Making Life Less Miserable
Facing page Ben Tallon (photo Danny Allison).
Ben Tallon uses his skills as an illustrator
and art director to launch Xpress, a new
awareness campaign to raise money for the
The Campaign Against Living Miserably . . . .
Directing a full awareness campaign wasn’t something I had in mind
when I sat down with a cup of coffee last August, right at the start of the
Olympic Games. I’d come to talk to the The Campaign Against Living
Miserably (CALM) to find out more about their work to prevent male
suicide in the UK. One year earlier I had begun writing a two hundredpage behemoth of a rant when my career as a freelance illustrator was
on life support thanks to budget cuts. At the time I didn’t see my book
as theraputic, just anger and frustration controlling my fingers on the
keyboard. I had no idea just how many men take their own lives. My
conversation with Rachel, editor of CALMzine resulted from my work
as an illustrator and as Creative Director of Quenched Music. Both were
rich with potential methods of helping CALM and we saw opportunities
to do something together.
Without friends, family and colleagues the world can be a
pretty dark place. CALM had left me in no doubt that too many men
inhabit a place where there are no friends; nobody to talk to at ease
about the things that bring you down. The next day I drew up ideas for a
campaign. I wanted to somehow get to the core of the feeling I get when
I write angrily in my book or draw something to make people laugh - the
way music can make you cry or smile. To me, all of this is precious.
My team and I called the campaign Xpress and agreed that if
just one person should benefit from this work, if just one life is saved,
however indirectly, then each of us will have achieved something far
bigger and real than anything we have yet done. We decided to create
three tangible elements for the campaign. First, my company, Quenched
Music would release an album of all the best new music in the UK
and beyond. If we could recruit one or two established artists for the
record that would give us something we could sell to raise money for
CALM and champion musicians who struggle in economic times like
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