Bill Taylor Beales has completed an intense period of work with his multi-tiered 'Scratch The Sky' project, but there isn't an end in sight yet. After the recording and release of the CD, the launch show and the charity work, he's only just beginning to realize it's potential. We caught up with him at home in Cardiff to have an in-depth look at the last twelve months and beyond.

You're quite a multi-tasking sort of guy Bill. Do you want to explain what projects you have got on the go at the moment?
Yes, sure. We've just come off our Nativity tour which is part of our People Around Here charity. We've been going into schools doing an all singing not so much dancing, a little from the kids actually, music, live art and storytelling project. This is quite a core of what the charity does actually. It goes into places and uses the arts as storytelling.

Also it was the year of the launch of the Sir Silence And The Hush - Scratch The Sky CD which was very exciting. A long time coming that album I think one of the tracks is twenty years old. That was the first part of the ongoing project of Scratch The Sky. It's not just a music project it's also an arts project. There's film involved, story, writing, dance, it's very much pulling as many of the art streams in as I can and as I enjoy working with.

I'm looking forward to expanding on all these next year. Certainly the key thing for me is to really get some touring and gigging going with the album. I haven't as yet fully had the opportunity to see what's in there. To see what's in the album. It was rehearsed and performed live for the recording but I've as yet to take it on the road and see what else is lurking in there.

The whole Sir Silence And The Hush pseudonym you work under, how did that come about?
Whenever I've performed throughout I've had a separate identity for me on stage. I find it useful from a purely kind of theatrical point of view in a sense. Having a real name and a stage name to keep things separate but also I just really enjoy taking on a character for stage. The actual name was given to me by someone. I suffer from tinnitus and this was like somebody saying 'I hope you don't have tinnitus for the rest of your life'. I like the sound of it, I like the whole kind of vibe of it. Sir Silence And The Hush seemed a really nice stage presence to get together.

And that sort of helps you to feel freer on stage does it, to inhabit that character?
Yes and it frees me up from Bill Taylor-Beales visual artist as well so i can play. I think that's the key thing i really do enjoy playing between the media. Playing between art and music and film. So if you do have a different persona for one of them it kind of fun as well.

So whilst we're on the subject The Scratch The Sky project was that launched at The Greenbelt Festival?
The actual CD launch was at The Gate Arts Centre. We had the full all singing and all dancing for that. We had two dancers and we imported thirty-two bags of sand to create a beach on a first floor theatre. So it was a lot of lugging up and down the stairs. Then three musicians on stage. It was fantastic. It was a really beautiful turn out and to perform with your feet on sand and have dancers around on sand was a really really nice thing. I'm not sure how practical it is to take on tour with the bags of sand! We're looking at how we can find an alternative beach and actually thinking about is this something we try and do on beaches? The beach tour sounds very nice.

So on stage people would see you playing and singing but also your artwork is sometimes part of the show isn't it?
Yes, the live art is something that I really enjoy doing. It's something which at one level could be the whole sort of Rolf Harris thing 'Can you see what it is yet?'. That's still part of peoples' mentality but the larger the better. In the past theatres that Rachel and I have done, I've painted the whole set. There'd be a complete blank canvas surrounding the set then as the performance goes on I can paint the whole thing interlaced with songs and stories. Live painting is something that I really do enjoy but it's difficult when you are painting and playing, swapping between the two. So I was fortunate at Greenbelt festival when Martyn Joseph stepped up to the mark and became me for a song, that was fantastic.

There isn't much of a safety net with live painting is there?
No, no. I think there's only once or twice when it's gone horribly wrong and I've had to pull out the fact that it was an abstract (Laughs). It something I love doing and something I've practised a lot to get it right. It a very different dynamic, it's not something you see very often.

I know you've just finished a tour of some schools where you've presented a sort of alternative Nativity. Do you want to tell us a little more about that?
Just to backtrack a little about two years ago we started a charity which was picking up on the artwork and the music in a more community context. So apart from the private commissions I might get for my art I very much have a social consciousness to do some work in the community. I picked up on that and one of the key areas for us are the schools. Schools in community first areas and struggling areas. So we decided to get a little tour together for Christmas. The Nativity tour was born and it's been a lot of fun. It's a re-telling of the Nativity story so instead of 2000 years ago in Palestine we have Mary and Joseph coming down from the valleys into Cardiff this year on motorbikes and giving birth in Morrisons' carpark. The kids really enjoy it. Then we run some workshops on the back of that.

Speaking of Palestine that was a major trip for you this year wasn't it?
Palestine's been quite a turn around for us this year. I freely admit that I was quite naive about the whole situation over there. But a good friend of ours was very keen to get us over there. They had been a few times, but to get us over there doing a few workshops. She knows the kind of workshops we do, she knows how we use the art and music to allow people to tell their own story.

Part of the Scratch The Sky project is very much focused on using the kite as an emblem, a symbol of your hopes and dreams. So what better place to take that workshop than right in the heart of occupied Palestine. There's a small village just outside Bethlehem called Biet Sahour and we worked with fifty kids there aged seven to eleven and some teenagers from a refugee camp. We basically asked them what their hopes and dreams were, what was going to allow them to experience their hopes and what would stop them. They put that down visually on to the kites which we brought back across to the UK and was part of the experience when we launced the CD. We had all the kites from Palestine in the same building as an exhibition plus all the original artwork I'd done for my own hopes and dreams.

So it was very much a three tiered project. I ran a project with all the shopkeepers around the area where we live. They added their hopes and dreams to the kite. So it was a personal, local and global experience that we keep trying to tie in together and inter-lace together. We sincerely hope that the Palestine connection does grow stronger and stronger. We are due to go over again next year and build on this. We made some connections with some Palestinian artists that we intend to do develop.

So under this umbrella of Scratch The Sky all these things happen?
Yes and the wonderful thing is we're only just beginning to find out what is in Scratch The Sky. You know I had my initial vision but the more we open it out for other people to come in, particularly the kites, whole new areas open up that we hadn't been aware of. So we hope that we are at the start of something really quite special.

Coming back to the music element of your work Martyn Joseph has been helpful hasn't he. How did that connection develop?
That was really nice actually. It was where I was wanting to put in a painting for the Welsh Portrait Awards and basically you paint a portrait of someone who is a welsh citizen. I had in my head a few people but being a real fan of Martyn performing live as a musician, being a wonderful experience seeing him, I thought I'd like to try and capture some of that for a portrait. So contacted him and he agreed to me coming around and painting him whilst he sang. The relationship struck up and we got on very well and the painting that I did we then auctioned as one of the first events for Sratch The Sky. The money raised allowed me to go into a local hospice and doing some of the workshops.

The relationship has grown where he agreed to, if you like, be my Rick Rubin for my recording. While I was painting his portrait we were listening to the Unearthed boxset of Johnny Cash. We were both saying how wonderful it was and how much they managed to capture. It naturally led on to me thinking if Martyn might be interested in pushing the sliders up and down for me. He did and did an absolutely brilliant job and it's worked really well.

For people who haven't seen the stage show and people who've only heard the CD as a stand alone project there's a powerful sense of contemplation, even isolation at points. Are those emotions reflecting anything in particular?
I dare say that with anything I do there is an autobiographical element in there but also as an artist I observe people all the time. So there's a mixture of those two experiences in a very loose narrative. Some of it is certainly dreawing on some of the darker times I've had personally. Suffering from depression and some low times. Fortunately now on the other side of that experience being able to look back in a cathartic and creative way to try and bring some of that into the things that I write.

What's been really exciting about Scratch The Sky is that it has been a project with some songs that I wrote a good twenty years ago and ones just before we finished in the studio. So there's a sense of journey very much for me which completely echoed what was happening with the CD. There was a struggle, there was isolation and dark times but with the kite metaphor there was that point right at the end where you just released, let go and let the wind take the kite. On the stage show the kite never takes to the air until the very last moment. It's the whole theme of never giving up. It ties in with the charity. The kind of folk that we meet have been brought into a hard place. The kids who are born on an estate in the welsh valleys or children who are raised in Palestine knowing they will never leave the country because they can't get permits. So how do you find a path through that? How do you realize your dreams through that? So the creativity is what I offer for them to explore and help find a way through and realizing some of those dreams.

www.billtaylor-beales.com

www.hushland.com

Dave Kushar