I’ve never been a great fan of the Olympics but this year I’ve found myself already caught up in it’s wake.  So despite my disapproval of Union Carbide’s sponsorship (the people behind the Bhopal disasters for which I shaved my head) I already have tickets for several paralympic swimming events to cheer on my superhuman cousin Ellie Simmonds. Furthermore I was recently asked by my old friend and house-mate Louise Giblin to compose a short piece of music to accompany her exhibition of body cast sculptures of Olympians. Louise has made body casts of various olympic athletes including Kriss Akabusi, Beth Tweddle, Dame Kelly Homes and Sally Gunnell onto which she adds motifs and designs reflecting the model’s career/life/achievements, they are then cast in bronze, brass or aluminium. I spent a day with her and blind paralympic swimmer Darren Leach as we watched him train and then go through the process of being cast as you can see here. By chance and synchronicity the 2012 Olympic slogan is a quote from Tennyson’s Ulysses :“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, so I was able to tie this into my last album ‘Tennyson’. I produced a short film to explain the process, and here is the final piece: To strive