I knew climate change was happening, but where was I supposed to talk about it and who with? I wanted to have the conversation as part of my daily life .... in the food shop, at the bank, in the post office, but where were the devices to help engagement? All I could see was people going about their ordinary business as if the beast of climate change, global warming... however it was termed, was not happening. I needed to understand more about what was causing it, I needed to find a space in which to engage.

Photo: Liverpool Street Station, London, 2015 (Lola Perrin)

The only thing I could think of was to write a set of concert pieces , Piano Suite IX 'Significantus', with a big gap in the middle of the concert for a climate expert to give a talk and then facilitate an audience conversation. I started performing these concerts with different guest speakers at each location.

2017 I set up ClimateKeys so more musicians could adopt the same concert structure I'd developed; always placing the spoken word element within the running order of their own concert programme - so the audience engagement was always at the heart of concerts - and not an add-on to the end, as if an afterthought. Equally important was: - guest speakers were to talk without projected imagery and without blinding the audience with hard to absorb facts and statistics, the emphasis would be on forming community around action and solutions - the audience conversation had to be longer than the guest talk, and facilitated so that the audience would answer each other's comments and questions, rather than look to the guest speaker for answers. This way new agency would be accessed. Between 2017 - 2020 over seventy concerts took place in fifteen countries performed by scores of musicians, each playing locally in collaboration with local experts, triggering thousands of new conversations.

Photos: by the local concert organisers of ClimateKeys & Fossil Free concert, University of Maastricht, Netherlands