Transcript of Making music with the blind: Marie Naffah – TED x Courtauld Institute
Marie Naffah: This is my grandma. I see her once a year. She’s this adorable 85 year old lady, who manages to remain so elegant, despite being in a wheelchair. And obviously, like most grandmas, she always tells me that I look nice and that I should eat more cake.
She always tells me that I look nice, but the truth, my grandma can’t see me. She suffers a condition known as AMD, which until this year, I didn’t know that it stood for. For those that don’t know, it stands for age-related macular degeneration, which in simple terms means you lose your central vision over a period of time.
I’m not here today to talk about my wonderful grandma. Instead, I’m here to talk about how blindness isn’t an obstacle to creativity or talent. And it’s because of my grandma that I started thinking about visual impairment. And I must tell you now that I am the furthest thing from an expert in blindness – I’m not an eye doctor or an optician. I’m just a songwriter and I’m a creative, and I’m going to share with you my experience of how I came to learn that being blind doesn’t limit you in creating or being successful. The stories that I tell you may or may not resonate with you, but I really hope they give you something to think about.
So for songwriters, writing music can help you express these emotions that you didn’t know how to or even want to express before – that sounds so cliché, but I’m serious. These raw and ragged emotions that you spend most of your days covering up get chucked out to anyone who pays £7 to attend your gig. And as the musician, you’re all like – ‘Let me tell you my life story, my biggest insecurities and all of my fears in just seven songs.’ It’s terrifying. But once the song is out, it’s like you’ve kind of untangled and decoded this inner nonsense and made a little sense of it all. Quite simply, music lets you express yourself.
When I was 18, I was thinking about my grandma a lot, and how sight loss affected her. She was often left out of conversation; she had to rely heavily on others, even when she didn’t really want to. She couldn’t just check the time or check if there was a bit of food caught in her teeth. A former actress, she raised four children, travelled the world, pursued a love for the performing arts and for literature. Now that same lady, as a result of AMD, sadly can’t do a lot of those things.
So I was thinking about this. I was sitting in my room and I thought – ‘How could I even begin to imagine this?’ And this was where I did something very odd. I got a pair of tights and I tied them around my eyes. So these tights are clean as well – I promise. Sort of. I started feeling very awkward and very self-conscious, much like I do now. And on top of that, if someone were to come in, they’d be like – ‘What on Earth are you doing?’ But then I wrote this song and I called it ‘Blindfold’.
[Song ‘Blindfold’ performed live by Marie]
[Audience applause]
Marie: Thank so much. So I started performing that song at the end of my shows, and as you can imagine, people thought I was mad. Sound engineers would actually laugh at me. But once I’d performed the song, most audiences were completely silent. I had got them, and even if it was just for three minutes, I’d got them to think about sight loss.
A few years later, and things have changed, and I realised that although I may be able to do a few more practical tasks that my grandma can’t do, I realise I was the one that had been blind the whole time. Tying a scarf around my eyes and looking inwardly wasn’t where I wanted to go with this project. So I went on the radio and I put out an appeal for blind musicians who may be interested in recording my song with me. And as it so happens, there were, and this was how I met six guys that opened my eyes and together we recorded ‘Blindfold’.
[Video footage of Antonio de Lillis]
Antonio: Well, simply it’s something that I have always been trying to do putting together a bunch of crazy, silly blind people. I don’t know if you’re aware of having four, five, ten blind or partially sighted people – you have the sticks hitting each other all the time. It’s so funny! It’s so funny!
[Video footage of Ashley Cox]
Ashley: Like you see a lot of these ads on the TV, like how horrible blindness is, and yeah it is, but at the end of the day, you’ve just got to get on with it.
Marie:So this is Antonio, who is a singing teacher, and this is Ashley, who’s a drummer. It’s actually his birthday today.
So suddenly, the sadness and the solitude and the loneliness that I’d written about in my song was exchanged for this energy and this optimism and this humour. I mean, these guys were so funny. Like for example, I’m getting ready for our first rehearsal, and I’m really nervous because I’ve never done anything like this before, and in comes Antonio and he picks up my guitar and he starts to play. [Sings] ‘I can see clearly now the rain has gone.’ And this other time, when I’m telling the guys – ‘Tell me if I’m being insensitive or patronising’ – to which Steve replies, “Don’t worry – if you’re being insensitive or patronising, we’ll just hit you with our white sticks.” Not only were these guys hilarious, but they were amongst the most talented people that I’ve ever met.
Music has the power to bring people together, and our guitarist Rob summarised this perfectly when he said, “It is important that blind people get together to play music because together we are stronger. “We need to let people know we are around,” Antonio said.
Many blind people are too afraid to even leave their homes. Older people with sight loss are three times more likely to suffer depression than those who are sighted. Losing a sense can be an isolating experience, but it doesn’t need to be.
There is still a social stigma that surrounds blindness, specifically in the music industry. You’d think that by now, with about 285 million visually impaired people living in the world, we’d be a bit more comfortable with interacting with blind creatives. Hugely successful musicians have been blind, across genres – Stevie Wonder, Andrea Bocelli – and yet still visually impaired musicians come up against barriers.
A blind friend of mine is a musician, a songwriter, a sound producer and a – yeah, a lot of those things – and he works in his local studio. Recently, he told me that the studio was being handed over to someone else. So he went in to go and meet them and they told him that they had to cut his hours, because they – and I quote – “Didn’t want to deal with the whole blind thing.” “What do you mean – ‘the whole blind thing’?” he asked. “Well, you know, it’s pretty awkward, isn’t it, introducing you to people and all that.” This sounds like an extreme case, but sadly, it’s not an uncommon one. When I was booking us in to do the ‘Blindfold’ project, I was turned away by five established studios because they too ‘didn’t want to deal with the whole blind thing’. I’d offered to pay the respective fee, provide carers, and yet I was still turned away. It was a kind of segregation I didn’t think we’d be facing in the 21st century.
We shouldn’t be too swift to jump to the conclusions about where talent lies. I’ve worked with some great singers who can’t read music. Some people are amazing painters, but aren’t formally trained. Some people are phenomenal musicians, but cannot see. There is no monopoly on creativity or talent.
When I was working on the project, people were very nice to me and they said – ‘Oh my gosh! Well done, you! It must have been so hard for you.’ And it was like – ‘No, it was no harder than working with sighted musicians.’ The technology these days is so good that we organised all our rehearsals via email, and the hardest part when catching a train was reaching an arm out to guide someone to their seat. When I started planning the ‘Blindfold’ project, yes, I thought it was going to be really hard. But I’m standing here now telling you it wasn’t. It isn’t. Speaking as someone with zero experience with working with the blind before this project, we shouldn’t disregard working with the visually impaired because it’s too much hassle.
Bringing blind into the mainstream is easier than we think. This project wasn’t a charity project, and it wasn’t restricted to the blind-related press. It was meant to be something cool and inspiring, and something that everyone could learn something from. I’m not expecting to change the world with this talk, but like me last year, many of you may not have thought about the blind population, and it’s important that we’re aware of the challenges they face, but more importantly, to understand that disability does not obstruct creativity. Let’s not be blinkered about this.
[Recorded song played – ‘Blindfold’ by Marie Naffah]
Marie: Thank you very much.
END OF TRANSCRIPT