Ian Badcoe Poetry: Hallam London Music Videos

Songs by me and Hallam:

Hey Changeling

A song about being "other" from the people around you. About not fitting in, both from how others see you and how you see yourself. There are obvious connections here to the experience of growing up "different" that connect to common LGBTQ and neurodiverse life stories, and also belonging to any sort of minority: religion, race... However there's a deeper phenomenon here in that not all causes of difference are obviously categorizable. Are you cleverer than the kids around you? Quieter? A slightly different shape?

Who are the changelings? You may ask, but one way or another, we all are...

Walking to Alpha Centauri

On the face of it this is about the sheer disconnect between things on the human scale, walkable distances like one or two miles; and things on the astronomical scale like the four lightyear distance to our nearest neighbour star: Alpha Centauri (technically Alpha Centauri is a system of three stars, of which the closest is called "Proxima"...)

However what's really going on here? The narrator is on a huge mission, it consumes their every waking moment, but they don't really remember why they are on the mission. The don't really remember who it was who signed up in the first place. The song captures the moment when the narrator recognises this and steps back to try and take stock...

On End Times Boulevard

A song that's a SciFi story set at the end of time. The stars are going out and the universe is getting cold and empy, but there's still that one person you need to meet, that one unresolved passion that never played out.

"Let's dance while there is still some heat..."

Soap Bubble

This is my climate change poem A Soap Bubble set to music.

Climate change is real and threatens us all. However it is also only part of a larger problem which can be broadly summarised "technological bubbles". Economic bubbles are well known and understood: something temporarily gets highly overvalued, leading to a rush of ell-advised investment, people get invested in the bubble and try to prop it up, but ultimately the underlying value to the world is not there and the whole thing collapses - a lot of wealth revealed as imaginary overnight.

A technological bubble is similar, except it is based on the fact that people happily build, use and invest it technologies which ultimately cannot be sustained. Basically, as the song has it, "we did not do our homework" and just started using stuff on the assumption that it was workable. In some cases things were workable originally, on moderate scale, but started to crack as their usage blew up to huge proportions. In other cases things were never really workable, but it was possible to ignore the problems at first.

We need to get to where our technologies are sustainable. There is no alternative. Well... there is one, but it involves us all being dead.

Soap Bubble [Stripped Back Version]

This is an alternative performance of the above featuring Reentko, an amazing guitarist and composer and a good friend to Hallam's music.

Hallam's original songs

Run For Your Life (Stop Homophobia)

Hallam's angrily sarcastic song about the perennial debate over how granting any sort of LGBTQ right is somehow supposed to mysteriously impinge on someone else's rights.

I think I am right in saying this was the last song he wrote before we started working together, and it is wonderful. The video is also wonderful and shows a "normal" family frantically barricading themselves in as the streets fill with danger.

This is the making video that goes with the above:

Shakespearean Sonnets

I'll just give a few of these, it was a earlier major project of Hallam's to set selected sonnets from Shakespeare in modern musical settings. You can really hear the full range of his wonderful voice in these.