Alex Clare The Project Inspire Convention 2021

you gotta dig deep cause your mind i can't is [Music] i grew up in a very very secular family and i grew up in southeast london famous for david bowie and peter frampton and billy idol i didn't really have a sense of being jewish i didn't think that was we were any different to anybody else until i was at what would be called junior high in america i guess there was another kid in my class who was much more traditional than me and i had another kid in our school in our class say to me that he wasn't allowed to play or hang out with this other kid because he was jewish and his father told him not to and that really shook me up when i was seven years old they were offering free music lessons at school and i got a drum kit and i started playing in different bands when you're a musician as a kid there's like a gateway to get into all the parties and all the bars when you really shouldn't be there and at 17 years old i decided to really take music seriously and follow it full time sure enough i started working for a small publishing company in london working in studios working on my way up from firstly just making cups of tea but i started creating my own type of music which was blending soul music with electronic music i was playing live almost every single night and before too long the recording industry in the uk started to notice me eventually there was some sort of building war between pilophone and island records which is where i ended up signing and becoming a an island requisite is famous for signing u2 and bob marley and like various other big big musicians [Music] you know the real moment of sense of achievement was when i played a lollapalooza in chicago that feeling of seeing 30 to 100 000 people singing every word to every song back um marks a real sense of achievement it's the dream [Music] society i grew up in is one of the focus is on materiality physicality but i realized that there had to be more to life than just chasing after shows and money and success had to be more emotional and spiritual fulfillment somewhere so as my career was really sort of taking off i was thinking about judaism a lot more that became for me the focus thank god at a very early stage not to be focused on materialism to have a connection beyond the physical to have a spiritual rookies take a relationship with a college borough so as i was becoming from at the same time my music career was also going off on the same trajectory when i first signed my record deal i told them that i was sherman shabas so they were very aware that there was something different about fridays but they didn't quite get how serious it is for some reason every piece of promo that came in over that course of the summer was for friday nights and i was just turning down promo event after promo event of the promo event and they're getting really frustrated and they might say yom kippur i had a big phone call from my nr man saying you've got an amazing opportunity and asked them what it was and it was for a live performance on the bbc and the best thing is it's not on a friday it's on a thursday and i said to them thursday that's fantastic which thursday and he said next thursday so i counted in my head and i realized thursday oh it's a cop circus so i said to my nr man you know that's the cot right and they said yeah we know but you have a choice to make we can either support you in your career or we can drop you when you sign a record deal they give you a ton of money they handle your studio time they handle logistics behind you know doing live shows at this point from that huge sum of money they've given me to make an album i now had very little left being that making an album is extremely expensive when i got dropped they left me in a situation where their debt to my musicians which they were willing to pay and hadn't paid yet was to the tune of 11 000 pounds and being that i just got dropped they no longer legally had an obligation to pay that um yeah that was pretty terrible yeah pretty rough so i decided to do what every good jewish boy should do in the situation and go to yeshiva literally a couple of days later the divorce proceedings of my record label and i were finalized and i was finally dropped properly i was meeting with a friend of mine having a coffee one morning talking about my words and my worries and like not really knowing what to do and i got a phone call from an organizer of a design fair in germany a huge international conference of designers and architects and you know people in that industry and they have a party and they usually have like a big pop act to come and play it now unfortunately for the young pop act who was playing that night the lead singer got a case of laryngitis and they couldn't do the show and they phoned me up and said alex can you get to berlin tonight with uh your band i'm like not a chance no way i said we want to give you uh well we'll pay you 11 000 pounds to play a show if you can get there tonight so quickly i said okay give me five minutes i hung up i phoned my whole band i phoned my tour manager everyone i earned money to and i said look i can't pay you for this show but if you do this show for me we can be even i paid off my debt to my musicians with one gig just before i left yeshiva i got an email from a guy called keith and it says alex hi i work for microsoft we really want to use a piece of your music for a commercial we want to give you 75 000 for this piece of music to use it for this campaign is that okay absolutely sure and i realized that uh essentially that's gonna go to paying off my debt with my record label before i know it that ad campaign was international every commercial tv station in the world was playing that commercial and as a result there were people all over the world downloading and buying my music and radio stations all over the world were playing it i'm in yeshiva and i get a phone call from universal music in germany and they say to me alex can you come to frankfurt tomorrow morning okay can i ask why and he said well you're going to be number one here tomorrow in the chats yeah i'm yeshiva bacha in russia i am and i'm being told that the next day i'm going to be number one so uh yeah probably the only yeshiva backer in history to have a number one here in germany so from there i was in germany and i got a phone call from radio 1 in the uk the radio station that wouldn't move their thursday night slot for me they failed me up to tell me that my music was now on the radio one a-list it was being played every rotation amazing being that i was selling millions of records all over the world another bidding war started here between record labels i mean shiva boca and i'm getting offered you know deals into the many hundreds of thousands of dollars if my record label hadn't dropped me they would have had to give me a very small amount of money to make a new album and the best part was is that i was in a much stronger place to negotiate a new deal meaning not only could i get a much bigger deal but i could get much better terms with regards to shabbos observance and regards to what they would end up taking from a deal very good place to be [Music] today i live in euro shalom iraqi dish the very fact that i had so much yatima in the music industry means that i can sit and spend most of my day learning toyota which is a big big privilege and i am very touched and i can't believe that i have discussed to be able to uh to do it i still work i still go on tour every now and then we need to have pranasa and we need to have his dadless it's completely important totally vital but for us the main thing is a connection to our college borough you know i said when he says this what does it mean it means that everything else is a means to an end for a jew the priority is shabbos it's catalyst to understand the brokers the benevolence and the goodness that comes from learning torah and trying to build a meaningful relationship with our goddess baruch it's infinite [Music] you