Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with BBC Radio 3 host Elizabeth Alker. 13/03/2024

Introduction 

Elizabeth 

Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast about the deep values of the people who shape our common life. Every episode I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or public platform and I’m trying to get a sense of their principles, their view of the world, what they think a good life is. These things are not often what we are given space and time to reflect on and they can actually be quite difficult to know the answer to. But I think the questions are deeply important and endlessly fascinating. I speak to guests from a range of different professional, political and religious backgrounds. And part of the point is to build our understanding and empathy across our differences. If you listen for long enough, you should hear someone who believes and belongs and behaves very differently from yourself. I hope you’ll go away with a better sense of how they got to where they are and what the world looks like through their eyes. 

Today’s guest is Elizabeth Alker. She is a BBC Radio 3 presenter, which for those of you outside the UK is the big classical music station here. And she’s previously spent several years working at 6 Music, which is the big rock, pop, alternative music station. We spoke about growing up with parents who fostered and who were involved in local church leadership, the role of faith in her life, fairness as a sacred value and her reflections on being northern. There’s some reflections from me at the end. In the meantime, I really hope you enjoy listening.

Elizabeth, we are going to dive in. We are going to go deep fast. No chitchat, no warm up. I’m going to ask you what’s sacred to you? I’ve had a bit of time to think about it. What bubbled up?

What’s sacred to you? Elizabeth Alker responds 

Elizabeth Alker

Yes. So I was wondering about this, because I thought, gosh, there’s so many values that I do hold really dearly. And then I was dividing up some fennel sausage pasta with my husband last night. And I am obsessive about us having equal amounts. I don’t know what it is really. That’s probably just some kind of compulsive thing. I think fairness is really the value that I hold sacred. I think that’s just applicable right across the board. Of course, that bounces into other values and overlaps slightly with other things that I hold dearly, and my outlook on the world and that sort of thing. But fairness is the one.

Elizabeth 

What does that mean to you? 

Elizabeth Alker

When I was about seven or eight, my parents fostered a teenage girl, called Diana. I was very close to her, because I’m the eldest of three siblings and so suddenly, I had this older sister. So this was obviously really exciting. She was 16 and really cool, she liked Madonna and I was slightly in awe of her, and we were close. But I was very aware that she was dealing with lots of difficult things just because of the background that she’d had because of the family that she’d been born into, and because of things that were completely out of her control. I think to me, that just seemed so unfair and it’s making me feel a little bit emotional thinking about it. I think that’s really stayed with me that the fact that she’d had this really different upbringing to me that her circumstances from birth had been so different through no kind of fault of her own or nothing that she’d had any kind of control over. It seemed really unfair and I think that’s really stayed with me. My parents explained that to us and they were very good at sort of making us aware of those things. I was able to process it probably at that time as well. I think the way that I’ve carried that forward is just to really be conscious that regardless of somebody’s background, they deserve any opportunity. I would say that’s how it has coloured my outlook as a 41–year–old.

Classical music, Christian Union and social class

Elizabeth

You gave a tantalising glimpse of your parents, and I would love to hear more about them, about your childhood, particularly big ideas that were in the air, either political, philosophical or religious, whatever was formative for you.

Elizabeth Alker

They’re both classical musicians and music teachers. My dad always was involved in church leadership. So we were very involved in church growing up. As many people who have been brought up by parents in church leadership will know, that means your house is open, basically. I mentioned our foster sister Diana, she lived with us, of course, but our house was open to lots of different kinds of people all the time. I think growing up in Rochdale, that’s a place where there is quite a lot of poverty. It’s a post industrial town, and to be part of a church that’s in a place like that, I think you meet people from all different walks of life. That was kind of very important in the way that my outlook has been shaped.

I’m 41 now, I don’t have any children. I find it hard enough looking after a Yorkshire Terrier. When they were 32, they had three children, two full time jobs and they fostered a teenager. We always had pets, dogs, rabbits, everything. My dad was doing this job and also really involved in the church. He was out quite a few evenings a week at meetings, and he played piano on a Sunday and he often preached as well. I just think, how on earth did you do all that? I think also my grandparents were really important in the way that we were brought up as well, especially that thing about fairness. Fairness is something that I hold very dearly, but also I expect that for myself as well, I expect to be treated fairly.

And I think that’s quite healthy way to feel and to apply to other people, but also to expect yourself. That was something that was very sort of drilled into us. I think, partly because my parents were actioning that value, and my grandparents did. My grandma worked for the YMCA in Manchester, and my granddad was also very involved in church, he was a lay preacher. They would often take on people that she’d met through her job at the YMCA. So when we would go around for tea, there would always be different people. I think, the feeling was at home, was that this is how we treat other people. And also, that’s how you should expect to be treated. I think it feels like that’s a possibility when you can see other people doing it.

Elizabeth 

People who’ve been raised by parents in church leadership, or as missionaries. We all have complex journeys with faith, right, but it feels like sometimes there’s an added layer. How easily did it become part of your life personally? And I guess, has it always been? Did you have crises along the way?

Elizabeth Alker 

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was raised in church so I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t part of my life. I think sometimes I’m a little bit envious of people who have that sort of road to Damascus experience, whereas mine was just very sort of by osmosis. I grew up with the stories of Jesus and growing up with the Bible stories, and being part of that family, and always believing. I think sometimes it can work the opposite way for people who are brought up in church, where you think I’ve always just accepted. 

So when I went to university, I actually had a moment like that. It was the first time I’d lived away from home and then I was quite involved in the Christian Union there. I think the pressure of that just made just sort of made me drill into what I believed and think for myself around it. I remember having a flowchart, because it’s a difficult thing when your faith is questioned. So I had this flowchart on my bedroom wall at university that placed things I believed, why I believed them, and I workshopped my way into a sense of what I believed. I was finding it stressful, particularly with responsibilities at the Christian Union, which felt very heavy at the. I think that time crystallised what my walk, my Christian journey, was about up until that point. If my faith has been tested, I look back to that time and think no, you figured out for yourself what it was that you believed in and ways that you believed Jesus had worked in your life and that God had been with you.

Elizabeth

I’m doing a terrible thing of just like taking a few fragments of what you said and basically falling in love with your mom and dad, but it sounds like it wasn’t forced upon you. Am I assuming too much? 

Elizabeth Alker

No, it wasn’t. No, it wasn’t forced upon us. We had friends at church and it was always just part of what we did. We liked going to see the people there that were our friends. I enjoyed church. I remember lots of instances as a teenager where I had a lot of comfort from being part of that sort of community and having a faith. I remember when I first went to secondary school, I was the only person who went from my primary school to my secondary school so that was quite a lonely time. I remember the church family was about was especially important. I used to write down Bible verses sometimes before I went to school that I would keep in my blazer pocket and then sort of look at and, and feel very sort of reassured and comforted by that. I found a lot of comfort, community friendship, and joy in being part of it.

Elizabeth

And tell me about your earliest music memories. Oh, by the way, your parents were pretty young. They must have been pretty young when they had you, right?

Elizabeth Alker

Yeah, my mum was 24 and I think my dad was 25.

Elizabeth

So they went straight into and then they’re teaching music as well as running a church. Is that right?

Elizabeth Alker

My dad was, yes. They were busy.

Elizabeth

Maybe it was because they didn’t have phones?!

Elizabeth Alker

I know, it’s incredible. I think because my granddad had been a teacher and a lay preacher, he’d always done both those things. They were in the kind of nonconformist tradition. So they were part of a Baptist church that was a plant from another church. So growing a church, often there’s not the funds to employ people full time and that sort of thing. So it was always something that was done as well as working full time.

Elizabeth 

Music was all over your home. Tell me about what you were hearing.

Elizabeth Alker 

Music was obviously a big part of our lives because they were both music, both pianists and both music teachers. So we grew up learning instruments and playing together. Honestly, my childhood was quite normal, I had friends and I went shopping and like for makeup and stuff like this. Our home life was quite normal, we went on bike rides and on holidays to normal places, but I think my dad had this dream of having this family band. He was in the worship group in the music group at church. So he was probably thinking, right, well, we’re lacking a saxophone there, so I will make sure Elizabeth can learn that. I had a brilliant clarinet teacher, he taught at the Royal Northern College of Music and was a classical musician. So we learned instruments from being young.

I think this is another thing to do with fairness. My granddad had come from a very, very poor family. His dad was a was a miner, but I think he’d been unemployed a lot of his life. They always had outside toilets. But became a head teacher. I think it was that thing of like, you know, no matter where you’re sort of coming from, you can do whatever you want to do, that was very much in the culture. I think then my parents had got into classical music and that’s a very tricky world.

Music can be a difficult world to be in, because you can work very, very hard at it and it’s very unpredictable. It’s an unpredictable landscape. So as much as we were kind of brought up with lots of music playing in the house and learning to play instruments, I think we were also given a slight awareness that this might this is quite a difficult world to be in as well, that comes back to that idea of fairness. Because again, I think, well, everyone should have the opportunity to access music and to enjoy music, and to have the chance to be able to learn to play music. And it’s not always the case.

Elizabeth 

Do you sometimes think whether you would have pursued a career as a musician rather than music journalism, if you hadn’t had that steer? 

Career determination and the Dalai Lama’s birthday cake

Elizabeth Alker

Yeah, possibly. I think I was always aware that it’s good to have like a backup. I really liked to read music criticism, reviews and music magazines. I used to buy The Enemy every week because in those days, you didn’t, you couldn’t just click and listen, something, obviously, you had to go and buy a magazine. And then you would buy the record, based on what this person has written about it and how they described it and the words they’d used. So weird to think of now, isn’t it? I think there’s still a value in that. Because I think that a lot of the way we enjoy music has to do with the community that we’re in, and the way people that we trust shape our taste. So I’m really interested in that idea. I think, possibly I would have got into music journalism anyway. I loved that you could be really descriptive about it, you could actually put the way that something sounded into words, or that I really liked that idea.

Elizabeth

That sent me off on a whole other thought, what you’ve just said about music is true of everything, that we are so influenced by people that we trust, basically, the power of testimony, like someone who we trust and respect tells us something and we believe it, we can’t get first hand evidence for almost anything in our lives. We live in a tiny community and one of the phrases we sometimes use is like you are the average of the six people that you spend the most time with, which is probably why I’m just this indistinct mush of confused self, because I’m always talking to people on this podcast. We are interconnected, peer shaped, hyper social beings.

Elizabeth Alker

This is what I do for a living. And yet, I can be really convinced that I do not like a certain artist or a band or whatever, and then I’ll meet someone who I love, and they love this band and it rubs off on me, because part of the way that I enjoy that thing is knowing that they like it as well and respecting what they like about it. You want to kind of get to the bottom of what it is that they like about it. Because if you really respect another person, there’ll be something in there that you can get hold of, as well. So I think that’s a big part of how we experience music. And I think that that’s one of the things I’m really passionate about with classical music, because I believe that people can just enjoy the music. My husband has no background in classical music and just knew very little about classical music before we met and was slightly intimidated by the culture around it. But actually, I just have played him things over the years and he’s and now he enjoys it because the music is separate to the to the community around it sometimes and it just takes one person to kind of change your perspective on it, and help you hear it in a different way.

Elizabeth 

Well let’s come back to that, I think there’s really interesting things there about class and sort of popular music tribes and classical music tribes, but I want to just put fill in the gaps of your story because you didn’t have a media family or loads of journalism contacts. I’d love to know, how did you find your way into an industry? That is not always a particularly easy one to get access to?

Elizabeth Alker 

I remember being in the final months of my degree, and thinking, what happens now. No editors from the The Enemy are coming round to Leeds University to our course, it felt like going to the moon and I couldn’t afford to move to London, I just suddenly was like, this is actually really difficult to bridge this gap from where I am now to see where I want to be. I think I was lucky because my parents live on the outside of Manchester. Manchester is a big enough city with enough going on that there were there were publications that I could write for and there was a music scene that I could write about.

So I just worked really hard. I remember once I had this wheelie suitcase and I was wheeling it all over the place all the time. I was dragging it down Tip Street and I thought, gosh, this is really hard to pull,  why is it so heavy, what’s going on. I had wheeled all the wheels off, and then the plastic underneath that right through to the fabrics, I was just like dragging this suitcase along with me, because I’d been zipping about all over the place. I had a few friends who were in bands, and I would turn up their gigs and then I would just used to write reviews, and then send them, then I guessed people’s emails. I was just so determined. I thought I may as well like go hell for leather with this thing and just spend all the time doing it. I just kept sending reviews until someone got sick of me and published it. Then I was able to sort of build a little bit of a CV from having a couple of things printed, and then applied for some work experience at the BBC.

I managed to get some work experience, partly because I’d sort of built up a bit of a portfolio. But this was a time when music journalism was just struggling even then, that’s 20 years ago, but it was struggling. I remember, I’d start writing for magazines and then suddenly you get an email from the section editor saying, oh, we don’t pay any more for this sort of thing. Then I ended up working at Radio 4 and then somebody knew that somebody there knew that I’d had this background with music reviewing and a job came up with 6 Music and that’s how I ended up there. But it took me like it took me about four years to establish myself.

Elizabeth

It sounds like you just had a whale of a time on 6 Music. What are some of your favourite memories of interviews or events that you covered there?

Elizabeth Alker

Especially when I was working with Radcliffe and McConey, who I worked with every day for eight years or something like that. It was just one of those really weird right time right place, right people everything just coming together. I met Paul McCartney. I was at Glastonbury every year. I got to report from the mainstage when Patti Smith sang happy birthday to the Dalai Lama and brought a birthday cake on to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. I’ve got a picture of it. I’ll send it to you. So that was memorable. I was on the stage when Jeremy Corbyn went on the main stage at Glastonbury as well, that was just incredible to just see all those people who were really hopeful for more equality. I’m not saying that I was a diehard communist or anything like that. There was like a real palpable sense of hope and longing for more equality. I interviewed Lou Reed, I became quite friendly with Markey Smith from The Fall, who had been a hero of mine from being a teenager, and my uncle had always taken me to see gigs. I got to know him quite well. So just all kinds of crazy things really.

Faith and northernness in public life

Elizabeth

I worked at the BBC was for five years in very different areas. But I did an interview recently where I mentioned it on someone’s YouTube channel. I was surprised still, how many of the comments were like, oh, must have been really hard being a Christian at the BBC, people have this assumption that it’s a sort of secular lion’s den? What were your experience to someone who has repeatedly been really open about being a person of faith?

Elizabeth Alker 

I think that it’s a really open–minded environment. Especially if you’re working in the arts and music, I think you’re going to be rubbing up against people who are open in their outlook. That was always my experience. I think a lot of people had some sort of that faith background, or were intrigued by it. I never found that people were hostile towards me because of it. I never came up against that sort of thing. In an industry, like the music industry, or the entertainment industry, they’re really difficult industries to be part of, as you’ll know, actually people are just looking for somebody who they might be able to trust. As a Christian, you have a responsibility to live by the values that you claim to uphold and to put your faith and trust in. So I think that’s the challenge, to actually be the embodiment of what you’re saying you believe in and then people hopefully can trust you in what can be kind of quite a kind of backstabby environment. I was certainly not always faultless. But that’s was the biggest challenge, I think. In terms of other people, they were always really open to what I believed.

Elizabeth 

It’s noticeable how open you are about it. I’ve interviewed people from all kinds different religious and political perspectives, but often the ones that are people of faith with a high public profile, I often don’t want to push them into being more open about it than they are comfortable with because some of them are nervous. Some of them have had pushback. But every interview I’ve heard with you, you’ve just really calmly gently brought it up as something about yourself. Tell me about that position that you hold for graciously and so clearly.

Elizabeth Alker 

That’s interesting that you made that observation. I guess that’s something I’ve not thought a great deal about, to be honest. I think maybe it’s natural to me to be quite transparent about who I am. It’s such a huge part of who I am, because it always has been for a start. As I was saying, those really kind of formative experiences of my grandparents and my parents, and the way they lived, because of what they believed, I feel like there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that. I think what appealed to me about this podcast is to talk about values that are sacred. I mean, these are all good things aren’t they, I have no kind of fear of saying that. The only challenge to me is to live by them and live up to it. I’m happy to sort of challenge myself with it.

Elizabeth 

I was listening to something and you were talking about the value of faith and value of kind of knowing your heritage, and you are such a champion of the North and its beauty and its culture. Does it still feel like an area where there is a divide or a set of misunderstandings or, you know, the potential of people in places being overlooked in our public conversations?

Elizabeth Alker

Well, I think so. My accent is nowhere near as strong as it used to be. But even just my voice and who people expect that I am just purely because of the way that I speak. And even, my own kind of prejudice against my own accent, I don’t know if that makes any sense. So I remember had to do a voiceover for something a few years ago, and they’d written it quite chatty. It was in quite a chatty style. And I think the person was thinking that this would suit my voice. I remember thinking, this would sound really sort of casual and pleasant in a southern accent, but it’s making me sound like I’m starting a fight. I think they were quite taken aback by it, I thought that it would be rewritten and it was. And why is that? That’s because of all the things that we think about the north and its history. Even if I tell my members of my family or people that I meet for the first time that I work in classical music, they might start putting on a posh voice. We expect that people who talk about classical music talk about it in posh accent, which is a southern accent.

It was real journey for me to find a voice with which I could talk about the subject matter. I think I had to imagine all different kinds of scenarios, so I think when we think of northerners chatting away, and this is like my own prejudice. Then I think, how then do I put this subject matter into that kind of lexicon, interesting syntax. I remember thinking, well, I just can’t, you can’t talk about classical music with this voice or with the inflections that northerners have, because it sounds so weird, people can’t get it. I understand why they can’t. People are not used to hearing it. I feel like that’s been a long journey, to find a way that I can do it naturally.

Elizabeth

A lot of this stuff is only semi–conscious, right? We have a set of stories and associations about tribes, or places or people that usually sit just below our consciousness, but that do shape how we interact with people, what we what we think is possible, where we think we will be welcomed or not welcomed. I was realising, I lived in Manchester for a while, I felt very foreign and I felt very posh. I’m sort of like, solidly middle class. But I was suddenly aware of my southernness in a way that you’re not when you’re just kind of swimming in the water, where everyone’s like you. I just find it really interesting to sort of take them out of the unconscious bit of the box of our brain and go, how are they serving us? How useful are these for loving our neighbour. 

Elizabeth Alker

It’s kind of just constantly fascinating to me and I’m aware of it, because I have like an inverted snobbery towards southerners, possibly. Like you said, when you’re swimming around in your own kind, you’re not aware of it, and then you’re suddenly taken out of it. At university, I became aware of the associations that I had with northerners, because I would play up to them, because that’s how people that’s what people are projecting onto me. And it’s quite fun to kind of play around with that.

Class is something I think about a lot. Yes, my parents studied classical music, but they had quite a working class sensibility, because their parents did. I was mentioning my granddad, who was brought up in a really, really working class family. We were only a couple of steps away from it. I do think about those things a lot. I feel like my background is mixed in that way. I’m really conscious of being able to kind of flip in and out of whatever it.

Elizabeth

Tell me how that plays out now, as someone who I would say is a pretty well positioned ambassador between various musical tribes. You’ve got a book coming out about the influence of classical music on pop. One of the things they do with Radio 3, is that they sort of put you in the crossover places to sort of translate different tribes to each other. What are the some of some of the stories and associations that you are trying to challenge either about classical music for those who don’t feel comfortable in those tribes? Or about every other kind of music, popular music, world music, all these kind of things, for people who would see themselves as very rooted in a classical tribe. 

Elizabeth Alker 

Classical music is an interesting one because obviously, to play, you have to be brilliant. It’s kind of like sport in that way, there is that standard it for the performers. And that requires years of training and investment. So already, it’s just exclusive by its nature in that sense, and that’s very difficult because the standard needs to be maintained. I remember when I was doing my a level music, and was just really more interested in Joy Division than any of the classical music that I was required to listen to. Then my dad was playing me these symphonic poems and a natural born teacher. And I was like, oh, wow, bang, I get this now. I understood the spirit of the composer. That’s the bit that fascinates me. That’s my way in, the human story is always the way into understanding music. And then you hear the sounds differently, because you know what they were thinking when they wrote them and why they’re there. So they start to make sense. There are extra layers of complexity in classical music but it’s easy to understand, in terms of what the composer was trying to communicate, and they want it to be understood. I believe that it’s accessible to people who can’t play, who don’t have a background. I’m sure the people who wrote the music hope for that as well.

Elizabeth 

And on all your travels, whether it’s engaging with people who might have a different faith perspective from you, or the north south thing, or tribes in classical music, class divides, what have you learned about what helps us actually encounter each other as fully human and treat each other with the respect and care that we need if we’re going to have a common life in which we can flourish?

Elizabeth Alker 

Respect. Definitely. Where is this person coming from? That was something that was so sort of deeply instilled in me as child, to ask where is this person coming from? What’s their experience? Why then, is their outlook taking that away? Why might they be thinking differently to me, differently to the way that I do? And then you learn something, I think that’s the key to it.

Elizabeth 

Elizabeth Alker, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.

Elizabeth Alker 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Reflections from Elizabeth

Elizabeth

Well, what a sweetheart. Elizabeth just came across as someone who is really straightforward in a massively refreshing way, by which I don’t mean not deep or thoughtful, but just very, very at home in her own skin, which was incredibly charming and very refreshing. Just a lovely person to speak to for that reason. And she started with talking about fairness as her sacred value and that really powerful origin story of having someone fostered into her home and realising just how different life is for someone who’s come through the care system, how many fewer opportunities there are, how much harder that foster sister would have to work than Elizabeth herself has had to work or would have to work and how wrong that is, how deeply unfair that is. You can hear the ways that shaped her sort of vision of the world. 

That childhood formation in a community where there might be quite high levels of poverty and inequality from a family that had experienced quite grinding poverty not many generations ago. And this vision of church and religious communities as places that can be where those of different backgrounds, views, perspectives, socioeconomic situations can meet and come together. It was noticeable that Katherine May noted that as someone looking at it from outside and how formative that was for Elizabeth as someone who grew up in it. 

She had this lovely line, this is how we treat people and this is how we expect to be treated. I can really see how that both open–hearted generosity, that posture of service that she saw in her parents and the community she was part of has formed her but also how that second part is important and this is how we expect to be treated. There’s something confident about Elizabeth in a way that is the opposite of arrogant and I think that’s very unusual. The phrase that keeps coming to me, she’s very at home in her skin. She is who she is in the world and she’s doing her thing and she’s using her gifts. Who can tell from one conversation, right? I’m sure there’s much more going on. But that it was really noticeable to me: confident but not arrogant. We sometimes use a phrase at Theos, which is the think tank that sacred sits under, which is confident non–defensiveness. I think there are forms of confidence which are just steady and rooted. And from that can be open–hearted and generous. Then there are false forms of confidence that are actually covering up status anxiety and make us scrappy and defensive and need to be kind of shoring up our own self by being critical or insecure. I really loved, this is how we treat people and this is how we expect to be treated.

I love, love the flow chart. Some people in the church at the moment use this phrase deconstruction, which is a sort of kind of rebranding of faith crisis. And I can sort of see student age Elizabeth in her room with this flow chart trying to work out how everything connects and what she believed and what she’d inherited. Also this beautiful picture of a family band of the dad just being like, I really need a guitarist and I really need a saxophonist.

The only time Elizabeth was cautious and stopped herself and thought, I need to think carefully about this, was talking about the classical world. I think that’s really interesting. As someone who is really quite a leading figure in music journalism, classical music journalism, extremely well known in that world, wanting not to slam it, but clearly having her parents experience and other people having experienced how difficult world is to function in. I think this is probably true of all the creative industries. They’re wiggly paths, right? And they’re so based on relationships and talent is a big part of it, but it’s not everything and access is an issue. As she said, to be a classical musician, it really helps if you have a lot of resources in your childhood. It really helps if your parents can afford a lot of lessons and to ship you about places and to buy you expensive instruments. And not everyone has access to that.

And then this lovely thing about seeing other people love things. How social we are as creatures, how influenced by those around us, how much what we believe is sort of held in ambient space in the community of people that we trust and respect, and both people that we know in person and people that we listen to or watch regularly. This sort of fallacy that we are these rational, optimising creatures, either like coming to our own exact conclusions on reading of our scriptures or on what science says on or how do we make decisions. And all these big questions. Relationships, I think, are sort of 90 % part of the ball game, particularly on how we change our minds. It has to be hearing something from someone we trust and respect. The messenger is everything. That’s as true of music, of politics, of faith. 

It was really making me think of a quote that I can see on the back of a book that I probably read when I was a student called Blue Like Jazz that comes back to me a lot and I actually looked it up and it goes like this. “I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for 15 minutes and he never opened his eyes. After that, I liked jazz music.” And then at the end, Don Miller, who wrote that book said, sometimes you have to watch somebody loves something before you can love it yourself. It’s as if they are showing you the way and he ends with, I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened. I love humans, I love our creatureliness. I love how formed we are by love and by what other people love and how we are desiring beings as the philosopher James K. A. Smith put it. There you are, that whole line of thought was kicked off by what music journalism is doing.

Elizabeth is, as a music journalist, also clearly a hard worker, just a lot of hustle happened. Let’s just have respect for people who can sort of push and push and push and wheel their wheelie suitcase around Manchester until the wheels wear out, because they’re going after their dream. When I asked her about being public about her faith, she was so gorgeously guileless about it. I think a lot of people, whatever religious perspective you’re from in public life, often have had to think quite carefully about how open or not they are. I was sort of expecting her to say, yes, I always bring it up because I think it’s important that people are open about their faith, or you know, that it’s part of my kind of It’s just a dutiful thing that I will talk about my faith in public because I’m here to represent in that way. But she didn’t, it was really lovely. She was quite surprised that I even asked. She was like, well, of course, that’s just part of who I am. You know, it just pours out of her. She’s really relaxed about it. And I think again, that’s what’s so beautiful. It just sort of weaves into who she is and her love of music and her background and her northernness. It’s just who she is and she’s just being that in the world and she’s not tense and she’s not trying to persuade you of anything. It’s just being who she is and I found it very, very charming.

Finally, on the northernness thing, I was really grateful for her going there because I was like, I don’t want to be facile about it, but I suspect we still do have a bunch of prejudice about loads of things, about loads of different accents and where people are from and associations. The fact that Elizabeth had felt she needed to really think through her accent and how it changes, how a script sounds and how it changes how people respond to her talking about classical music, really confirmed for me that that is something that we need to be a bit more conscious of as we listen to each other.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Sacred. The Sacred is a project of the think tank Theos and I’d love you to go check out Theos’ wider work. You can find Theos and The Sacred and me on all your usual social media platforms. I mean, not all your usual ones. I haven’t quite yet braved TikTok. I think I may be too old. Maybe I will. We’re on Twitter. We’re on Instagram. I have a sub stack. I have a book coming out in May. It would be really helpful if you know you’re going to buy it, if you would be happy to pre–order it. That gives the bookshops a signal that they should stock it because there’s interest. And we love hearing from you. Please do email, get in touch, reflect back to us and as I often say, it’s so helpful if you can rate and review the podcast and send an episode to a friend because we’re trying to do something quite nuanced and thoughtful and careful and the algorithm doesn’t tend to prioritise those things. And so we need your help. Thanks in advance. And until next time, thanks for listening.

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