Film Producer and Photographer Patrick Bethell tells Shake the Dust how words and lyrics changed him in the inspiring 360° blogpost…
“As a kid ambition can be anything, everybody would try and strive to be the professional footballer or a famous dancer. In fact I remember saying to my Mum at the age of 8 that I would buy her a whole row of houses when I started playing for England.
As you grow up it’s important to hold on to what you wanted to become or get as close to it as you can. When I was 17 the culmination of bad grades and a difficult year at home meant that I started to lose all confidence in myself. I stopped playing football and stopped caring about a lot of things that I should have.
I realised that I couldn’t let my family down, they’d tried to help me every way they could. As the end of my sixth form year I was sat in my bedroom at home realising that I had probably failed most of my exams. That evening I heard a song called ‘Liquid Diction’ by an artist by Jehst that gave me a new perspective on what I wanted to do. The lyrics made me step back and evaluate what I was doing, it gave me space to think clearly through the flow, word play and the beat…
‘I might not succeed but it’s instinctive to try, to see my goals achieved before I die. And if my flow runs dry, I’ll rehydrate to dilate’
A few months later I got my first 35mm analogue camera, I’ve been shooting ever since. It has led me to having my work shown on the BBC as well as starting up a production company. Projects like Shake the Dust are so important to young people for the same reason, words can change and influence our aspirations and I have never looked back since”
