I met Giles Martin - Not the normal I ever dared to expect.
Most days, this life now feels ordinary. I’m not gonna lie, I take it for granted. Yet every so often these moments remind me of how unusual it is that someone from my background gets to be in them.
Days slip by quietly, threaded with a disbelief so subtle it almost vanishes, with whispers of chances I once believed were reserved for others. It’s easy, dangerously easy, to forget the strangeness of this normal. I live in a world far removed from the restless, ragged boy who shuffled between courtrooms and children’s homes, the chavvy little bastard who perpetually teetered on the edge of disaster, and occasionally fell over. Normalcy becomes invisible when you live in it. But every so often, reality fractures and I’m reminded how ordinary this extraordinary has become.
This week was such a fracture.
Giles Martin stood in front of me. Not merely as the name beneath a Beatles remix, but as someone who knew mine. Yes, I’m talking about that Giles Martin, the architect behind the latest Beatles track “Now and Then”, the guardian of a legacy shaped by his father’s hands. Yet, there we stood together, neither gods nor myths, just two music producers in a mundane photo call to urge the UK government to rethink it’s AI copyright plans, to allow music creators to give consent and be paid for the use of their work. Me, as a director of the trade organisation representing music producers, and him as a well-known music producer. We chatted about work, about the Music Producer’s Guild, about doing some more stuff together. A perfectly normal situation for someone in this position. This is never quite my normal. Not the normal I grew up with. Not the normal I ever dared to expect.
But it is normal. Well, it is now. It’s not a new normal as it has been this way for a while. And it's not an old normal as that was my life as the chavvy little bastard that everyone refuses to believe exists. Regardless of how long this normal has been with me, in these moments, the improbability swallows me whole.
I cling to one tether, the one voice I’ve reached for daily since the days of the care system. Many people know her as Fiona, but I know her as Fi-fi. The first voice I seek whenever life reminds me of this extraordinary.
Glaswegian grit shaped her, leaving her unimpressed with these calls.
“You’ll never guess who I just met”. I could feel her eyes roll down the phone line.
“The prime minister” she mocks sarcastically. There are few names which take her breath away, but I knew this one would. I threw the ball up and prepared to swing.
“Giles Martin”.
Silence stretched, a rare moment of astonishment.
When I was sixteen, as I left the Isle of Man, Social Services placed me in something they call “supported lodgings”, which is Social Service speak for renting a stranger's spare room. That stranger was Fiona. At that time, we were both in a moment of quietly tearing ourselves apart. But our battles faded in shared nights, washed in the flickering blue glow of Beatles documentaries. Fiona with a bottle of wine (or two), and me secretly sniffing an unreasonable amount of drugs.
It was during these nights, in those dimly lit conversations, that she prodded gentle provocations. Prying open doors, I had slammed shut after my father died when I was ten years old. She would challenge the assumptions I felt were impossible with,
“Why not?”
Why not you? Why not LIPA? Why not working recording studios? Why not have a life beyond police cells and drugs? I never felt I had permission to dream like this in my life. She would share her knowledge. She would inspire me. I absorbed it like a sponge. She became a mother figure. She would undoubtably be the mother figure I never had. She stopped being Fiona and became my Fi-fi. And slowly, my world shifted from monochrome despair back to colour drenched possibilities.
Recalling those nights, I reminded her,
“I bet you never imagined this?” feeling her quiet pride crackle through the line.
Truthfully, neither did I. Although, one of my subscribers, who is a former care worker of mine, will say she’s not surprised. This is also them, like me, taking who I am now for granted and forgetting the vastness of the journey, the near impossibility of this normal.
Statistics don’t capture our stories. Care leavers in the creative industries remain undocumented. Invisible. I suppose this isn’t surprising, as this is how we are in society. Invisible. People only keep stats on things they care about. People don’t care enough about care leavers doing well. The numbers when they do exist rarely celebrate our resilience. Instead they catalogue the adverse effects of our trauma, the negative impacts of the care system (e.g. prison population, joblessness, lack of educational attainment), the echoes of societal indifference. Despite our very specific challenges, we get lumped in with other working-class statistics. But these are also quite stark. In a 2024 report by PEC, which found that people from working-class backgrounds made up 8.4% of the workforce in the creative industries.
Recognition matters. One of the reasons I think the numbers remain so low is that people never acknowledge the journey to success. I appreciate being seen as an equal and, therefore, treated as one. However, my journey to this point has been anything but equal to my peers, and this needs to be recognised. You cannot be what you cannot see. You shouldn’t have to get lost to find a place no one around you has found. So, every moment like meeting Giles Martin, every unlikely achievement, must be spoken loudly. Only then will it open up more avenues, so more care leavers can experience the extraordinary and make it their ordinary, so the seemingly impossible can become possible for every chavvy little bastard like the one I once was.
Let's shift our focus away from those who don’t get the opportunity to be inspired, those who don’t find their Fi-fi, and focus on those who do. Report success too. Why would anyone from the care system believe it is possible for someone like them to create a career in the creative industries when they never get to know it happens? We need to see our successes grow. They’ll never be able to sustain one, if the industry doesn’t recognise how much of an achievement it is when they do. Then we can rewrite what is normal, and we feel like we should be here.
Fi-fi replied saying it didn’t matter what she imagined. All that mattered was that my head didn’t get so big that it couldn’t fit through the train door on the way back.
Did you know that liking this post or leaving a comment helps me connect with more readers? I’m guessing if you've read this far, you probably enjoyed the writing, so please click the heart below. Your support is valued - thank you 🙏.
If you haven’t succumbed to all the other pleas of subscribing. Be a hero and pop your email address in the box, and receive newsletters as they happen in your inbox.
Thankyou Matt, yet another revealing wonderfully descriptive piece of writing.
Martin's former son-in-law is one of my closest friends x