As the new blood at YouthMusic, I was determined to circulate round the body of the organisation straightaway and visit all our Action Zones.   We are funded by the Arts Council of England, so most of these are in England – twenty out of the twenty-two. The two Welsh ones are funded by an anonymous donor  - so anonymous that even I, the chair, don’t know his or her name, but if they are reading this I’d like to say how grateful we are – especially in my case for funding the zone in Ynys Mon, or Anglesey, where I have happy memories of childhood summer holidays spent sitting on a freezing beach wearing a plastic mac. 
 
The English YMAZs are as diverse as the nation, dealing with all the familiar challenges of youth in different and imaginative ways. I could go on about them for ages, but let me just say “Thank you” to all the directors, staff, musicians and clients I met, working with the great gift of music to provide a beanstalk with which to climb out of deprivation up to a better world of harps and golden chickens – if you’re lucky. Rather than try to ramble through all twenty-two zones, here is one simple verse of gratitude.
 
These are eight real case histories.  I have not identified the YMAZs where they happened, and I have renamed the subjects Abe, Ben, Caleb, Duncan, Ed, Fergal, George and Hanif.  They are all boys, because almost all the young people I met were boys.
 
Abe is 14. He has been excluded from school, though it is hard for someone meeting him for the first time to see why – he is friendly and chatty.  He works at his local YMAZ HQ as a helper, plugging in mikes and moving amplifiers about during sessions.   He is a drummer, he says, and is in a band with friends he has made through the YMAZ. He is aiming to train as a music leader, and watching him helping children younger than him to use their instruments properly he has a real feeling for this. His band has played several gigs at youth clubs and, he says proudly, “We nearly got paid once”.
 
Ben was 16, and was doing nothing. He came to an open session because his youth worker referred him, and sat by the sound engineer. The sound engineer showed him how the desk worked, and he had a try. He did some work experience with the local radio station.   He has a job there now.   A real, proper, job which pays him for doing something he enjoys. His dad has not had any sort of job at all for as long as Ben can remember.  This creates tension at home, but Ben is handling it.
 
Caleb is a wheelchair user. He works with a computer with Reason software, organising samples and bits he has recorded or downloaded himself.  He gave me his CD, which I played in the car.  My expectations, based on experience, were not high.  It was a complete delight – musical, witty and technically faultless. Caleb is on the Youth Forum of his YMAZ, and the others treat him with respect - possibly because they too have heard his CD.
 
Duncan is 11, and excluded from school. He is sitting in front of a workstation looping basslines together with the help of a young female mentor (there – a girl!).  He is also adding occasional notes on a small piano keyboard. After he plays one phrase the girl says “That was good.”   “Which one?” he says. I reach over his shoulder and demonstrate the notes he played. Duncan turns round and says, “Look, I don’t want to seem rude, but do you think I could just get on with this on my own?” This is the most polite rebuff I have ever received from a fellow musician.
 
Ed (15) has ADHD and behavioural difficulties, and I am in charge of him while all thirteen of us play a blues. Ed’s keyboard has green dots on the notes that make up a triad of C, yellow dots on F and orange dots on G.  We talk through the procedure – four bars of four beats (That’s 16.  Embedded numeracy!), two bars of F etc., and off we go with the whole band.  Ed concentrates hard, and gets it all right for two choruses, so on the third chorus I add some twiddly bits on the higher part of the keyboard. “Stop it!” says Ed urgently. So I stop it while he continues accurately playing his chords.   At the end of the number I ask why he stopped me. “You’ve got no coloured dots up there,” he says, “You would have gone wrong.” He’s dead right.
 
Fergal is four.  He and his Mum are sitting on the floor of the Day nursery, and Fergal is teaching his Mum Incy Wincy Spider.  She has never heard it before, because her mother never sang to her, but Fergal learnt it last week in his Early Years session and is now teaching it to his mum.
 
George is eighteen, and part of the New Deal. He left school with no qualifications, and has not had a job before this one.  He is a programme assistant at an Action Zone, and explains to me about gang culture in the area, and how scared people are to visit other areas in the control of other gangs. George is doing an NVQ, and wants now to be a youth worker. A member of the Youth Justice team sent him to the YMAZ, and he says it has changed his life.
 
Hanif is 17. He first came along to his local YMAZ’s open lounge on a Wednesday evening because the pupil referral unit told him to, and in any case he ‘thought it might be a laugh’. There was a drum kit.  Hanif’s history is quite special to the innocent ear.  His parents both died horrifically three years ago.   He didn’t want a pair of foster parents – in his own words – “I’ve had one family, I don’t need another” – so he is looked after by the state.  His loneliness and confusion, and the peculiar sadism of some teenage boys, meant that school was not a welcoming place.  The pupil referral unit suggested the YMAZ, and the YMAZ sat him behind the drum kit. Hanif is not the first person, and will not be the last, to take his anger out on a set of drums.   But soon, over the weeks, he learns to control and concentrate and co-ordinate.  He comes back again and again.  He starts to teach others, and because of what he has been through he can empathise with them.  Hanif was on course to be a full-on, costing-society-a-fortune disaster.   He now has qualifications, self-belief and a future.  Because somebody gave him a drum to put his anger in, and helped him turn that anger into music. Youth Music can show the young a way to let anger out, and let good things in.  The Wednesday evening lounges were suggested to the YMAZ by the local police.  Every Wednesday, while the lounge is happening, crime in the surrounding area goes down by 12%.
 
These are eight stories. I could go on through the alphabet, and keep going through it a thousand times, for the Action Zones have given hope to tens of thousands of young lives. By using the miraculous instrument that is music, we can discover the person with a future inside the child with a past.

Words: Richard Stilgoe, Youth Music Chairman.