none for the soil. The cycle is self-perpetuating. “We’re trying to figure out what skills people need,” he said. “So we need to do a slightly better job planning, because otherwise when they do the course, by the end of the course, those skills qualifications are out of date.” This is the policy equivalent of buying a road map and then re-drawing it once a fortnight to account for the roads people have actually driven on.

Darius’s principle, borrowed from a Swedish leadership training organisation called Tuff, is that responsibility has to sit in the right lap. When it doesn’t, the careers adviser becomes more committed to the young person’s job search than the young person is. Darius parodied the result. “I turn up for the session and I say: ‘How are you doing with my job search?’ The adviser says: ‘I have found three roles I think you should look at.’” It sounds absurd. It is also, with discomforting frequency, how British employment support is structured. Paying a careers adviser to chase your job applications is as effective as paying a personal trainer to do your press-ups. One of you gets fitter, and it is not the one who is paying.

The misplaced responsibility scales. Employers expect somebody else to train the workforce; the government expects somebody else to fund the employers; and the workforce, very reasonably, expects somebody else to fund itself. Everybody is pointing at everybody else, and the money is going nowhere.

Employer investment in training per employee has fallen by around 30% since 2011, according to Learning and Work Institute research funded by the Nuffield Foundation. UK spending per worker is half the EU average. Four in ten UK employers now offer no training at all, up from a third in 2011. We are a country that publishes more skills reports than any other in Europe and pays for fewer of them.

Another of Darius’s lines hit harder still. “Training should be harder than reality, so that when they enter the world, it feels easier than what they went through.” British schools, by and large, run the reverse experiment. Children are trained in conditions calmer and more orderly than the average open-plan office, and adult life arrives as a series of small shocks: more noise, more ambiguity, and considerably more arguing with people who hold strong views about the photocopier.

Freddie starts secondary school in September. I do not know what he will be tested on at 16, or what the labour market will look like when he is 21. The people running British skills policy do not know either. The rational response to genuine uncertainty is the disposition John Amaechi described on the IFOW stage: neither converts nor martyrs, but agnostics, with a feel for the tools.

The unwelcome news is that nobody is coming to do this for you. The schools are not going to. The government is not going to. The employer, on current evidence, is going to spend less on you next year than this. The good news is that the tools are sitting on your laptop already, the courses are mostly free, and the only investment required is the patience to use the tools badly for a while before using them well. The agnosticism is, as Darius would put it, a matter of where you choose to place the responsibility. Mine. Yours. Freddie’s, in due course.

The trouble is that the responsibility is easier to take when you have the room to fail. Fiona’s point about the West Midlands was that most young people do not. The children whose parents read this newsletter will work it out. The children whose parents have never heard of it, whose schools cannot afford the staff to introduce them to the tools, and who have to walk three miles to a job interview because the bus has been cancelled, will not. AI agnosticism, left unaddressed, becomes the next axis along which inequality widens, and the gap is considerably harder to spot than the old ones. Whether anyone in power has the appetite to prevent that is the next question.

The present

Image created by Nano Banana

The young people whose education I’ve written about above are not waiting for politicians, employers, or speakers at the IFOW to settle the question of what their futures should look like. This last month, they have been making their feelings known, loud and clear, on the stages where their educations conclude.

At the University of Arizona on 15 May, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt rose to deliver a commencement speech of the kind technology executives have been delivering for 15 years: complicated, contrite, and mildly evangelical. The platforms that connected us also isolated us. The students must adapt. Then he said the letters A and I, and the booing began.

Schmidt paused. To his credit, he tried to engage with it. “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written,” he told the crowd, “that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess you did not create.” He called the fears rational, which they are, and asked the graduates to shape AI rather than be shaped by it. The boos intensified anyway.

A few days earlier, at the University of Central Florida, the commencement speaker, real-estate executive Gloria Caulfield, informed graduates that AI was “the next industrial revolution”. The video shows Caulfield pausing mid-sentence, raising her hands in surrender, and asking, with the calm of a substitute teacher addressing an unexpectedly hostile classroom: “Woah, what happened?”

What happened was that the AI conversation has been done at young people, not with them, for several years now, and the bill has come due.

Marcus Hutchins, the British security researcher who famously stopped the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 (and whom I interviewed for the New Statesman last year), smartly captured the dynamic on LinkedIn: “Everyone is sick of having AI shoved down their throat 24/7. Imagine spending years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars studying, then instead of celebrating your achievements, this asshole shows up to your graduation to talk about AI for 20 minutes. Wrong time, wrong place, and a complete inability to read the room. These people have spent years telling everyone AI is going to make their degrees worthless, them unemployable, and then as if that wasn’t enough, they show up to graduations to promote their AI products.”

Hutchins is right about the room, and correct about the bill. The graduates of 2026 are the first cohort to have completed an entire degree under the shadow of generative AI. They have spent four years being told, by the same industry now lecturing them on adaptation, that their qualifications will be worthless. They have watched their universities raise fees, and their potential employers freeze entry-level hiring. And they are now expected to applaud the person who built the asteroid – in Schmidt’s case, by accelerating Google’s AI research for two decades – for arriving on stage to explain it.

It is, in fairness to the speakers, a tonal challenge. The right time to tell a 22-year-old that the tools are exciting is somewhere between never and considerably earlier. By the time they have crossed the stage in a rented gown, the appropriate emotion is celebration, not reorientation. AI agnosticism, the disposition John Amaechi described on the IFOW stage on 18 May, requires the room to have at least some belief that the people offering it are on the room’s side. The Schmidts and Caulfields of the world have spent too long on the other side to be heard now.

The booing graduates, in this reading, are not anti-technology. They are anti-being-patronised by people who, in their view, have spent the last decade promising the impossible and delivering the disquieting.

The harder question is the one Hutchins’s post stops just short of answering. If not the inevitability narrative, then what? If not the well-meaning Schmidts and the off-key Caulfields, then who? The answer, in my own experience this month, is the one Fiona prescribed for the medical model: you build the skills by doing the thing, in increasing doses, under the eye of people who already do it.

I have been doing more of this myself than at any point in my career.

In early June, I will be at SXSW London, the festival’s second UK outing, which once again has AI threaded through almost every session. (I will report on that more fully in next month’s edition.) The week after, I will be a roving reporter, followed by a camera crew, for London Tech Week, interviewing keynote speakers as they come off the main stage at Olympia. Also that week, I am giving a keynote of my own for Ericsson on the collaboration required to take 5G to its next phase, which is a brief that demands rather more humility than I am naturally inclined towards. Additionally, I’ve been invited to audition for a TEDx talk on what I have been calling the feeds and the feels, an update to the birds-and-bees chat for parents whose children are about to inherit a smartphone.

None of this came naturally. Three-and-a-half years ago, when ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and the first stirrings of what I have since come to call FOBO (fear of becoming obsolete) set in, I was a journalist who largely avoided public speaking. The skills required to do what I will be doing this June are skills I have had to acquire, in public, by gaining experience.

The encouraging news, for anyone else considering the same leap, is that the discomfort lifts. The keynotes become easier. The video work becomes natural. The TEDx audition, which a year ago would have terrified me, now feels like a useful next stretch. None of this was on a SATs paper. None of it was on any qualification I ever held. All of it has come from putting myself, repeatedly, in situations where I was the least qualified person, and staying there until I was not. The thing is, venturing outside one’s comfort zone is as thrilling as it is rewarding.

This is, I suspect, what the booing graduates need to hear next, and from someone other than Eric Schmidt. The tools are real. The disruption is real. The case for agnosticism is real. But the skill that closes the gap between the test you have just sat and the labour market you are about to enter is the willingness to be bad at things in public for a little while. Nobody teaches it. Nobody can. You have to walk onto the stage yourself. Nobody else is going to do it for you.

The past

Walking onto the stage yourself, individually, is the lesson of this month’s interviewees. Walking onto the stage collectively is the longer lesson of the past 125 years.

International Workers’ Day, on 1 May, exists for two reasons. The first is to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, when a peaceful demonstration in support of the eight-hour day (a six-day week with 16-hour shifts was typical at the time) ended in a bomb, a trial, and a movement. The second is to remind us every year that workers’ rights are not features of the natural environment. They were fought for. They were resisted. They can be taken back.

We are not very good at noticing this in 2026. The cultural memory of organised resistance has thinned to the point where most British under-thirties associate trade unions chiefly with cancelled trains.

So I went, a couple of weeks ago, to see The Music is Black: A British Story at the V&A East, the first major exhibition at the museum’s new £135 million Stratford site. The show traces 125 years of Black British music, through 200 iconic objects – including Stormzy’s Union Jack stab vest from Glastonbury 2019, and Dame Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger dress – and 120 tracks streamed through the visitor’s headphones, with the soundtrack changing depending on the user’s location in the exhibition.

Stormzy’s Banksy-designed stab vest from Glastonbury 2019

The exhibition is, on a single wall in the second room, devastating. It explains that British and other European empires used religion to extend control in colonised countries, sending missionaries to enforce a colonial reading of faith and producing new publications to normalise slavery, forcing millions of enslaved Africans to convert to a denomination of Christianity. This oppression, the wall continues, inspired songs of rebellion and hybrid faiths. From this emerged the gospel voice, which set the vocal standard for almost all of the contemporary music that followed.

In other words: the dominant sonic texture of the past 125 years of Western popular culture is, at root, the sound of people refusing to be silenced. Soul, ska, lovers’ rock, two-tone, jungle, garage, grime, drill. A continuous argument with the system, conducted in time signatures.

Acquiescence is the natural state of any system that has not been challenged recently. It is also the cheapest. Saying nothing costs nothing. Going along with the new rota, the new tool, the new restructure, or the new commencement speaker explaining the inevitability of one’s own redundancy requires no effort and produces no friction. This is why the default settles where it does. Not because the people imposing it are evil, but because objecting is genuinely tiring, and the rewards for objecting are diffuse, delayed, and frequently never collected by the objector.

The exhibition is a 125-year demonstration of the opposite. People who were never going to be reasonably accommodated, who had every economic incentive to keep their heads down, who would have benefited individually from going along, chose instead to argue with the system, in public, in song. The reward, in many cases, accrued to the children of the children of the people doing the arguing. Two-tone gave way to grime. Grime gave way to drill. The conversation continued. And the British identity those movements forced into existence is now, in plain and undeniable terms, ours.

The contemporary version of the question is whether anyone in any workplace, school, or commencement hall will do the equivalent for AI before it is fully imposed. The first stirrings are visible. The booing graduates of Arizona and Florida were not just expressing displeasure. They were, however ungracefully, refusing to grant the assent the speakers had clearly expected. It is a small thing. It is also the first move.

A still from a recent Thanks Flux it’s Friday video

I have been making a much smaller version of this argument, with steadily diminishing literary returns, every Friday morning since January, in a short video series called Thank Flux it’s Friday. The premise is that the more AI-generated content there is on LinkedIn, the more useful it is to put a (real) human face on the other side of the lens. Every week, I share a short human-work evolution story.

There is now a small but growing audience for it, which suggests, encouragingly, that the conch shell – William Golding’s, the one in Lord of the Flies that asks the boys to listen to each other – has not yet been lost. It just needs picking up, by somebody who is willing to insist on having a say.

Tech for good: Coracle

The opposite of an AI-celebrating commencement speech, both rhetorically and practically, is a battered Windows 10 laptop in a prison cell.

Earlier this month, I spoke to James Tweed, the founder of Coracle, a Cambridge-based company that now provides secure offline learning devices to more than 90% of the prison estate in England and Wales. James is a former shipping man, who chartered oil tankers in the 1990s, which is how the company acquired its nautical name. He returned to academic study in 2017 to write an MPhil thesis at Cambridge on what happens to people who lack internet access.

James Tweed, founder of Coracle Online

Prisoners, it turned out, were one of the few groups in British society who fit the description. They still are. There are around 87,000 of them. As James pointed out at a recent United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime expert group in Vienna, which helped produce the newly published UNODC/ICRC Handbook on the Use of Technology in Prison Settings (in which Coracle features prominently as best practice), they are about to be released into a country that is cashless, paperless, and incomprehensible to anyone who left it more than a decade ago.

“Today, everyone has mobile devices, everything is online, and the world is increasingly cashless and paperless,” James told the UN group. “Many people released from prison are totally unprepared for this. If we really want to cut reoffending, we need to ensure all of those released have basic digital skills so they can access work and housing and do all of the things most of us take for granted.”

The numbers are bleak. James points out that 40% of UK prisoners were permanently excluded from school. The national figure is 0.1%. For most of them, education is the place where life first went wrong. Put them in a classroom and they will play up, because performing in front of one’s peers is the worst possible setting in which to admit one cannot read. Put a laptop in front of them, in the privacy of their cell, and something else becomes possible.

Coracle’s platform runs adaptive AI in the background, lowering the text’s reading age when comprehension falters and refocusing the screen when the cursor begins to wander. The point of the technology is to remove the shame from the act of learning. James told me about a man he met at HMP Grendon, the country’s only therapeutic prison, who had been illiterate when sentenced as a teenager and had taught himself to read inside. By the time James met him, he was working towards an Open University degree. He now has a job at a Greene King pub, worked at Coracle for six months last year, and is, in James’s words, “the kind of person who is not going back to prison”.

The case for this, in the dryest possible language, is that every £1 spent on Coracle returns around £16 in reduced reoffending, according to a Crest Advisory evaluation last September. The prisoner education budget this year was cut by a third. The Treasury, in parallel, is finding the money to build new prison places in anticipation of a population that may reach 100,000 by the early 2030s. The arithmetic, on any rational measure, is the wrong way round.

James has also founded a separate charity, Rebooted, which recycles older laptops, installs Google Flex, and provides them to released prisoners and to the 300,000 British children who currently have a parent inside. “If we can break the cycle by keeping access to education alive,” he told me, “that is a significant thing we can do.”

Coracle is, in the most literal sense, a tech-for-good story: a piece of technology designed to fit the people, rather than the other way around. It is also a direct counterpoint to almost every theme of this month’s edition. The graduates Eric Schmidt addressed in Arizona were booing because the tools had been imposed on them. The prisoners James equips are quietly learning to use the tools in their cells because somebody finally remembered to ask. The difference, again, is consultation versus conscription. Coracle is on the right side of that line.

It is also, not coincidentally, doing the foundational mindset work Darius Norell complained nobody is funding. The reading age adjustment, the privacy of the cell, the chess game as a way in: all of it is designed to rebuild the disposition that British education first failed these people on. Responsibility, in James’s model, ends up in exactly the right lap. The prisoner does the work. The technology helps. The state, eventually, saves £16 for every £1 it puts in. Everyone benefits, with the possible exception of the people running the budget for new prison places.

This is what technology built for human flourishing actually looks like.

Statistics of the month

🧠 The organisational bottleneck
AI adoption is now constrained more by institutions than by individuals. Microsoft’s analysis of trillions of anonymised Microsoft 365 productivity signals, combined with a 20,000-worker survey across ten countries, finds that institutional factors (culture, manager support, talent practices) account for more than twice as much of AI’s impact as individual factors like mindset and behaviour (67% versus 32%). 58% of AI users now say they are producing work they could not have a year ago, rising to 80% among Frontier Professionals. The skills are arriving. The systems are not. (Microsoft, 2026 Work Trend Index)

😟 Fear is winning
Seven in ten of the UK public are worried about the economic impacts of AI. Six in ten think it will eliminate more jobs than it creates. Half think its impact will be worse than a normal recession. One in five think it will cause civil unrest. Nearly six in ten agree with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s prediction that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. The booing graduates of Arizona and Florida, in other words, are not statistical outliers. (King’s College London Institute for AI / Policy Institute, AI and the Future of Work)

💷 Tax the robots
Almost half of Britons (47%) would support a tax on work done by AI rather than humans, against just 20% opposed. Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters are most enthusiastic (55-58% in favour), with Tories not far behind (38% versus 27% opposed). Even Reform voters are net positive, narrowly. The idea, raised most recently by a British tech entrepreneur to the BBC and previously by Sam Altman and Bill Gates, was once fringe. It is now mainstream public opinion. (YouGov, How do Britons think AI will impact the UK?)

📱 Bring your own AI
Some 53% of UK workers are now using personal AI tools to do their jobs, rising to 75% among 25- to 34-year-olds. In the absence of fit-for-purpose enterprise systems, employees are quietly building their own. WalkMe’s separate State of Digital Adoption 2026 report puts the global cost of bad workplace tech at 51 lost days per worker per year, the work-equivalent of a third of an average annual leave allowance disappearing into the IT helpdesk queue. (Kantar for NTT DATA Business Solutions and WalkMe / WalkMe State of Digital Adoption 2026)

⚽ AI in the dugout, instinct in the box
A survey of 1,000 UK business executives commissioned by Hemsley Fraser finds that 55% would back AI playing a central role in World Cup tactical decisions, and 47% would trust an AI-guided manager over one leading on instinct alone, more than twice the 21% who would back instinct. But 62% still believe strong leadership matters more than data, and 59% say instinct and gut feel beat data in the knockout stages. (Hemsley Fraser)

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Get in touch: oliver@pickup.media. I write, speak, and strategise on the future of work, AI, and human capability. For speaking enquiries, contact Pomona Partners.

Go Flux Yourself: Navigating the Future of Work (No. 16)

TL;DR: April’s Go Flux Yourself explores the rise of AI attachment and how avatars, agents and algorithms are slipping into our emotional and creative lives. As machines get more personal, the real question isn’t what AI can do. It’s what we risk forgetting about being human …

Image created on Ninja AI

The future

“What does relationship communication – and attachment in particular – look like in a future where our most meaningful conversations may be with digital humans?”

The robots aren’t coming. They’re already in the room, nodding along, offering feedback, simulating empathy. They don’t sleep. They don’t sigh. And increasingly, they feel … helpful.

In 2025, AI is moving beyond spreadsheets and slide decks and entering our inner lives. According to new Harvard Business Review analysis, written by co-founder of Filtered.com and author Marc Zao-Sanders, the fastest-growing use for generative AI isn’t work but therapy and companionship. In other words, people are building relationships with machines. (I’ve previously written about AI companions – including in June last year.)

Some call this disturbing. Others call it progress. At DTX Manchester earlier this month, where I moderated a panel on AI action plans on the main stage (and wrote a summary of my seven takeaways from the event), the conversation was somewhere in between. One question lingered among the panels and product demos: how will we relate to one another when technology becomes our emotional rehearsal partner?

This puzzler is no longer only theoretical. RealTalkStudio, founded by Toby Sinclair, provides AI avatars that help users prepare for hard conversations: delivering bad news, facing conflict, and even giving feedback without sounding passive-aggressive. These avatars pick up on tone, hesitation, and eye movement. They pause in the right places, nod, and even move their arms around.

I met Toby at DTX Manchester, and we followed up with a video call a week or so later, after I’d road-tested RealTalkStudio. The prompts on the demo – a management scenario – were handy and enlightening, especially for someone like me, who has never really managed anyone (do children count?). They allowed me to speak with my “direct report” adroitly, to achieve a favourable outcome for both parties.

Toby had been at JP Morgan for almost 11 years until he left to establish RealTalkStudio in September, and his last role was Executive Director of Employee Experience. Why did he give it all up?

“The idea came from a mix of personal struggle and tech opportunity,” he told me over Zoom. “I’ve always found difficult conversations hard – I’m a bit of a people pleaser, so when I had to give feedback or bad news, I’d sugarcoat it, use too many pillow. My manager [at JP Morgan] was the opposite: direct, no fluff. That contrast made me realise there isn’t one right way – but practise is needed. And a lot of people struggle with this, not just me.”

The launch of ChatGPT, in November 2022, prompted him to explore possible solutions using technology. “Something clicked. It was conversational, not transactional – and I immediately thought, this could be a space to practise hard conversations. At first, I used it for myself: trying to become a better manager at JP Morgan, thinking through career changes, testing it as a kind of coach or advisor. That led to early experiments in building an AI coaching product, but it flopped. The text interface was too clunky, the experience too dull. Then, late last year, I saw how far avatar tech had come.”

Suddenly, Toby’s idea felt viable. Natural, even. “I knew the business might not be sustainable forever, but for now, the timing and the tech felt aligned. I could imagine it being used for manager training, dating, debt collectors, airline … so many use cases.”

Indeed, avatars are not just used in work settings. A growing number of people – particularly younger generations – are turning to AI to rehearse dating, for instance. Toby has been approached by an Eastern European matchmaking service. “They came to me because they’d noticed a recurring issue, especially with younger men: poor communication on dates, and a lack of confidence. They were looking for ways to help their clients – mainly men – have better conversations. And while practice helps, finding a good practice partner is tricky. Most of these men don’t have many female friends, and it’s awkward to ask someone: ‘Can we practise going on a date?’ That’s where RealTalk comes in. We offer a realistic, judgment-free way to rehearse those conversations. It’s all about building confidence and clarity.”

These avatars flirt back. They guide you through rejection. They help you practise confidence without fear of humiliation. It’s Black Mirror, yes. But also oddly touching. On one level, this is useful. Social anxiety is rising. Young people in particular are navigating a digital-first emotional landscape. An AI avatar offers low-risk rehearsal. It doesn’t laugh. It doesn’t ghost.

On another level, it’s deeply troubling. The ability to control the simulation – to tailor responses, remove ambiguity, and mute discomfort – trains us to expect real humans to behave predictably, like code. We risk flattening our tolerance for emotional nuance. If your avatar never rolls its eyes or forgets your birthday, why tolerate a flawed, chaotic, human partner?

When life feels high-stakes and unpredictable, a predictable conversation with a patient, programmable partner can feel like relief. But what happens when we expect humans to behave like avatars? When spontaneity becomes a bug, not a feature?

That’s the tension. These tools are good, and only improving. Too good? The quotation I started this month’s Go Flux Yourself with comes from Toby, who has a two-year-old boy, Dylan. As our allotted 30 minutes neared its end, the hugely enjoyable conversation turned philosophical, and he posed this question: “What does relationship communication – and attachment in particular – look like in a future where our most meaningful conversations may be with digital humans?”

It’s clear that AI avatars are no longer just slick customer service bots. They’re surprisingly lifelike. Character-3, the latest from Hedra, mimics micro-expressions with startling accuracy. Eyebrows arch. Shoulders slump. A smirk feels earned.

This matters because humans are built to read nuance. We feel it when something’s off. But as avatars close the emotional gap, that sense of artifice starts to slip. We begin to forget that what we engage with isn’t sentient – it’s coded.

As Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz stressed in an article outlining the roadmap for avatars (thanks for the tip, Toby), these aren’t talking heads anymore. They’re talking characters, designed to be persuasive. Designed to feel real enough.

So yes, they’re useful for training, coaching, even storytelling. But they’re also inching closer to companionship. And once a machine starts mimicking care, the ethics get blurry.

Nowhere is the ambivalence more acute than in the creative industries. The spectre of AI-generated music, art, and writing has stirred panic among artists. And yet – as I argued at Zest’s Greenwich event last week – the most interesting possibilities lie in creative amplification, not replacement.

For instance, the late Leon Ware’s voice, pulled from a decades-old demo, now duets with Marcos Valle on Feels So Good, a track left unfinished since 1979. The result, when I heard it at the Jazz Cafe last August, when I was lucky enough to catch octogenarian Valle, was genuinely moving. Not because it’s novel, but because it’s human history reassembled. Ware isn’t being replaced. He’s being recontextualised.

We’ve seen similar examples in recent months: a new Beatles song featuring a de-noised John Lennon; a Beethoven symphony completed with machine assistance. Each case prompts the same question: is this artistry, or algorithmic taxidermy?

From a technical perspective, these tools are astonishing. From a legal standpoint, deeply fraught. But from a cultural angle, the reaction is more visceral: people care about authenticity. A recent UK Music study found that 83% of UK adults believe AI-generated songs should be clearly labelled. Two-thirds worry about AI replacing human creativity altogether.

And yet, when used transparently, AI can be a powerful co-creator. I’ve used it to organise ideas, generate structure, and overcome writer’s block. It’s a tool, like a camera, or a DAW, or a pencil. But it doesn’t originate. It doesn’t feel.

As Dean, a community member of Love Will Save The Day FM (for whom my DJ alias Boat Floaters has a monthly show called Love Rescue), told me: “Real art is made in the accidents. That’s the magic. AI, to me, reduces the possibility of accidents and chance in creation, so it eliminates the magic.”

That distinction matters. Creativity is not just output. It’s a process. It’s the struggle, the surprise, the sweat. AI can help, but it can’t replace that.

Other contributions from LWSTD members captured the ambivalence of AI and creativity – in music, in this case, but these viewpoints can be broadened out to the other arts. James said: “Anything rendered by AI is built on the work of others. Framing this as ‘democratised art’ is disingenuous.” He noted how Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghilbli expressed deep disgust when social media feeds became drowned in AI-parodies of his art. He criticised it as an “insult to life itself”.

Sam picked up this theme. “The Ghibli stuff is a worrying direction of where things can easily head with music – there’s already terrible versions of things in rough styles but it won’t be long before the internet is flooded with people making their own Prince songs (or whatever) but, as with Ghibli, without anything beyond a superficial approximation of art.”

And Jed pointed out that “it’s all uncanny – it’s close, but it’s not right. It lacks humanity.”

Finally, Larkebird made an amusing distinction. “There are differences between art and creativity. Art is a higher state of creativity. I can add coffee to my tea and claim I’m being creative, but that’s not art.”

Perhaps, though, if we want to glimpse where this is really headed, we need to look beyond the avatars and look to the agents, which are currently dominating the space.

Ray Smith, Microsoft’s VP of Autonomous Agents, shared a fascinating vision during our meeting in London in early April. His team’s strategy hinges on three tiers: copilots (assistants), agents (apps that take action), and autonomous agents (systems that can reason and decide).

Imagine an AI that doesn’t just help you file expenses but detects fraud, reroutes tasks, escalates anomalies, all without being prompted. That’s already happening. Pets at Home uses a revenue protection agent to scan and flag suspicious returns. The human manager only steps in at the exception stage.

And yet, during Smith’s demo … the tech faltered. GPU throttling. Processing delays. The AI refused to play ball.

It was a perfect irony: a conversation about seamless automation interrupted by the messiness of real systems. Proof, perhaps, that we’re still human at the centre.

But the direction of travel is clear. These agents are not just tools. They are colleagues. Digital labour, tireless and ever-present.

Smith envisions a world where every business process has a dedicated agent. Where creative workflows, customer support, and executive decision-making are all augmented by intelligent, autonomous helpers.

However, even he admits that we need a cultural reorientation. Most employees still treat AI as a search box. They don’t yet trust it to act. That shift – from command-based to companion-based thinking – is coming, slowly, then suddenly (to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway).

A key point often missed in the AI hype is this: AI is inherently retrospective. Its models are trained on what has come before. It samples. It predicts. It interpolates. But it cannot truly invent in the sense humans do, from nothing, from dreams, from pain.

This is why, despite all the alarmism, creativity remains deeply, stubbornly human. And thank goodness for that.

But there is a danger here. Not of AI replacing us, but of us replacing ourselves – outsourcing our process, flattening our instincts, degrading our skills, compromising originality in favour of efficiency.

AI might never write a truly original poem. But if we rely on it to finish our stanzas, we might stop trying.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari has warned against treating AI as “just another tool”. He suggests we reframe it as alien intelligence. Not because it’s malevolent, but because it’s not us. It doesn’t share our ethics. It doesn’t care about suffering. It doesn’t learn from heartbreak.

This matters, because as we build emotional bonds with AI – however simulated – we risk assuming moral equivalence. That an AI which can seem empathetic is empathetic.

This is where the work of designers and ethicists becomes critical. Should emotional AI be clearly labelled? Should simulated relationships come with disclaimers? If not, we risk emotional manipulation at industrial scale, especially among the young, lonely, or digitally naive. (This recent New York Times piece, about a married, 28-year-old woman in love with her CPT, is well worth a read, to show how easy – and frightening, plus costly – it is to become attached to AI.)

We also risk creating a two-tier society: those who bond with humans, and those who bond with their devices.

Further, Harari warned in an essay, published in last Saturday’s Financial Times Weekend, that the rise of AI could accelerate political fragmentation in the absence of shared values and global cooperation. Instead of a liberal world order, we gain a mosaic of “digital fortresses”, each with its own truths, avatars, and echo chambers.

Without robust ethics, the future of AI attachment could split into a thousand isolated solitudes, each curated by a private algorithmic butler. If we don’t set guardrails now, we may soon live in a world where connection is easy – and utterly empty.

The present

At DTX Manchester this month, the main-stage AI panel I moderated felt very different from those even last year. The vibe was less “what is this stuff?” and more “how do we control the stuff we’ve already unleashed?”

Gone are the proof-of-concept experiments. Organisations are deploying AI at scale. Suzanne Ellison at Lloyds Bank described a knowledge base now used by 21,000 colleagues, reducing information retrieval by half and boosting customer satisfaction by a third. But more than that, it’s made work more human, freeing up time for nuanced, empathetic conversations.

Likewise, the thought leadership business I co-founded last year, Pickup_andWebb, uses AI avatars for client-facing video content, such as a training programme. No studios. No awkward reshoots. Just instant script updates. It’s slick, smart, and efficient. And yes, slightly unsettling.

Dominic Dugan of Oktra, a man who has spent decades designing workspaces, echoed that tension. He’s sceptical. Most post-pandemic office redesigns, he argues, are just “colouring in”– performative, superficial, Instagram-friendly but uninhabitable. We’ve designed around aesthetics, not people.

Dugan wants us to talk about performance. If an office doesn’t help people do better work, or connect more meaningfully, what’s the point? Even the most elegantly designed workplace means little if it doesn’t accommodate the emotional messiness of human interaction – something AI, for all its growth, still doesn’t understand.

And yet, that fragility of our human systems – tech included – was brought into sharp relief in these last few days (and is ongoing, at the time of writing) when an “induced atmospheric vibration” reportedly caused widespread blackouts in Spain and Portugal, knocking out connectivity across major cities for hours, and in some cases days. No internet. No payment terminals. No AI anything. Life slowed to a crawl. Trains stopped. Offices went dark. Coffee shops switched to cash, or closed altogether. It was a rare glimpse into the abyss of analogue dependency, a reminder that our digital lives are fragile scaffolds built on uncertain foundations.

The outage was temporary. But the lesson lingers: the more reliant we become on these intelligent systems, the greater our vulnerability when they fail. And fail they will. That’s the nature of systems. But it’s also the strength of humans: our capacity to improvise, to adapt, to find ways around failure. The more we automate, the more we must remember this: resilience cannot be outsourced.

And that brings me to my own moment of reinvention.

This month I began the long-overdue overhaul of my website, oliverpickup.com. The current version – featuring a photograph on the home page of me swimming in the Regents Park Serpentine at a shoot interviewing Olympic triathlete Jodie Stimpson, goggles on upside down – has served me well, but it’s over a decade old. Also people think I’m into wild swimming. I’m not, and detest cold water.

(The 2015 article in FT Weekend has one of my favourite opening lines: “Jodie Stimpson is discussing tactical urination. The West Midlands-based triathlete, winner of two Commonwealth Games golds last summer, is specifically talking about relieving herself in her wetsuit to flood warmth to the legs when open-water swimming.”)

But it’s more than a visual rebrand. I’m repositioning, due to FOBO (fear of becoming obsolete). The traditional freelance model is eroding, its margins squeezed by algorithmic content and automated writing. While it might not have the personality, depth, and nuance of human writing, AI doesn’t sleep, doesn’t bill by the hour, and now writes decently enough to compete. I know I can’t outpace it on volume. So I have to evolve. Speaking. Moderating. Podcasting. Hosting. These are uniquely human domains (for now).

The irony isn’t lost on me: I now use AI to sharpen scripts, test tone, even rehearse talks. But I also know the line. I know what cannot be outsourced. If my words don’t carry me in them, they’re not worth publishing.

Many of us are betting that presence still matters. That real connection – in a room, on a stage, in a hard conversation – will hold value, even as screens whisper more sweetly than ever.

As such, I’m delighted to have been accepted by Pomona Partners, a speaker agency led by “applied” futurist Tom Cheesewright, whom I caught up with over lunch when at DTX Manchester. I’m looking forward to taking the next steps in my professional speaking career with Tom and the team.

The past

Recently, prompted by a friend’s health scare and my natural curiosity, I spat into a tube and sent off the DNA sample to ancestry.com. I want to understand where I come from, what traits I carry, and what history pulses through me.

In a world where AI can mimic me – my voice, writing style, and image – there’s something grounding about knowing the real me. The biological, lived, flawed, irreplaceable me.

It struck me as deeply ironic. We’re generating synthetic selves at an extraordinary rate. Yet we’re still compelled to discover our origins: to know not just where we’re going, but where we began.

This desire for self-knowledge is fundamental. It sits at the heart of my CHUI framework: Community, Health, Understanding, Interconnectedness. Without understanding, we’re at the mercy of the algorithm. Without roots, we become avatars.

Smith’s demo glitch – an AI agent refusing to cooperate – was a reminder that no matter how advanced the tools, we are still in the loop. And we should remain there.

When I receive my ancestry results, I won’t be looking for royalty. I’ll be looking for roots. Not to anchor me in the past, but to help me walk straighter into the future. I’ll also share those findings in this newsletter. Meanwhile, I’m off to put tea in my coffee.

Statistics of the month

📈 AI is boosting business. Some 89% of global leaders say speeding up AI adoption is a top priority this year, according to new LinkedIn data. And 51% of firms have already seen at least a 10% rise in revenue after implementation.

🏙️ Cities aren’t ready. Urban economies generate most of the world’s GDP, but 44% of that output is at risk from nature loss, recent World Economic Forum data shows. Meanwhile, only 37% of major cities have any biodiversity strategy in place. 🔗

🧠 The ambition gap is growing. Microsoft research finds that 82% of business leaders around the globe say 2025 is a pivotal year for change (85% think so in the UK). But 80% of employees feel too drained to meet those expectations. 🔗

📉 Engagement is slipping. Global employee engagement is down to 21%, according to Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace annual report (more on this next month). Managers have been hit hardest – dropping from 30% to 27% – and have been blamed for the general fall. The result? $438 billion in lost productivity. 🔗

💸 OpenAI wants to hit $125 billion. That’s their projected revenue by 2029 – driven by autonomous agents, API tools and custom GPTs. Not bad for a company that started as a non-profit. 🔗

Thank you for reading Go Flux Yourself. Subscribe for free to receive this monthly newsletter straight to your inbox.

All feedback is welcome, via oliver@pickup.media. If you enjoyed reading, please consider sharing it via social media or email. Thank you.

And if you are interested in my writing, speaking and strategising services, you can find me on LinkedIn or email me using oliver@pickup.media.

Best of Boat Floaters 2020 – for Meet Bernard

“Freak storm comes.” This refrain, layered on top of the track’s sense of loss, powerlessness and restriction in Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids’ When Will I See You Again? – which concludes the exclusive Meet Bernard mix of my Boat Floaters Best of 2020 – works neatly as a three-word summary of the most complex and chaotic year in history.

Some 1,783,100 million deaths have been attributed to coronavirus, at the time of writing. And while that’s a tiny fraction of the 7.8 billion humans alive today, the pandemic has touched every element of our lives, and choked many of them. Paradoxically, the coronavirus outbreak has set us free and opened minds. It has exposed and exploded outdated systems and antiquated mores, and triggered meaningful transformation across the globe.

Selecting just 20 songs for 2020 was always going to be challenging (and here is the 46-track, 226-minute longlist on a Spotify playlist). But having scrolled through my monthly Spotify playlists for Meet Bernard it has been fascinating to see what tunes were floating my boat at a given month, and how the sonic salve I sought to soothe my soul shifted with global events.

Music truly has been my sanctuary in the last nine months. I’ve listened to – and discovered – more music, both ancient and new, than in any other year. I’ve unearthed countless decades-old gems. And with artists locked down and not gigging it has enabled the time, space and emotion to produce a trove of fresh, enriching tracks.

This 20-track mix features artists from Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America, Scandinavia, as well as elsewhere in Europe, and much closer to home, in London. To me, all the tracks are standalone delights, and I could pen detailed blurbs on every one. But highlights of these highlights are as follows …

I simply had to begin the set with Cándido’s 1979 classic Thousand Finger Man. Yes, it is an awesome set-starter. But the unparalleled, innovative Cuban percussionist died, aged 99, in November, so this is a homage to him and his unique talent.

The secretive SAULT, supposedly fronted by London vocalist Cleo Sol, has seasoned 2020 with two incredible, tone-perfect albums, UNTITLED (Black Is) – which you can download on Bandcamp at any price – and UNTITLED (Rise). From the latter comes Free, a brilliant track about shorn independence and the need for connection and collaboration.

I love French “Afropean” duo DjeuhDjoah & Lieutenant Nicholson, and in the April-released Caipirinha, a nod to Brazil, it’s coolness served in a cocktail glass.

The return of hip-hop collective Quakers, later in the year, was welcome, too. With South African legend Sampa The Great on rapping duty, Approach With Caution captures how many of us have felt at the tensest times this year.

Danish singer-songwriter Astrid Engberg’s jazzy soul track Daylight, which speaks of a brighter tomorrow after a heavy night, has been an earworm ever since it was released in September.

Elsewhere, there is succour to be found in Hamburg-based ensemble Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band’s new version of Erykah Badu’s The Healer, and more steelpan goodness in Steel Band de la Trinidad’s much-older arrangement of Coming Home.

I had to include the original and best version of Money’s Too Tight (To Mention), released in 1982 by the Valentine Brothers, for all the musicians struggling to make ends meet in 2020. It’s also a superb funk track.

The aforementioned When Will I See You Again? ends the 87-minute mix. I am not alone in wishing to see Ackamoor and his nonpareil group live again, and sooner rather than later.

Finally, thanks to Ryan and Dani for offering an opportunity to make sense of and showcase my monthly musical mystery touring. If we learn only one thing from 2020 it is that collaboration and supporting others is critical. Together we are stronger.

Here’s hoping for fewer freak storms in 2021. Good luck to you and your nearest and dearest.

Yours in music,

Ollie (Boat Floaters)

Matthew Halsall: the trumpet virtuoso is striving to bring jazz music into a contemporary realm

Matthew Halsall takes to the stage in the open-air amphitheatre on a blissful Mediterranean evening. It’s July in the south of France and behind the young trumpeter, whose trademark worker’s cap is pulled over his eyes, the ochre sunset oozes into the sea as fishing boats rock lazily to shore.

Armed with a plastic cup of rosé in hand, conditions are perfect to hear to one of the most pioneering jazz musicians of his generation. Halsall needs little time to float the audience away. His tunes are soulful and spiritual, deep and subtle, yet bob along pleasingly, melodically.

Twenty-three years after first blowing his favoured instrument at the age of six, he has developed a playful and haunting style which has the potency to elevate jazz back in to the public consciousness. After a spellbinding 90 minutes he takes a coy bow and grins. “It’s magical to be here, thanks for listening,” he says before we rise from our stone seats to applaud, feeling privileged to witness such precocious mastery.

After his performance at Worldwide Festival in Sète, near Montpellier, the Manchester-based maestro sips a Dark ‘n’ Stormy and tells us: “That was one of the most special gigs I’ve played. I don’t play that many, so are all important in a way, but that was something else.”

Six-year-old Matthew had decided he wanted to throw all his energy into mastering the trumpet after his parents took him to a jazz gig to watch the big band he would eventually star in, the Wigan Youth Jazz Orchestra. And after realising his calling Halsall found school a struggle – “it was a diversion for me and I got quite irritated and angry” – and became close to veering off the rails.

“I was in with a bad bunch of kids and got in to a lot of trouble. Combined with hanging around with big northerners in a brass band, it was a lethal cocktail.”

His potential was spotted early and following two years in the Wigan Youth Jazz Orchestra, aged 14 he first toured the world with the big band. He was the youngest by five years. “I had to learn how to cope with drinking, and fast,” he says.

However, through music and after moving, at 15, to the Maharishi Free School in west Lancashire, which encouraged meditation and taught Eastern philosophy, he turned his fortunes around. “After going from E and F grades, I actually gained six GCSEs.”

The northerner, who turned 29 in September and is due to release his fourth solo album in mid-October, is also an established DJ and founded his own record label in 2007. Arguably his biggest challenge, however, is making jazz accessible and popular with the current generation of listeners.

After moving to Liverpool to live alone aged 17, Halsall started to mature and studied sound engineering at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. By his mid-20s, now in Manchester, he had cut back on his partying and, as he says, “started to really focus on my production and the creativity side. I felt as though I needed to play music for my generation and the generations just above me. The time was right to make my own jazz music.”

Showing impressive acumen he established Gondwana Records, which he still runs from an office in his house, and did not need to compromise his sound. Calling in favours and the help of his graphic designer brother Daniel, who does all his album artwork, Halsall brought out his debut record, Sending My Love, in 2008. It immediately grabbed the attention, and was soon followed by Colour Yes and On The Go.

His latest release is Fletcher Moss Park (named after the place he spends most of his time composing), and as his star continues its impressive ascent Halsall reveals his “dream goal”. He says: “I want do an amazing album that has solo piano tunes, orchestra tunes, jazz tunes. The task will be trying to make it sound like an album. I want to take my time and put my heart, personality and soul in to it.

“The problem is saying you are a jazz trumpet player to the younger, student generation – it’s probably the kiss of death. Immediately they think of cheesy cabaret-esque quartets who are very self-indulgent. I just have to try and make it as current as possible.”

This youthful talent, in his humble way, has the potential, ambition and backing to scale new heights in the genre, and possibly become one of the standout jazz heroes of his time.

This article first appeared in Crack in October 2012

Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards 2012 – as it happened

Gilles Peterson has been a tireless champion of music of a left-field bent for over twenty years now. From being the main exponent of the acid jazz scene through pirate radio in the 80’s to his weekly Worldwide show on Radio 1, Gilles has been a constant presence at the forefront of world music for over two decades.

Fittingly then, Gilles has taken it upon himself to helm the Worldwide Awards, celebrating the music he has worked so tirelessly to champion. Here we have a minute by minute, blow by blow account of how the day panned out for the man himself.

9am Pressed snooze on the alarm clock. The Worldwide Awards warm-up party at XOYO had been a bit too lively! It had featured Toronto-based jazzers BADBADNOTGOOD, local group 2Morrows Victory, out-there German Flako / Dirg Gerner and Lefto, the Brussels DJ with impeccable style. Pass the Alka-Seltzer!

Meanwhile at Koko, Gilles’s team rock up at the venue and begin sound checking – with six live performances and seven DJs to please it’s a long old day.

5pm With less than two hours before the first act, Southampton-based twiddler Gang Colours begins and Gilles arrives at Koko for a quick run-through.

6pm Wearing a Roger Federer-esque white blazer he is happy with the preparations and, with Lefto and long-time east London buddy Earl Zinger, hops into neighbouring Japanese restaurant Asakusa and tucks into some eel – but no booze. “Just green tea; I know there will be plenty of time for alcohol later. I need to pace myself,” he jokes with Mixmag.

7.30-8.15pm Peterson catches the end of Gang Colours and welcomes on stage, “a colourful Swiss lad who loves hiking”, Dimlite, whose new album Grimm Reality has received critical acclaim, largely thanks to the BBC Radio1 DJ bigging up his countryman. Later he tells Mixmag: “Dimlite was the highlight of the night, for me.”

8.15-9.15pm DJs Zane Lowe, Hudson Mohawke and Lefto spin the crowd, which is beginning to fill the old theatre to capacity, in to a lather while Peterson cracks open a couple of beers and greets guests, introducing those that haven’t met before to one another. “This is what it is all about: the fusion of generations. Problem is it’s always the oldies who make the most of the champagne, and it was the same again this year with The Pyramids!”

9.15pm The Ohio-based psychedelic jazz quintet wow the crowd with a magical performance, and show no signs of the bubbles they have been quaffing down as they snake through the crowd.

10.15pm After a quick set change, accompanied by DJ Kutmah showcasing his talents, the newly crowned BBC’s Sound of 2012, Michael Kiwanuka is welcomed on stage by Peterson. He slows the pace of the evening down, but his soulful lyrics and acoustic guitar are soon replaced and cranked up by another Lefto set before the Awards presentation.

11.15pm Peterson, having managed to pinch a swig or two of champers, takes centre stage announcing the winners, which included Kiwanuka (best session); SBTRKT (album); Matthew Halsall (jazz album) and Adele whose ‘Rollin’ In The Deep’ (Jamie XX remix) wins track of the year.

11.45pm Thundercat, who just missed out to SBTRKT in the best album category, was up next. By now, following the formalities, the crowd are ready to truly dance, and with Jamie XX wowing with a half-hour DJ set before SBTRKT takes to the stage the party is in full swing.

1.15am Julio Bashmore plays a 45-minute set and by now it’s beginning to get a little messy. Just in time for the band who Peterson has been bigging up most in recent weeks, BADBADNOTGOOD, to take the stage. “It was pretty funny – they are so young and extravagantly talented that two of their group had to head back to Canada and be in school on the Monday morning,” Peterson jokes. The crowd, still nearly at capacity, gave suitable encouragement.

2.30pm Koreless ended the night’s music, and Peterson heading homeward knowing that the Worldwide Awards had been a great success once again. Game, set and match!

This article was first published in Mixmag in February 2012

‘Peanut butter and a lot of sex’ – the secret to anti-ageing, according to Roy Ayers

Everybody loves Everybody Loves the Sunshine, with its warm, sexy, feel-good vibraphone vibes, falsetto synth and uplifting piano. And the man who released it 37 years years ago, Roy Ayers, is still basking in the heat from that 1976 mega hit.

For inquisitive listeners, though, Sunshine is simply the gateway track into Ayers’ funky world, and it’s a richly mystical and rewarding voyage. His vast back catalogue offers songs which are all sun-dappled and brimming with free love, almost without exception. He’s a happy, cool cat from Los Angeles and an evening with him live, a hand-held stroll through his sunshine paradise, is bliss.

Last week Ayers, at the grand age of 72, revisited his favourite London haunt, Camden’s Jazz Cafe, for a glowing three-night sell-out run. When we last saw him at the intimate venue – ideal for a man who loves to interact with his audience, as Ayers does – a couple of years ago, he said: “Admit it ladies, I don’t look any older than 50. You know what the secret is? Peanut butter, only the crunchy kind though. And a LOT of sex.”

Once again, he played the unscrupulous seducer, the LA Lothario, and there’s no signs of him wanting to slow down, on or off stage. It’s an utter delight to watch. Much like 007 fans leave the cinema after Skyfall feeling very Bond, all intense, darting eyes and pumping testosterone, Ayers casts his magic over the audience, though with a rather more amourous outcome.

On this occasion, wearing a black shirt, yellow pinstripe blazer, an African kufi cap and narrow sunglasses, the spiritual showman’s songs – more about love gained than lost – were punctuated by a playful, flirty narrative, with a reflective undertone. “Most of you out there are not my age, but let me tell you it’s good to be on the planet aged 72,” he beamed. “I first toured here in 1976, and now it feels like I live in the UK. I’m grateful for your acceptance. Britain is my number one market in the world.”

While you might think “I bet he says that to all the crowds” he followed it up with: “I want to thank Holiday Inn for their service over the years. Thanks for the lice! No, seriously, it’s been a wonderful trip. I’m enjoying the hell out of it!”

He then spoke about his two wives, before amusingly kicking into I Wanna Touch You Baby. And as his 90-minute set neared its end he showed off his incredibly high energy levels for a septuagenarian, performing a quick-paced medley of three of his biggest tunes: Can’t You See Me; Running Away; and Evolution.

There was the odd reminder that the world has spun a few times since the 1970s, when Ayers’ star was skyrocketed by his distinctive sound. At one point, for example, he accidentally turned off his MalletKAT Pro vibraphone midway though a song, but he had the calm charisma to breeze through, and all with a winning smile. For those lucky enough to see him live at Jazz Cafe this was a real, rare treat, made all the more precious as the shadows on this fantastic musician’s life grow longer.

This article was first published in Crack in January 2013