Head of Special Projects
Rolling Sound

Kris T

0:00:02 My name’s Kris T and I’m Head of Special Projects for Rolling Sound. Rolling Sound is a youth education provider so the majority of our work is based around helping young people back into schools, education or employment. But we also run the special projects which are about giving young people the chance to take part in kind of hopefully life-changing and interesting creative projects.

00:00:27 So, for example, we recently ran a project for Channel 4 where we worked with a team of young offenders to make an anti-knife crime computer game, a Grand Theft Auto kind of computer game but for young people, made by young people.

00:00:41 Yeah, so we had quite a large team of young people, some of whom, you know, were ex-gang members and ex-youth offenders. Some had been in prison for, you know, all kinds of things and they got training in various different kind of media production skills. Some of them are now working in the computer games industry.

00:01:00 When I was at school, I was…I don’t know, I was quite a shy kid. I think I was quite quiet. I was very unsure of what I wanted to do in my life. I think I very much felt that I was passionately interested in sort of being a musician and doing that and yet, I’ve felt like there was no real opportunity for me to do that in a formal kind of academic way.

00:01:28 I ended up doing a completely different unrelated sort of A levels and degree to what I was interested in really. So I ended up going to university and doing and English literature degree which I did, I did that for a year but I knew that I really wanted to do music and the only way at the time that I could find of doing that was to do an Open University degree. So I started working full time and did an Open University degree in my spare time.

00:01:55 In retrospect, it was an awful lot harder than I was imagining it was going to be. It took about five years to complete the degree whereas, you know, most of my friends had already graduated and I’m still working in terrible jobs and doing this in the evening. So at the time, I certainly started thinking, you know, what am I doing.

00:02:17 After I graduated, I worked in the charity sector for about seven years, mostly at Help the Aged, the old people’s charity and also for the NSPCC and I was doing a variety of community sort of projects there. It was very much a side step on that. I was sort of still very much considering music separate to kind of my day job I guess as I saw it. So I was playing in a band for the last five years and we got to play with sort of various, you know, various reasonably well known bands as support acts. People like Mews and like Turin Brakes and the Fun-loving Criminals and stuff and people like that. So I don’t know, it was good fun so I was kind of doing that in my evenings and working in the sort of the day job.

00:03:09 I really wish I spent more, may be taken a year out or something or got some advice probably just from someone and got someone to help me ‘cos I felt like I kind of went quite a long way down the wrong path. You know, I got like to the end of the first year of a degree and then realised that, you know, this wasn’t what I wanted to do and then I felt like my life has been a long process of trying to rectify that mistake.

00:03:37 The best part of my job is being there at the start of a project around here and watching and hopefully helping an idea come to life. Especially when you can sort of literally talk to so many young people and they come up with some idea and then six months later, it’s happened. We’ve done it, we’ve made it, we’ve brought the money in, we’ve run the project, it’s been successful and that’s quite, you know, that’s quite a thrilling experience to kind of create something in that way.

ENDS