Throughout 2021, RA will host a series of interviews in partnership with Black Minds Matter UK, an organisation whose mission is to connect Black individuals and families with free mental health services by professional Black therapists.

The interviews, which will be published as written features and audio RA Exchanges, focus on Black creatives working in electronic music at all levels. These conversations will touch on issues surrounding mental health, in keeping with Black Minds Matter UK's mission to "make mental health topics more relevant and accessible for all Black people in the UK, removing the stigma and remodelling the services to be relevant for the Black community."

Next up, East London DJ, broadcaster and passionate advocate of mental health Vanessa Maria speaks to Nate Agbetu, cofounder of the London-based creative studio Play Nice, among many other things.

This is a full transcript of this week's edition of the RA Exchange, edited slightly for clarity.

Nate, how are you doing today?

I'm good, you know, I'm good. How are you?

I'm good. Do you know what, there's one question I ask all my guests, and that's what made you smile?

Today? I think our conversation has made me smile, definitely just having the convo before we started this, it's had me laughing the whole way through, so, yeah, I'm ready. What about you?

You know what? I'm going to say the same thing, and just feeling grateful to be talking to someone during lockdown. It's been rough but I really appreciate it.

Yeah, decent Friday night, innit?

It's all right, yes, it is all right. Talking about Friday nights and talking about playing, having fun, talk to me about your creative studio Play Nice—what is it and how did it get started?

Play Nice is a creative studio developing communications, moments and just hearing the lived experiences of different people, people doing things just differently, interestingly, and communities that speak to the value of the new world that we want to be a part of. We've worked together in advertising, me and my cofounder, Ayo. We used to work at [Wieden + Kennedy] together before I moved in-house at Nike, and [we've] just gotten the chance to have conversations that people around us needed to have at that time.

It felt like a lot of the conversations we were having were through the lens of brands, but there were so many more important things that had to be said. More times people care when the message comes from someone in particular. So, in Play Nice, we thought why can't we be that someone, and we launched it in March 2019 when we were sick of filtering our ideas through a particular lens and thought we could push it ourselves. We started that journey with the young people who weren't being heard in the climate emergency to make a...—I guess you could call it a project that kind of hero-ed the lived experiences of them and the messages they wanted to share with the world around the climate.

I love that, and you recently launched The Pattern, right?

Yeah, that one is big.

Congratulations on that, I saw it across social media and it just looks so fantastic. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

When we launched that project around the climate emergency with the UK Student Climate Network, we made a little splash. It was the first project and it got into Beazley Designs of the Year. We were doing workshops with our local communities that felt a lot realer than the work we were making and creating in other spaces. And there was just a need for it to go a bit further. And we were chatting to Culture Mile about doing some programming around the prize that they had for the skills development of the future.

But we clocked that we were kind of building that by thinking differently and doing things differently. That gave us a chance to bring voices like JoJo [Sonubi], the founder of No Signal, into the Barbican, and Tobi Kyere, who is carving out space in theatre, and people turned out for it. So we turned around and realised it was time to just democratise that thinking and create something new by making sure these spaces were for everyone. And we just applied for the prize ourselves and it took almost 18 months in total to work on it from that beginning.

But, yeah, it's just about a takeover of those spaces, the spaces that we see as the culture industry. Because everyone's always talking about "what's the culture?" But why aren't they taking space up in the cultural industry? It was really puzzling, it felt wrong. And that's why The Pattern felt kind of right.

Amazing. And the thing that really struck me when I was looking at The Pattern is how intersectional your approach was to the project.

Thank you.

Especially when it went about selecting the mentors as well. I know you have people representing Muslim Sisterhood, Babez London and the UK [Student] Climate Network. Talk to me a little bit about that selection process and how intentional your thinking was in terms of intersectionality.

Yeah, intersectionality is just a massive part of the way we think. There's so many intersections to our identities. Like myself, I regard myself as a cisgendered man but I'm also queer and Black in my skin presenting and whatnot, and, yeah, for us it's just about how can you explore and engage with different identities and communities and people without being a voyeur. I think it's a big thing for us because you have to avoid that and work out how you create a real and a raw value exchange with the communities that you work with.

I used to work a lot at Nike with some of their community leaders, and one thing I learned from those experiences is just the value of relationships. They're so important because you just don't want to be a splash in the water; you want to do something for a long time and for it to stick around. So, we chose people whose visions we admire, who we can chat to on DMs or on WhatsApp because we want to create something real and quite natural. Because community at its core is founded on shared values and core beliefs and we kind of share that with each of those mentors.

So it made sense to work with them. Their work amazes us and inspires us and will be written in the history books, so we just wanted to be a part of their journey and we've been following it for ages and chatting to them for ages, and chatting to them about how we can bring this to life. So big shout out to Noga, Lavinya, Naeem and Ameesa, and anyone listening, if you don't know them then you should definitely go and check them out and check their journeys as well.

The thing that I picked out as well with the organisations that you're working with is the link to music. So, you're working with Guildhall [School of Music & Drama] and the [London] Symphony Orchestra. Why did you decide to select those institutions?

Yeah, they're just part of the partnering body that we're working with, Culture Mile. So there's a cultural district across Moorgate and Central that does a lot of creative learning programs and just general programming for those four institutions. So, it's Barbican, Museum Of London, Guildhall and London Symphony Orchestra. And, yeah, I guess London Symphony Orchestra and Guildhall are really interesting because they just work around music, and I guess for us, we just always want to make cool stuff. Cool, meaningful stuff.

And throughout history a lot of that comes from music, from Fela Kuti to NWA with their messages, from writers like Neef Ekpoudom with their words to Stormzy with his protests. So music will always be a part of what we do, and a lot of what we want to do moving forward, because it can show up and create change in so many meaningful ways. And it's kind of already showing up in what we're creating with The Pattern as well. It's super exciting because music's role in expression really starts to blossom in these briefs that we've got come out.

Lamisa, who's from Muslim Sisterhood, has references in her brief to ghazal, which is a Persian form of poetry and song that shares love for Allah. And Lavinya's brief—Lavinya if you don't know her is the founder of The Black Curriculum—focuses on how Black music is created and connected to social change. So, yeah, music's going to play a big role in The Pattern and it's going to be on the cohort's terms, on the people involved's terms, in terms of what they create and it's a part of our journey moving forward a lot as well.

I know music has been a part of Play Nice previously as well. You launched a documentary called The New Rave in collaboration with the Design Museum.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's just incredible, you were showcasing Black pioneers in electronic dance music.

Yeah, so, it looked at the experiences of Mali, or everyone knows her as Shy One. She's a DJ, producer, beat-maker, all round genius and my favourite DJ ever. Errol, who runs Touching Bass, which is just a beautiful jazz and soul collective, broken beat, just real, hearty music. They're based in South [London]. Tash, who plays global club like you do, is a DJ, presenter and she runs a record label called Club Yeke. And Tommy Gold who's part of the Bone Soda Family, and they're a collective and another creative studio as well.

They're just doing mad bits, crazy amounts of work, and I think for us when we spoke to the Design Museum, the exhibition was about electronic music and I think so much of what we know electronic music to be these days is quite whitewashed and forgets the legacy of electronic music actually being born in different spaces like Detroit through techno or Soul II Soul here in the UK, pioneering a new form of electronic music that kind of dipped in and out of house and soul music, and kind of built a new subculture in the UK in terms of us not Americanising our voices and stuff.

So, the film itself actually follows those four creators in music and looks at their experiences through lockdown of finding electronic music, finding themselves within electronic music, the power of dance and music, and what they hope for the future going forward. Because everything just feels a bit murky right now while we're in lockdown.

Definitely. The thing that really stuck out to me was that this type of music is Black music, it's part of Black culture, and everyone sort of picked up on the fact that it wasn't something that when they were growing up they maybe associated with Black people. But as they learned more about techno, house and its roots, it became apparent. I love that, and I feel like I learned a lot watching the documentary. But what did you learn when you were actually directing it?

Yeah, that's a good one. That one almost threw me off before. But, yeah, I think what I learned most from it, as well as learning about the richness of everyone's stories, was there's always more work to be done than it seems. I've been trying to get into directing for a while. I've written my first screenplay, a couple of little bits to drop. But I'm lucky that this kind of came at the divine moment that it did thanks to Ayo and Laura at the Design Museum, and the whole squad that we had around us.

I'm lucky I had my flatmate, Yasser Abubaca, who's a sick producer and director, to help me produce it and bring it together. Jaime Ackroyd, who's a good friend and the best DOP ever to kind of guide me into making it more cinematic and intimate. Laura at the Design Museum really let us fly away with what we wanted to create so it was amazing. But, yeah, the contributors were amazing as well, we had the most beautiful stories and experiences.

I guess I learned to document everything, because of that. There are so many amazing stories, so many different experiences, I wish we could've recorded it all, because we only had this one shoot day to record audio, but there were just so many rich gems from conversations that we had in everyone's spaces and outside of the eight minutes that we kind of built that film into. So it's taught me to definitely document everything and to always be aware that there's more work and you need to kind of seek advice from people and collaborate on your process, however close it is to your heart.

And in not being able to fit all the information in, we were lucky that we got to make a beautiful zine with the talented Aaron Skipper that got a bit more of that information in there, but, yeah, I definitely document a lot more. I feel like my mind's jumping everywhere. Yeah, communication is key as well. I think what was mad about this one was that most directors will be in the room with the editor bringing it all together, but this edit was done in isolation and I'm so thankful for Corey Mckay who edited the film together.

Because we had the most long conversations and tangents, but it made it such a sweet process. And sometimes what you want to convey, especially through mediums like film, it's more of a feeling than a transition or a single frame in the film. And it's important that you do the work of articulating that and learning to communicate that so you can really bring something to life that you can see in your head. So, that was another one I learned, definitely.

A lot of the time when I think about documentation I think about history. I think about family history and some of the things that the guests in the documentary—Tash, Errol, Shy One and Tommy—were talking about in terms of seeing music when they were growing up and having that experience, being exposed to music. How does music relate to you and your own family history?

Music is just in the family, it's actually kind of crazy. My mum and dad used to make street soul in the '80s and '90s. They had a mad little period of being little rock stars. There's actually another article on Resident Advisor that someone sent to me a couple of months ago that's about my dad being the godfather of street soul. And my dad's just really blasé about it, he doesn't really talk about it too much, but, yeah, I'm finding out about a lot of their music in lockdown and really connecting to that. Growing up it was just Stevie Wonder, Fela Kuti and a lot of neo soul and just movement and dance from a super young age.

Not to forget the "Tribal Skank"'s and the "Migraine Skank"'s in secondary school and stuff. It's always been really instrumental to me, and it's the start of my creative process as well, my journey into the creative industry, because the first thing I ever did was start my own club night so I could go to Uganda to do a charity project. Yeah, music and creating space for us to dance and to enjoy that and to soak in everyone else's rhythms—it's like no other. So it always has been and always will be, and it's a lot of what Play Nice is going to be moving forward as well.

What really strikes me is that a lot of the things you've done seem, well, very organic, very DIY, and you're a part of that sort of scene. When I say scene, I mean young people just doing it themselves, and going back to this documentary, I know that you linked up with Keep Hush and their merch service. And for me that's a space that sort of very much reflects the DIY scene in music.

Yeah, no, I can relate. Because Fred and Freddy, man, they're some bad boy entrepreneurs. I've known them since 2015, 2016. I used to have a streetwear brand called Light Work with two of my friends in college, and Fred and Freddy asked us to come and have a little stall at their first event in Soho Square. So sick. They're mavericks, man. DIY is in their blood, and I guess, yeah, the merch service is amazing because it's just another example of that.

That they found another way in the middle of a pandemic to bring music heads together in the world right now where we don't really know how we can, at least not in person, and in doing so and building another platform, they're supporting artists in a super sustainable way. It's mad magical. And, yeah, I've always been here for DIY culture. It breeds success I think, and I live by the phrase make it, break it, iterate it. But always learning, we're always learning.

Can you repeat that? We need a reload on that line.

What? Wheel it back? All right. What, the phrase, yeah?

Yeah.

The phrase is "make it, break it, iterate it." That's my thing. You just got to live it. There's no way to learn other than by doing. Learn by doing. We're all going to make mistakes and I think we live in a world that's constantly online right now, and you feel this need to get validation from others, but it's an iterative process. You've always got to be trying to move and level up and be vulnerable to evil eye if you need to be, because otherwise how are you going to make something that really supports the people that you want to support or serve them?

Or that actually functions properly beyond aesthetics. So I live for that. We're always learning, it's always growth, and being hungry for that, literally just do it. Yeah, think critically, I think, when you're trying to do something. Be honest and it's important to be the change that you want to see. I know that sounds clichéd but you always have to just do it and make sure that you do it with a good heart, I think, when you're trying to be DIY.

Absolutely. You talked about growth and learning and being hungry for it, and I feel like what better way to think about the whole lockdown period than a moment to just stop and reflect on life and think about learning and growing as a person and being introspective. I know for myself, that point when things sort of slowed down and stopped, it was the first time when I kind of looked at myself and the things that were happening in my life and really put things into perspective, thinking about what I wanted to prioritize and spend my time doing.

You have managed to produce a lot of content during these times of locked up-ness and feeling like life is over, so how have you managed to do that? How have you managed to stay so motivated during the last six, nine months or so?

It's been mad, you know. I can't lie, it's actually been mad. I think Tommy puts it the best in that documentary, he literally puts it in a nutshell, he's like, "There were days when I could get out of bed and moments where I just wanted to do nothing at all." I had moments as well where I just wanted to do it all, but, yeah, that was an emotional rollercoaster. It's still an emotional rollercoaster to a degree.

I don't know, lockdown has been crazy, because in this period I've learned to live with a lot. Loss. Heartbreak, and just living with covert racists at one point even. But I think it's also just been about learning to kind of purge myself of the things that don't serve me a little bit and be an introvert, like you were saying, and to use all of that emotion and feeling to kind of fuel the things that I want to create.

Personally, I've learned that I'm trying to express myself more through new mediums. It's the easiest way for me to push out and do something different and to feel that I'm actually seeing something outside of myself, if that makes sense. But that included just jumping into many things: there was film with the documentary, I did a little bit of code, I've even played with some clay and made candle holders and that. It's been mad interesting.

But there's still so much further to go, you know. I think it's just about using your time to do what you want to do, what you want to create, and being sure of what that thing is. Even if it is for the moment, even if it is just for right now, just having a crystal clear vision of it and trying to execute it is important.

I feel like emotions are heightened during this period as well, and you talked about loss and heartbreak and I relate to a lot of that, I relate to the heartbreak, do you know what I'm saying? I feel like a lot of people have gone through that, especially during last year and 2020 and how it's been. So how have you sort of maintained good mental health during that period?

It's the little things I've been making that are away from my work. Definitely making that candle holder or, I don't know, going cycling. I cycle a lot, and just eating. I'm out here getting thicc. That's me really. I think there are elements of the way that I look after myself that can be toxic, I can't lie, because I'm quite a workaholic. My work is my life and the people I engage with always remind me of where I'm trying to go.

And my mental finds peace in that. So, as much as I work all the time, I know that I'm working on things that give me grounding and help me find and be a part of building the world that I want to see. I need to slow down and I'm definitely open to finding some new hobbies, but, yeah, that's been me.

I love that you cycle. I think exercise is so important, I personally run 5K every morning if I can.

Yeah, you were saying, that's mad. Me and my asthmatic lungs could never.

It's just about habit and making it a priority and then soon enough you'll miss a day and feel like, oh my gosh, I need to get on it, do you know what I'm saying?

Mm-hmm.

And it's routine. Routine and structures are very, very critical and I didn't realise how important they were until lockdown hit.

Honestly.

And it puts things into perspective, doesn't it? Really.

Yeah, and it makes you realise that time is not such a linear thing. I'll be sitting in my bed working, and then I'll try and get up and be done with work and it might be the evening time. Or I might have had a really stressful day and then look at my watch and it's only 12 PM, or I might have had an amazing day and look at my watch and the whole day has gone by when it's felt like it's been one hour.

It's definitely routine and stuff which helps you to kind of ground yourself and be a bit more present in that, especially when everything's so monotonous and in the same space all the time.

Absolutely. Because that routine keeps you motivated and it keeps you on job, for me anyway, 100 percent. We're talking about mental health, we're talking about wellbeing, and one thing that I really, really love is that you actually teamed up with Black Minds Matter and you created their design system and their content strategy, and this podcast is in collaboration with them, so it's just so lovely that the circle has sort of been closed. Talk to me about your relationship with that organisation.

Yeah, BMM are amazing, man. Their whole team is so amazing. Agnes, Saskia, Liv—they're three magical people and they're making something really special. It's an honour to see them grow and serve the community in so many beautiful ways because we all really need it. So, yeah, big thank you to them. I guess collaborating with them came about at the height of BLM last year. Yeah, I suffer from a mad kind of PTSD and anxiety from a bag of trauma and stuff.

Especially during the point of lockdown when George Floyd had been murdered, Ayo, my cofounder, was a real crutch for me and my mental health. Yeah, George Floyd's death was so difficult. At the time I was living with some covert racists, it was really quite wild how the language started to become available around our different experiences in society and how difficult it can be to be a Black person living in this world.

So, the work that Black Minds Matter do is amazing and after George Floyd died, me and Ayo at that point had been chatting probably a few times a day, multiple times a day, and he just had this idea that we should do something around Black mental health. And I was all for it, because I was here melting in my room, and, yeah, just being the amazing researcher that he is, he found Black Minds Matter in seconds and we knew it had to become an institution and that we wanted to play a role in pushing it. If I'm honest, I was melting quite a bit at the time.

I had advice to give and consulting to do along with the work, but that work got done and everyone put in a lot of hard work and we're lucky to have the team that we had to support us. Ayo led that like a G. We had Johnny Isaacson, who's just the sickest designer, he built that brand based on Google Fonts so that it was accessible for everyone. And Mark Gilligan who just knows how to make things move, he's the waviest motion designer ever, and, yeah, those two are working with us on The Pattern as well, and some other design bits, and they're like brothers in arms.

And it was just beautiful to just know that we gave something to BMM's journey and that we can always be here to support in any way that we can. They're amazing.

I just love what you said, because I feel like I really relate to the trauma that you felt during the death of George Floyd, because I feel like there's not a Black person who wasn't affected in some sort of way.

Mm-hmm.

And you spoke about your co-founder, Ayo, helping you out in terms of his understanding of your identity and what you were going through as a Black person, and that leads me on to talk about why is it so important to highlight Black mental health in particular? What is it about our experiences that needs to be shared?

Boy. Where do you even start with ones like that? Yeah, there's a lot. I think, my friend Callum Jacobs, he's got a book coming out that everyone should read when they get the chance. He runs a zine called CARICOM, and they focus on the Black British experience in football. And there's just this one page in the second issue with this quote that just mashes me up every time, and it's like, "You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton and gold."

And it's just mad, that idea of transfiguring bodies. I don't think Black mental health hinges on whiteness, but that trauma is generational and there's still so much more healing to be done. So much for us to unlearn, and so many ways that we can exist in the world and so much to recognize about the ways in which we have existed in the world, and so much to draw from so that we can pave ways for the ways in which we will exist in the world.

And so I think Black mental health is so crucial because a lot of these conversations aren't being had. And like what happened with George Floyd and everyone posting infographics on Instagram, it kind of gave us a lot of language to understand things that we couldn't articulate before. And I think we just need to continue on that path and actually find a sense of solidarity as a community. So I think it's really important, because it's one of the things that will bring us together in a world that's quite fractured.

One thing that definitely keeps coming up in these discussions about Black mental health is the idea of community and uniting and staying together and supporting each other. What does community mean to you?

It's interesting, because I ask this question to everyone that we do a project with, or everyone who applies for anything we do. And I think it's foundations for me, community is just about shared value. I think it's really interesting because if we look at things like labels, for example, we love them when we ascribe them to ourselves but we hate them when others kind of force them onto us.

And so it's really hard to kind of define community in that sense because it's always going to be super fluid. But at its core, it's about sharing values with other people around you and finding a sense of commonality and either your rituals through life or your practices or what you make or what you take part in. That's what community is to me. The methods in which you live your life and the values that unite people.

And how has community informed your experiences and how has it affected you in your own life?

Yeah, that's super interesting. I'm a bit of a floater. I can have quite a few little friend groups, and I can appreciate a lot of different people for different reasons. So, I find community to be really joyous, because it allows me to kind of see the world through a new lens, with a different set of people. I think we all show different sides to ourselves and find different sides in ourselves around community and different sets of communities that we should just learn to nurture generally.

Especially when it comes to Black identity, we talk about code switching all the time, and I think it's important to maybe explore a bunch of different spaces so that you can start to unify those different characteristics that you find within yourself. And so, for me, community has always been a way to kind of grow and to understand more about just people in a bit more of an anthropological way I guess. And to support that and to nurture it and see what people's real motivations are.

I'm obsessed with intentionality and what people's intentions are when you make stuff, because if you don't have a shared value or a shared vision, it's going to be really hard to make something worthwhile or something that feels real and doesn't feel like just another piece of anonymous work in the water or experiences that we've seen enough of. So, yeah, I guess community for me is about finding newness and nuance. What about you?

Me? I feel like community for me would look like... Do you know what, when I first think of community, I think of support and I think of being just open minded to people's experiences and their ways of thinking and guidance as well. I see community as a form of guidance and as a space to grow as a person, because when I think of the actual words, I always think of the idea that it takes a whole community to raise a child.

Mm-hmm.

Do you know what I mean? And it's not just one person.

You have so much to learn from every single person in their lived experiences, you know.

Right, and I feel like the most powerful thing about community is the fact that everyone is different, and the fact that everyone brings something different to the table. Which is why it takes a village to raise a child, because not everyone has every piece of knowledge that is going to help you grow. You've got to find knowledge from different people in order to become complete, or not complete, or just find everything that you need or find the learning that will help you along your journey.

And you're never going to find that from one person, and I think that's why a community is so powerful, because it allows you to find everything in one space, in that one community. And I think that's what I feel like community is... it's a space where you can learn absolutely everything about one thing, because everyone is chipping in and supporting you. And I think that is what makes it so beautiful is that there's difference, but the difference is respected and the difference is supported and the difference is also celebrated.

Yeah, and there's a sense of just being mutual, you know? And feeling seen, that you don't often get in a lot of spaces. And so, it's important to try and find the spaces that do that for you.

Absolutely. And one of the things I really liked that you were talking about earlier, about your journey, your creative journey, when it comes to even just music as well. You said that you've done your own events, and events for me as a DJ is one way that you can very easily create a sense of community for people. I know you've had some parties at The Haggerston.

Yeah.

What was the reason behind that party? I know you had people like Scuti on the line up, Masterpeace, you had Jess Ajose and Ay Chibs on the decks.

Horacio, Patchbay.

Yes, yes.

Kam Bu, Masterpeace, everyone on that lineup was just hard. Hard, they are the best out. That moment was our first birthday, and it actually burns me because that moment was the last proper party I've been to. The first lockdown literally happened the Monday after it, and it was insane, but that party was just, I don't know, I love Errol. He has a way that he speaks, and in the documentary he says that it's about sharing space, rubbing shoulders, the gun fingers, the moments of just bliss and euphoria.

And I think for us it was just about celebrating that we've been in this for a year, and we have these interests and we work on these projects, but they don't always have to be heavy and I don't think that they should be heavy, we should talk about all of these conversations that we have with a sense of levity and lightness. And so, music is one way to always do that, and creating spaces that are music fueled is something that I've been heavy on since I was 16, doing Afrodisco nights or just nights for college students with my friends, and it's a beautiful feeling.

So, it's there for us to show that you don't always have to be a social justice warrior just to think about the right thing and interact with us in those spaces. It's also to show that you can wear multiple hats. You can do things for the good of society and at the same time still bust a dutty skank in the middle of The Haggerston, you know?

Absolutely, absolutely. I feel like sometimes, being yourself and being authentic to who you really are can sometimes be the most powerful thing you can do. And in that, you are being an activist through your own self-transformation, and I just feel like that's definitely something that comes across when you're speaking about your work and what you're doing and the creative spaces that you're building for people in the community.

I wanted to touch a little bit about what it was like for you as a Black professional being in creative space, because there's a conversation around representation, the lack of it, the lack of positions of power that Black people are in. What sort of experiences did you have?

This is one of them questions. Yeah, I don't know, just remember not to meet your idols, innit. I think for ages I wanted to answer this question in a way that bare motivated everyone to jump into jobs in the creative industry. But, honestly, I think it's time for us to try and make our own. Yeah, I don't know. I did this talk with Create Jobs. And when I was writing out the presentation, it was a lot about the creative industry and what it means to be a professional in it, and how to approach it.

And when I thought about it, I kind of brought it down to experience, it all comes down to experience. But in different forms. Experience using different platforms and experimenting and learning how to use things that will define the means of communicating with each other or making stuff. There's, I don't know, experiences that you learn from leaders and mentors that you find along the way, which is so crucial. And then there's just this backbreaking experience of trying to rise from the bottom with your peers.

Which is just another mutual feeling, and all through those types of experiences so crucial into developing yourself and to building your skillset, but I advise that... I don't know, I think people should exhaust themselves as much as they need to to grow and to challenge and make something different. Some people grow in a way that they can live the rest of their lives even by those systems, but personally I think it's important to set boundaries around yourself and your practice and to take what you can from these spaces so that you can build something new.

Because especially in this point when I have so many friends who are creatives and work in one line of creativity, photographers or writers, and it's quite difficult with publications and it's quite difficult to get jobs if you're not in agencies, with being a photographer right now. And I think it's important to just learn different transferable skills. That way you can set your terms with the projects that you jump into. And know that it's mutual, and return to that point when you're really making something that you feel the world needs as opposed to just trying to churn out more work.

Because it all kind of leads up to you building that world and giving to the world in a way that represents your view of it. So, I think as a Black creative it can be quite difficult because sometimes you're asked to turn up in ways that aren't you on that day. Yeah, I think people expect a lot from you. And it's good to try and push yourself and to grow in that space, but it comes to a point where it doesn't serve you. And sometimes I think your life experiences turn into a commodity. So, you know, sometimes you have to work out what the value exchange is for you.

Are you really gaining? And how long are you gaining for? And how long are you going to have the energy to keep giving before you can actually stand on your own two feet sometimes? But no knocking to those guys who are in the system, because, yeah, there's a bunch of different stakeholders. There's people who work outside and do the work of trying to build something new. There's people who are inside actually pushing for that change and advocating it too, so big shout out to them, but me personally, I can't really do the inside the system ting.

I really relate to what you said when you pointed out that your life experiences are commodified. I feel like it's very true and I feel like sometimes it's easy to lose yourself. Or not even just yourself, your direction, especially when maybe you're working in a corporate space and I just wanted to know, it seems like you're someone who identified that pattern early on and thought, "I don't want to be there, and I want to do something for myself."

How did you do that? Was it a case of mentorship? Was it a case of a role model? Was it a case of just your own observations? How did you get yourself…

It honestly comes back to that "make it, break it, iterate it" kind of thing. When I started doing events when I was 16, my aim was to just make £1,700 to go to Uganda. And at the time, I was learning economics, I was doing English lit, maths, economics. And I was using little pricing schemes, like price elasticity with demand to kind of work out what my price elasticity of demand was for my tickets. And that, yeah, I failed college which was horrible, but I made ten grand at the age of 16.

And got to go to Uganda to do this project and find out about how different people are socializing, what those communities needed, and I had the equity to be a part of that. And I think just being able to come out of the rat race of London and, yeah, just see something new and see how at 16 I had the talent to bring value to different people in different ways, I started to realize that you just don't have to always go on this one linear path. And that's just been my method, always.

I think all those entrepreneurs that tell you [to have] multiple streams of income, I would say similarly, the same thing, but not for the multiple streams of income, just for the different perspectives you can have on the world. I work on some freelance jobs, where I do co-creation with young people to build campaigns or I work on strategy for a campaign. That allows me to think about how a client thinks, and how they're approaching a problem and to research around that.

But then with Play Nice I can think more about what a community needs or what a stakeholder within the community needs. Which is just a bit more of a smaller world than a more direct world, and so having the balance of two, you kind of learn to move the different things that you learn, the transferrable skills and, yeah, just the learnings in general across both. So it's always important to just work on multiple things, and work towards what you're building for yourself.

Some people want yachts, some people want a mad mansion in LA or something. Personally, I just want a house with a skylight and a kitchen island and a nice garden. So, work out what it is in that world that you're trying to build, and gain the skills that can help you build that and work with the people that you want to be round for dinner, so that you're focusing on the things that do serve you and serve the people around you that you care about.

I hear you. It almost feels like this idea of purpose, and I don't know if you watched the Disney film, Soul?

Yeah. Yeah, I've seen that.

It touched a lot on this idea of purpose and whether it was redundant or not, and what is your purpose, and do we need purposes, and what is it that gets you out of bed and keeps you going? Someone once said to me that you don't need to know what you want to do, you don't need to know how you're going to do it, you just need to know why you want to do it.

Exactly. That is exactly it.

Yeah, and I feel like when you were talking, that's what really stuck out to me, it's your why is very crucial because once you have a why, you have direction and it will feed into everywhere and everything that you do.

Yeah. And that's the thing, that's the only thing that I'd ever say to pass down to anyone. Always ask yourself what your why is. What are you looking to make? Who are you looking to make it for? Who are you making it with? Maybe you're just making it for yourself, maybe you're making it by yourself, but there's this practice as well, this research practice, if you ask yourself why five times, you'll find the purpose of what you're doing, what your inner child wants. And then you can just kind of have fun with it, and play nice, and with others, and make something that the world needs or that you need.

So it's always important to start with that first, I think, otherwise you're just never going to be satisfied.

Never. You're always going to want that bigger house, that bigger skylight.

Yeah. You know what I mean? It's got you. But I think that always changes. I think your why always changes. I think everyone thinks they're so static, but your identity is moulding all the time, and your desires change all the time with everything that you interact with. You're basically the sum of everything that you touch.

That's very true. I feel like a lot of people will relate to that, and I do know for a fact that when I started and I was like, "I want to be a DJ", I was like, "I'm going play drill and trap and I'm going to be a pretty girl DJ on the decks and it's going to be all mad." And as soon as I started, I was like, absolutely not, I want to play baile funk and I want to platform weird sounds because there's a lot... you just hear the same music all the time, and I just thought that we need to diversify the sound that we're experiencing in clubs.

And that's why I changed. And then the why changed for so many different things in my life, and I feel like that's the beauty of it as well, because once you grow, once you learn, that changes and I feel like you can only do the best with what you have. And once you know something, once you've learned something, then you need to apply that and you need to do better.

Yeah, and I think everyone does themselves a disservice. I know we all look back and hate our past work. I think everyone has that mutual feeling, but if you didn't, for example, go and jump into the drill ting and try and do a pretty girl with it, you probably wouldn't be where you are now, if you know what I mean. So that served you for that moment, you know what I mean.

100 percent, 100 percent. I feel like you have to start somewhere, and it's not about whether you're getting it right the first time, it's about having the confidence to sort of show up and give something a go, and that relates to everything, whether it's starting to DJ, whether it's starting to create your own creative studio. You just have to have the confidence to show up and start. And then from there you start building and you learn and you look back and you're like, "That was cool, but I want to do something different because now I know better," or, "Maybe now I know that I want to do this," or, "This is what we need."

But without starting, you wouldn't have been able to get there and that's powerful because you need that confidence first to actually even attempt to do something that you feel that you need to do.

Yeah, 100 percent, 100 percent. And I think as you do it, you grow and you build and sometimes we end up wondering what for? What do we have some of this stuff, some of this baggage with us, for? And I think it's also important to just remember to get rid of things that don't serve you. Just cut it. And think critically. And make a plan on how to do that so that it's not sticky on the other side.

There's a pear tree that my granddad planted in my garden at my family home. And the fruit on it wasn't good enough to make a crumble, you know? It was just a bit mad. But we cut away all the diseased branches and now it's crumbles every summer, you know? So, always cut away the things you don't need.

Absolutely, absolutely, no bad energies, only good vibes.

Come on. Come on, every day.

Listen, before we close, I just want to ask, what's next? What's next for you? What's next for Play Nice? Are you dabbling in music? What's going on?

Next we're just trying to push more human expression, you know? Everyone's making space to make the things that they want to make and to be the change they want to see and whatnot. So I think for us what's super exciting is that we've got a radio station coming, that's going to be super exciting. Music's my first love and Ayo's truest passion, so that's going to be a super exciting journey and, yeah, we're working with the Design Museum to kick off their next exhibition, which is mad. And The Pattern to just democratize what we do, so, who knows what we'll bring to the table and what the young people who are involved in that will bring to the table.

So, yeah, it's an exciting time because we're looking to just expand and help everyone else build their own little worlds too.

That's amazing. I'm very, very excited for Play Nice. I'm excited for your journey, and I just want to really thank you for your time and for joining me, joining RA Exchange in collaboration with Black Minds Matter. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.

Likewise.

Where can people find you as well? Where can we follow you to stay up to date with what you do?

Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram, it's NateAgbetu. Or just follow us on PlayNiceLDN.

Perfect, thank you so much, Nate.

No, thank you, it's been sick.