Yes, busking!

Many of you who have come into contact with Autism Outreach will know that John Biddulph trained originally (many years ago!) as a musician supplementing his student grant with cash earned playing on sessions in studios. Although John continued to play professionally after graduating, he now plays for pleasure as well as recording his own compositions which are available as iTunes and Amazon MP3 downloads.

John has performed with many well-known musicans such as Jools Holland and Nigel Kennedy and in many different musical guises from orchestras to jazz bands to folk groups and he even played on a bhangra track that reached no. 1 in the UK Bhangra Charts.

So why busking? Busking can be a fairly solitary activity – so far so good. John’s busking has 2 significantly different facets:

Busking activity 1
This comprises solo saxophone, other wind instruments playing over backing tracks with ‘standards’, some jazz, a little music from popular culture even a tiny smattering of Country and Western and one or two of John’s own compositions performed in a variety of venues either as a precursor to events, conferences etc or in a typical busking location such as Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets or Cambridge market and so on.

Busking activity 2 however, is quite different. The instrumentation is roughly the same but the venue and type of music is quite different. The style is far more improvisatory in nature though still uses some of John’s own composing work. It is also influenced by location (the sounds chosen for the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge would be different from an art gallery, museum or other public place). The music would be influenced by the artefacts, the visitors and other environmental elements. The visitors are able to interact with the music in real time through devices such as Sound beam and other ‘touch’ musical interfaces. Sometimes the sounds can be purposefully changed by deliberate interaction; sometimes they will be modified by someone passing moving through the beam and triggering sound events.

If you would like to know more about busking, autism and John’s work please contact him on