Director
Rolling Sound

Simon B

0:00:02 My name is Simon B and I’m the Director at Rolling Sound. We work with at risk young people, young people at school who aren’t achieving to reengage them through creative multimedia. My role in the company is directing that and providing sort of the vision for where we’re going and running the team really.

00:00:21 Rolling Sound came about after a holiday in Morocco in 2001 when the other director, Tom and I were travelling and realised that actually carrying bags and guitars wasn’t much fun. So we decided we’d one day put a studio in a camper van and relieve ourselves of our heavy luggage and also be able to sort of record and travel at the same time.

00:00:49 I didn’t do anything about that for three years and then at university, my major project was to assess the viability of a project like that that involved education. At the end of that project, I managed to receive a small amount of funding and the projects kind of grown from that really. This is just an extended major project at university that’s kind of got a bit out of control.

00:01:12 At school, I wasn’t actually much of a high achiever. In fact, I was probably the opposite. More interested in music, playing the guitar, song writing and we were in a band, Tom and I, the other director, were in a band for two or three years. The band’s name was Morphic Fields and we were a UK grunge band back in 97 and 98.

00:01:35 At school, I think the last thing I thought I’d be working in is education. I hated education. I wanted to do something creative and I didn’t know that you could actually be necessarily that creative in business. But I think looking back at school, I was a bit of an entrepreneur. I went to Macro and bought bulk sweets and sold them in sort of bags at school because there wasn’t a tuck shop. There was definitely a sort of an entrepreneurial spirit when I was younger.

00:02:01 I got into a commercial music degree which was at Westminster University which covered both the production side and the business side and I took more of a business route. I actually managed to get a first at university which was a massive surprise to sort of family and friends because I was the under…you know, the massive sort of underachiever. So I think it was…the major turning point was actually sitting down and realising that there was something that I wanted and really sort of going for that.

00:02:29 The lows were probably two years into the project when we realised that we were, you know, not making any money from it at all. We weren’t getting many clients and, you know, we were in discussions around sort of wrapping it up and going our separate ways.

00:02:44 During that period, we were contacted by EA, the computer games company, to do a project with them which provided the finance for us to go forward and, you know, keep the project running. Just after we’d essentially sort of sealed the deal in Central London, we walked around the side of the building and made sure we were sort of out of earshot and their view from the window and we both sort of danced around the streets and sort of shouted, you know. It was a massive thing for us.

00:03:20 That was three years ago and there was just two of us and three years on, there’s now 20 full time staff and 80 freelance tutors. So it’s kind of…it’s grown very quickly over a small amount of time. It is quite strange sometimes to think that it’s grown from such a small humble beginnings in my bedroom.

00:03:46 In five years time, I won’t be here. I’m planning to be travelling the world in five years time. We’re setting up an international charity around the world that Rolling Sound does in the UK but on an international basis. I’ll be out and about. I think there’s a lot of scope for what we do internationally and we’re heading out in a little campervan.

ENDS