Things I’m building now

My father, Benny Green, left behind far more than a collection of papers.

There are more than 2,500 radio programmes, thousands of articles, more than 40 books, hundreds of sleeve notes, scripts, interviews, correspondence, photographs and an extraordinary body of research documenting music and popular culture across much of the twentieth century.

Taken together, the surviving material is estimated at 15–20 million words.

And buried within it are connections between some of the defining figures of twentieth-century culture — musicians, composers, lyricists, writers, actors and broadcasters whom Benny interviewed, knew, worked alongside and wrote about.

The Benny Green Institute is being created to bring that material together for the first time.

Digitisation is only the beginning.

The ambition is to transform the archive into a searchable, interconnected research environment, using structured metadata, knowledge graphs and modern research technology to reveal relationships across decades of material.

Benny was born in 1927.His centenary comes in 2027.

A hundred years after his story began, the archive begins another life.

I first played with Van Morrison after writing him a letter in 1993.

That eventually became years of performances and recordings — and a deep relationship with a catalogue of songs and with an extraordinary community of musicians who had themselves spent years inside Van’s music.

The Van Morrison Alumni Band brings members of that community together.

This isn’t an imitation of a Van Morrison concert.This is not a tribute show to Van Morrison.

This project is about songs.

It features a group of musicians who actually performed and recorded the repertoire, returning to the songs with the musical knowledge that comes from having lived inside them.

The sound, stories and musicianship come from experience rather than recreation and from a deep love and respect for the song catalogue of Van Morrison.

Alongside my work for established broadcasters, I created LG Radio as a home for independently produced, authored music programming.

The attraction was freedom.

An artist, album, song or musical idea could be given the time it deserved rather than the time available between two points in a schedule.

The catalogue now stretches across documentary, biography, interview, jazz, soul, Motown, popular song, live performance and cinema, through programme strands including In A Lifetime, Insight, Inspired, In Concert, In The Dark, In The Mood, In The Groove, In The 50s, In Love With Motown and In Conversation.

It is both a broadcasting project and an expanding archive of long-form musical storytelling.