UEA Alumni couple look back on being in a band in the 1980s and how music shaped their careers
By: UEA Alumni team
Stephen and Pippa Colvin (née Clements) met at UEA in 1982 and subsequently married. Stephen has had a distinguished career as a C Suite executive working with businesses such as Bloomberg and CBS. He has launched numerous media brands across many platforms including for Dennis Publishing both in the UK, US and globally, the news website The Daily Beast with renowned editor Tina Brown and The Week magazine in the US. He has also launched many prestigious live events, including the Bloomberg Green Festival and Women in the World. During their almost thirty years in the US Stephen has managed large teams across the world, travelling extensively.
Pippa worked in publishing for many years, editing science, art, architecture and children’s books – she helped create the genre-defining ‘The Art Book’ while working at Phaidon Press. Pippa is also a cellist and is the principal cellist for The Riverside Orchestra in Manhattan. They reside in New York, USA.
Stephen and Pippa were recently kind enough to share their memories of how they met at UEA, being in a pop band together, and how it helped them launch their careers.
How did you both discover UEA?
Pippa: I grew up in Kent and went through the normal application procedure, picking UEA as my first choice. I studied biology and specialised in genetics. I loved the course and I often reflect that if I ever had the chance to go back I’d choose genetics 100 times over.
Stephen: My story is a little different. The summer before starting university, I happened to be interning at a law firm in Hong Kong via a distant relative. I had an amazing time and befriended a chap called Nicholas Chapman and we had the best of times in Hong Kong. He was already reading law at UEA and said I should come and join him there.
So, I went back home to Belfast, my hometown, and said to my mum “I'm going to UEA.” I knew very little about UEA and my mother certainly didn’t. She thought I should go to Trinity College Dublin, which had been a family tradition, and I also had an offer from Warwick University. But I chose UEA to study Economics and Politics. A month later I was on a train to Norwich and it rained for the first four weeks straight!
How did you end up meeting and getting into music, and what was the Norwich music scene like?
Pippa: We met on our second day at UEA at the Horsham bar, and soon started hanging out with the same group of friends.
Stephen: I’d always played in bands from a ridiculously young age in Belfast and it was just a natural thing to be a part of when I came to Norwich. When I arrived, I put an advert up in a music shop in the city. The band we formed was very much a Norwich band rather than a UEA band and I really valued that I got to know the Norwich community during my student years. Many of them are friends to this day.
Lots of rock and pop bands around that time had keyboard players and Pippa who grew up playing the cello and piano was the perfect fit. The music scene was fantastic at UEA and in Norwich more widely at that time. The Higsons were about and Norwich friends of ours had got a record deal and we were part of that new Norwich music scene.
Pippa: UEA was an ideal melting pot for what we were doing music-wise. It was just that little bit too far from London to be going there regularly, so it developed its own scene. That distance from London – back then it took a good three hours – meant that most students committed to staying the full ten weeks of term, not dashing back and forth to London at weekends. This also made for a very strong university community and culture.
Sam & Galore in the 1980s
And did the band give you experience along with your degree?
Stephen: Absolutely, it was such a life lesson on top of our academics and uni social life. It was really like running your own little business and everything we earned we put back into the band – we were self-sufficient.
And so how did you balance music with your careers after graduating?
Pippa: I got a job in book publishing straight away, down in London. I was initially in scientific publishing and then I moved into architecture and design publishing which was great.
Stephen: I went to work for Ernst & Whinney, the chartered accountancy firm. I was offered a job and thought “why not”. I lasted there for about a year. I was very popular with the clients, but I failed the accountancy exam after the first year, which is somewhat ironic since I have spent the last 30 years running pretty complex businesses. (I did pass the law and economics exams, mind you!)
Our singer moved to London with us, but the other two in the band stayed in Norfolk and still live there. New band members joined. We continued the band in the evenings while we worked during the day. We were going to recording studios, rehearsal rooms and doing gigs all alongside our full-time work, often staying up most of the night in the recording studio.
And how successful were you?
Stephen: We never “made it”, but we did have a single in the top 60. It got playlisted on Radio One and we had our videos played on MTV. So, although we didn’t succeed as such, we did have that great experience of being in a band. We even did a show with Sinead O’Connor whom we all remember as such an amazing and kind person. Our first single, Heaven Knows, was put out by Polydor and we had a really good team behind us. That was the single that was meant to be a launching pad, but it wasn’t to be. We had spent a good eight years following our dream of being full-time musicians. We failed admirably and were then able to move on with our lives.
What advice would you give to students starting out in their career?
Stephen: We have three kids in their 20s so this is something we have had to think about a lot in recent years. I think it is important that you plan to live the life you want to live, not the life others want you to live, or that you think you ought to live. For some people earning a lot money is a priority while for others it is not– which doesn’t mean to say you won’t earn decent money if you follow your heart. It’s a long journey (and appears to be getting longer as people live longer), so you should take time to find out what work you enjoy. Some people fall into a job they love early on while others need to experiment with different jobs/professions. I know many people who didn’t figure out what they loved until they were in their thirties and they have nevertheless been successful.
I also think it’s important to always have a plan – it can be a 3 month plan, a 12 month plan, a 2 year plan (or all three) - you just always need something to be aiming towards; that provides you with purpose and lifts your spirit. You can always pivot from a plan as necessary.
Pippa: I’d also say that your three years at uni are such an opportunity to try new things outside your coursework, even if it’s something you hadn’t even considered before. Believe it or not, you have more time available while you’re a student, so join a club, throw yourself into a play or theatre production. It’s amazing how those experiences will impact other choices you make in the coming years. For us this was music, and although it didn’t become our “career” it is something that was always present in different forms. Stephen launched a music magazine, Blender, in the US in the 1990s, our kids all grew up playing instruments, and in recent years for me being able to play in the orchestra has been incredible.
What do you look back at fondly from your time at UEA?
Pippa: We were looking earlier today at the gig list of who played when we were there, and it was just phenomenal. Almost every week we would go and see a top band. Seeing live music was really accessible.
Stephen: University life was just fantastic. I really loved UEA. Probably for the next 15 years after graduating I told everyone that uni days were the best days of my life. Norwich was just such a great city as well. I worked at Sasses Restaurant near the railway station, and I really enjoyed it there. It was good work, and it was considered a privilege to be a waiter there. Great tips! Several other friends from UEA worked there too.