FAC Insights: 25 Glorious Years of Attitude with Suzanne Bull MBE
FAC Insights is a forum for us to showcase and share long form pieces looking at various parts of the music industry and the society that shapes it. Pieces take the form of videos, interviews, discussions, articles and more.
We’re back with another FAC Insights, and this month we are thrilled to hear from Suzanne Bull MBE, founder of Attitude is Everything.
After 25 glorious years, I’m stepping down from Attitude is Everything, which I founded in 2000. As many of my industry colleagues know, I’ve been living with a cancer diagnosis since the pandemic struck in 2020. Although, thankfully, I remain NED thanks to my brilliant NHS team at Charing Cross Hospital, the ongoing cancer treatment is taking its toll. Now I want to live life at a slower pace.
This decision hasn’t been easy. I’ve stayed a long time at Attitude is Everything because I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Although I’m sad to be leaving, I know that the organisation will continue to thrive into the future.
It's hard, well impossible, to distil my time at the helm into one piece, but I can say with confidence that I’ve had a lot of fun amongst the hard work. I’ve always worked alongside staff and Board teams of the highest quality, expertise and diligence. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have this wonderful career, but how did it all start?
In many respects, I kind of fell into it because of Grae Wall and Louise Rutkowski who were in Arts Council England’s music department during the late 1990’s. After reading an article that I’d written in ‘Time Out’ magazine about poor access at gigs and festivals, they rang me up to offer me some project-funding (we live in very different public funding times now!) I had a support through a steering group made up of members from the MU, Gig Right UK (now British Underground), Artsline and a design company called GR/DD. We created the Charter of Best Practice for 10 Charter Venues – now the Live Events Access Charter which was revised and relaunched on 12th February at Sinfonia Smith Square.
We also recruited 10 disabled volunteers as mystery shoppers to assess the access at the Charter Venues and report their findings back to us. That programme still exists today - Mystery Shopping Programme
To celebrate the completion of our pilot year, and for being re-funded for another year, we took some disabled artists on tour around the UK. The seeds of our disabled artists’ programme were sewn here. The tour grew into a bi-monthly Club Attitude night in London (where we discovered the Mystery Jets who first played our club in 2005 at The Spitz!) When we ran out of money for it, we turned Club Attitude into an annual event and other one-off events such as partnering with Continental Drifts on the DADA stage in the Shangri-la area of Glastonbury between 2009 – 2011. Then finally in 2015, we secured an uplift from Arts Council England to create the Next Stage programme for disabled artists.
During the years 2000 and 2008, we existed on year-to-year project funding. We added a volunteering stewarding programme, launching at Glastonbury 2005, for disabled people who wanted to get into the live events sector. An amazing relationship with Glastonbury was born which still exists today. Now they’re at the gold level of the Live Events Access Charter and they’re one of our donor partners.
However, I feel that when Attitude is Everything became a charity and received its first-ever Arts Council England regular funding, it was transformational. I felt like the organisation had come of age, and longer-term funding meant we could create a strategy for change in music and live events.
When I look back, it seems daft that the sector thought that disabled people wouldn’t be interested in going to gigs and festivals. But that was the attitude of some promoters until the organisation started to gather momentum, and more venues and festivals started signing to our Charter. Knowing that not every promoter would come on board during the early years, I unashamedly exploited some of the ‘nay-sayers’ and those with inflated egos. I played them against one another - telling them that their peers were signed up to our Charter, and if they didn’t sign, then the public would assume that they didn’t care about their disabled audiences. They scrambled to sign up.
I never saw Attitude is Everything as a one-year pilot programme. Neither did I regard it as just for audiences. I had to start with audiences, because the finances were limited, but over the years I’ve brought in artists’ and professional development programmes so that disabled people could be who they wanted to be in music and live events.
Our disabled professionals programme, Beyond the Music, was created in 2019 and funded by The National Lottery Community Fund.
When we were creating this programme, we were shocked by data that come from our disabled volunteers. 74% of them said that volunteering with us, was the first time that they’d felt useful in their lives. It upset me. These weren’t young people, approximately 20 – 40 years old. I questioned what the people around them were saying to them, or about them, to make them feel like this.
In truth, there are many ground-breaking moments at Attitude is Everything but when we partnered with Black Lives in Music to create the Unseen Unheard report and podcast in 2023 which exposed the level of discrimination against Black disabled people in the UK music industry, it shook up the industry. Listen to the Unseen Unheard report and podcast.
It revealed that 91% of Black disabled creators and professionals felt unsatisfied with how they are supported by the music industry. Again, I raged about this, and since then we’ve been working on the calls to action within the report.
Another moment is when we partnered with Julie’s Bicycle, A Greener Future and Sarah Pickthall from Sync Leadership to tackle the issue of climate change solutions within live events not being accessible for disabled people. Disabled voices were shut out of the climate change debate. Together we showed the sector that there is no climate justice without disability justice, and we created a suite of climate sustainability resources.
Our impact has been extraordinary:
67% of people felt connected to others.
65% of people improved their confidence.
We’ve improved 1,612 spaces.
We’ve directly impacted an audience of 284,446.
At the recent leaving party, I read out a card from one of our disabled volunteers.
“Thank you for EVERYTHING you have done for me and for my family over the years. I would have never have lived such a happy life with my disability with you.”
If that’s the summing up of all that the Attitude is Everything team, industry partners, supporters, funders, investors and stakeholders have achieved together, then I’m happy with that!
The party ended with just Grae Wall and I sitting together in the pub - just like old times! The many ideas that we discussed became reality, and now they’re good memories for me. Grae gave me a bag he’d made in the design of our old Club Attitude flyers. It was like I’d come full circle.
As for my future, I’m just going to drift for a while and float around the edges of become a creative consultant. After a 30+ year career which started in disability justice, arts and culture, I think it’s ok to just see what comes next.
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