60s Hit-Making Songwriters Key To Creating Winning Ideas

I read that a song-writing duo recently, separately died. So successful that in the Sixties they racked up UK Top 20 hits in number second only to Lennon-McCartney.

With a love of songwriting since schoolmates, they were rejected by the gatekeepers of the day (Soho's English Tin Pan Alley). So chanced their luck with a newly formed band they saw perform live in a pub. Giving them one standout that a few months later was Number One.

Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, as London's Times attests, 'never lost their belief that songwriting was an art in which the best results were achieved collectively'.

Later citing this exchange. Which you can imagine from a pairing adept at gliding the other's point to another, whilst finishing each others sentences in complete comfort.

“Alan and I have known each other for so long that we have developed an intuitive empathy that allows us to short-cut the creative process,” Howard noted.
“It’s like a rally in tennis, keeping ideas in play which individually one might have discarded,” Blaikley added.
“Then you examine what you’ve got and you can tell at once if it’s a winner.”

I've chaired countless 'better idea generation' sessions over video these past few years.

Some attendees come pre-amped to dismiss group brainstorming as a total waste of time.

Yet it needn't be.

Here, you get a glimpse into how. Especially when you and your colleagues may have a history strangely bereft of 'intuitive empathy short-cuts'.

Take this pair of criticisms of brainstorming as most know it.

No idea is too stupid. (Except when it is too stupid.)

The 'team' always triumphs. (Except that personal creations alone are always better.)

Both can be minimised with these writers' approach.

What their experience shows, is that it pays not to discard any thought as you progress.

There's plenty of advice around keeping going for as long as you've got. Regardless of any perceived quality of output.

The fact remains that during a session you can pursue what might seem dead-ends. Remix them. Take one somewhere weird. Mash a couple up together.

Try never to cut down an idea the moment it germinates. Certainly not without seeing where the seedling might sprout.

To 'play around with them' is to adopt the proven tactic of allowing them to breed.

It's so often not the first idea. So why stop without iteration?

Once pausing a session along these lines, you can then truly have a clearer view and a real winner emerging.