Skills & Thrills

THERE’S more to being a roadie than wearing a black T-shirt, smoking roll-ups and vetting groupies.

Doubtless these duties will form modules in courses for roadies on offer at the country’s new National Skills Academies.

Consideration will be given to rolling fags with one hand and humming the opening bars to Smoke On The Water.

These academies will provide vocational training for Briton’s new professionals. To begin, the schools will focus on manufacturing, construction and financial services. You know, the kind of things school leaves once learnt on the job but now require a certificate for.

And once they are established, courses will be offered in roadying and much else. These will be called the creative and skills academies.

One of the leading lights of this school for free thinkers and creatives (does anyone else see the irony?) is Feargal Sharkey, the pop musician and former lead singer of the Undertones, whose paean to masturbation shone a beamed a torchlight on what life is like for underemployed teenage boys.

Feargal says he knows of a band unable to crack the United States because they cannot find a decent tour manager. “You need a special sort of project manger, who can take 60 people and several tons of equipment to a foreign country for 1 1/2 years, but [they] can’t find one.”

You also need hit a hit song. Or you could just carry a guitar and hope that raw talent will see you though. But that is by the by. There is a shortage of pop tour managers that needs to be addressed with some urgency.

And by 2008, Phil Hope, the wonderfully entitled Skills Minister, hopes to have 12 skills academies open.
Or 13, depending on how skilled he is at opening them…

Posted: 1st, November 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink