Nick Robinson
Guitarist, 30 years
Gabrielle and Nelly Furtado. Supported Motörhead and Saxon with his own band. Music on the BBC and Netflix. Sixteen years co-running a school music department.
Home / Why
Why we're building this.
Nick Robinson and Adam Hollier on the gap nobody in this industry talks about, and why Talking Notes exists.
Who we are
Two of us are building this.
Nick, the musician, and Adam, the journalist-filmmaker. Here's Nick's reason first, then Adam's, then where the two land together.
Adam Hollier
Photographer, former newspaper editor
Twenty years finding the real story behind the one people tell you first. A serious guitar player himself, in bands with friends and in the Pepper Show every year.
Nick's reason
I've been a working guitarist for over thirty years. I've played for Gabrielle and Nelly Furtado, supported Motörhead and Saxon with my own band, and written music that has gone out on the BBC and Netflix. On paper, it looks like a career that went exactly to plan.
Here's the part that doesn't make the bio.
For most of those thirty years, I quietly assumed I wasn't good enough. Not the modest, aw-shucks kind. The real kind: anxiety, the sort that sits behind your ribs before you walk on stage. I've stood in the wings on serious gigs with imposter syndrome, convinced I was about to be rumbled. Most musicians reading this know exactly what I mean, because almost nobody says it out loud. We're supposed to look like the opposite.
Then there's my back. Fifteen-plus years of load-ins, stairs, flight cases and amps that were always heavier than they had any right to be. Nobody warns you. No induction, no manual, nobody at 25 telling you that the way you're lifting that rig is a bill that comes due later. I paid it. Plenty of players are paying it right now and calling it ‘just part of the job’.
I spent sixteen years co-running a school music department and coordinating the arts, then helped run an inclusive music charity. So I've stood on both sides: the player who was struggling and hiding it, and the person responsible for everyone else's wellbeing and development. What struck me, from both sides, was the same thing. The music industry is brilliant at teaching you to play. It teaches you almost nothing about how to survive doing it.
And playing is only part of the job. The rest is running a business with one employee: you. You're your own promotion, your own marketing, your own admin, your own invoicing, and your own credit control, chasing people who are in no rush to pay you. You book the travel. You carry the gear. You always do the tax return. You're also HR and occupational health, for a staff of one, which is exactly how your body and your head end up last on a list nobody asked you to make. None of it gets taught. You work it out alone, usually badly, usually after it's already cost you something.
The numbers back this up, and they're not gentle.
The evidence
It isn't just us.
2,000+
people working in music, surveyed by Help Musicians and the University of Westminster.
Source: University of Westminster. Musicians are three times more likely to experience anxiety or depression than the general public.
Most of us are freelance, which means most of us sit outside the safety nets other workers take for granted. Bodies, minds, money. We're expected to sort all of it alone, usually in silence, usually while smiling for the photo.
I don't think that's acceptable, and I don't think it's inevitable.
None of that cancels out why we do it. Most weeks, playing is still the best part of my week, by a distance. That's exactly the point I want to make: loving the job and being looked after properly by it shouldn't be two separate arguments. Right now, they are.
- Nick
Adam's reason
Adam's reason for being in this is different to Nick's. He's not a working musician, he's a photographer and former newspaper editor with over twenty years spent finding the real story behind what people tell you first. That's the actual skill: knowing when someone's giving you the rehearsed answer instead of the true one, and knowing how to get past it on camera.
He's also a serious guitar player himself, most of his spare time goes on it, in bands with friends and in the Pepper Show, a charity rock show he plays every year. So he's not coming at these conversations as an outsider either. Between the two, he brings something Nick can't: enough distance to ask a question one musician might not ask another, and enough love of the instrument to actually care what the answer is.
- Adam
Where we land, together
Here's the straight version: we don't have the answers. Nobody does, on their own. What we want this to become is enough first-hand evidence to actually help three different people. Someone already doing this job, trying to navigate the money and the body and the head of it. Someone still deciding whether to do it at all: a student, a career-changer, a parent trying to advise their kid. And anyone who simply wants to know what this work is really like from the inside. Not to sell anyone on it either way. Just to give the full picture instead of a prospectus.
It isn't built yet, and we're not pretending otherwise. You can't get any of that from one person's opinion. It has to come from the interviews, enough of them, open enough, that the patterns actually show up. So right now, this is a research project. Interviews first, conclusions later, and only once the evidence earns them.
Neither of us is doing this from a mountaintop with it all figured out. Nick's lived the gap directly. Adam's spent twenty years learning how easily the truth gets buried when someone's only giving you the polished version. Between the two, that's reason enough to build the bridge instead of pretending the gap isn't there.
That's why we're building this.
Nick & Adam
The film
The two of us, talking it through.
Everything above, said out loud, with the bits that are easier to say than to write. 13 minutes.
Thirteen minutes is a lot to ask in one go. Jump to whichever bit you came for.
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