Did you know that it’s our 32nd birthday? We started life back in 1992 as Access to Music, offering a small number of music courses. From such small beginnings, we’ve since evolved into games, media, computing and esports. We became Access Creative College to better reflect our focus on and passion for a wide range of creative disciplines.
It’s been an incredible three decades here, during which we’ve seen innumerable talented young creatives come through our doors, leaving us with the skills, knowledge and experience to launch incredible careers. Some have even gone on to be household names! We’re proud of every single one of our students, past and present, and we can’t wait to see what future generations of creatives achieve within our campuses and in their careers after they’ve finished their studies.
To help celebrate our birthday, we spoke to the Head of Campus for Access Creative College in Manchester, Mark Acton and Access Careers Leader, Martin Smith to find out what their time with us has been like. Read on for more!
Mark Acton
“I think it was in 1998 that I first came across Access to Music, when a friend of mine said that he was doing music teacher training ‘through the back door’ and he said how brilliant the Instrumental Music Facilitator programme was that he was engaging with.
Just under two years later, in late 1999, my wife was expecting a baby and I thought that I should probably try and get a real job, rather than relying on unpredictable gigs and selling nurses uniforms (yep). I took up teacher training with North Trafford College who suggested that I do my teaching practice with their music provision, which was a collaboration with Access to Music. On my first visit to the Beehive Mill, a vibrant, multi-industry building that housed a nightclub, radio station and lots of other creative businesses, I was awestruck by the atmosphere and the spark. Within 5 minutes, I was filming someone doing an assessed performance and I already knew that this was where I wanted to work.
I remember staff development days in August of 2000, with all the important names from Access to Music at the time, including a certain Martin Smith, the hangovers on the second morning after the karaoke in the bar the night before.
I was there on 9/11 watching the Twin Towers go down on a black and white portable TV with Steve Barlow twisting the aerial to get a good signal. Ben Searle had come down to IV the work on our HND Music Performance programme. At the same time, Sean South was in Lincoln having his job interview.
We’ve seen some tremendous developments over the year, including the move to having our own students instead of working with partner colleges, the British Academy of New Music in London with George Martin as our patron, Adrian taking over from John Ridgeon in (2007?) and the change to Access Creative College in more recent years.
With the broader remit of Access Creative College, and the Access Group we have been able to expand our horizons and feed off the symbiotic relationships of all of the creative industries, providing a much richer context for our learners.
Sports, music, games, film, art and graphics are the things that make our lives better and more interesting. They are what kept us going during lockdown. They make the world a better place for the creatives, the participants and the consumers.
We have changed people’s lives (sometimes even for the better) and helped other people do the same.
The world needs Access Creative College. Happy birthday and here’s to many more.”
And now let’s hear from Careers Leader, Martin Smith!
Martin Smith
““Long Time Gone” is a classic slice of psyche Americana from the 1969 Crosby, Stills & Nash album – I have a copy on vinyl. A long time has gone since my band, the Dancing Wu Li Masters, met John Ridgeon, Access to Music’s founder, in a pub in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Over a drink, in his charismatic way, he persuaded us all to enrol on a new teacher training course for musicians. We’re talking here of 1994, in the heady days of Britpop and acid house – Irvine Welsh’s book of that name had just been published. The result was we ended up teaching as a band residency in a secondary school and the kids loved it – chords to Half the World Away anyone? The next year I was running the course I had just completed, driving around rural Lincolnshire in a clapped-out Escort estate.
I next bumped into John Rigeon while out shopping and in his inimitable way, he said ‘How do you fancy running some music courses at Cambridge Regional College?’. That was the start of what would become the current ACC centres, with one in Leicester and another in Lincoln. At this time the management team used to meet in John and Linda’s kitchen in an old stone cottage in deepest Rutland over tea and sandwiches.
From there things just grew, until we had lots of centres, some run directly and others in partnership with colleges. I remember being at the launch of The Beehive in Manchester (hi Mark!), where Manni from the Stone Roses and Peter Hook from Joy Division/New Order, presided over events. I also recall when we moved into the current site on Oxford Street, which had been a venue and home to Jilly’s rock bar, where I had spent a few mispent nights in my youth!
Highlights from the early days included meeting Patron, Sir George Martin, at the awards show at the British Academy of New Music in London and seeing Ed Sheeran perform with his sampler pedal at the Artist Development Rich Mix gig and making a mess of his first loop – it didn’t phase him one bit, a precursor to him standing alone headlining the main stage at Glastonbury. I also met Basement Jaxx, Nitin Sawhney and Michael Kamen and we had radio presenters Lauren Laverne and Edith Bowman in to host Awards shows at the O2 in Birmingham, with students bused in from all over – hats off to Jono Heale for organising those. Prominent students from this period included Dizzie Rascal, Rita Ora and Jess Glynne.
At Cambridge I joined the Strawberry Fair committee to run a student stage at the city’s annual free festival and this inspired me and a few others to set up the Riverside Festival in Stamford, which grew into a 15,000 capacity one-day festival, featuring such bands as The Levellers and Enter Shikari. An ATM banner can be seen on the crowd barrier of the main stage in this video, which features myself playing in Funkmaster Wu Li, as well as dodgy crowd dancing. Eventually, the Cambridge partnership ended and I moved across to work on curriculum and then marketing.
In marketing we did some fun things, like create the prospectus in the form of a prog rock gatefold album with inserts. We also took an airstream mobile recording studio to the Birmingham NEC as part of a Get Experienced festival area. There was also the time we were at ExCel in London for an exhibition and the Premier Inn Docklands waiter insisted I was Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin and had a selfie taken – quite what Robert Plant would be doing in an East End Premier Inn having breakfast is another matter! This is a video of me actually doing a Plant impersonation in a band called Black Zeppelin.
The transition to Adrian Armstrong’s ownership took place, ceremonially at least, aboard a party boat on the River Thames, where I narrowly missed being struck on the head by a bottle of wine hurled from one of the bridges – it was almost as dramatic as the infamous Sex Pistols boat incident of 1977. From there, working with Jo Graham, we supported the transition to Access Creative College, pushing new courses in Games and Media and working on brand change, logos and our CREATE values.
In more recent times, I moved into supporting careers and personal development for our students and I have now trained to be a qualified Careers Leader. However, I still like to be involved in music and I stage-managed the ACC stage at the Green Man festival last year. I continue to play with the Dancing Wu Li Masters and also have a band which reimagines the music of John Martyn and Nick Drake. Finally, I have been asked to play a set of Neil Young songs for a future party, so I might just include Long Time Gone, on which Neil memorably played with Tom Jones in 1969, as a fitting tribute to 32 years of Access.”
And there you have it. Two amazing histories from two incredibly talented, long-time members of the Access community. If you want to be a part of our future, applications for September 2025 are open now.
- Access at 32: A retrospective from two long-time staff members - September 20, 2024
- Nina Coman – Best Animation/VFX Award 2024 - September 13, 2024
- Grace Matthews – Esports Student Winner 2024 - September 13, 2024