History
Mark Featherstone-Witty had been inspired by Alan Parker's 1980s film Fame to create a secondary school specialising in the performing arts. By the time he started trying to raise money through The School for Performing Arts Trust (SPA), he had refined a novel integrated curriculum. He approached Richard Branson to be the Project Champion who had agreed, but would only do so if other record companies chipped in. As it happened, The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) were concerned with home taping and realised they had no political influence to bring the necessary pressure to bear. The Conservative Government needed to give impetus to their flagging City Technology College scheme.
Over 20 years, the BRIT School has been the beneficiary of more than £7 million from the British Record industry, with a substantial annual contribution from the proceeds of the Brit Awards, administered via the record industry’s charity, The BRIT Trust.
Read more about this topic: BRIT School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)