Introducing Andy Bungay – Composer, Broadcaster, Writer

What is your name?

Andy Bungay

Briefly sum up who you are and what motivates you

I’m 56 and I guess renegotiating my inner boho for deployment in rapidly changing times!

If you have a job, what do you do for a living?

With various creative endeavours that sometimes overlapped, I was a support and floating support worker full-time until early 2017. I now do ad-hoc work in the busy field of benefit tribunal representation along with more of the creative stuff.

Creatively I am a Composer, Trombonist, occasional singer, broadcaster, and writer. I am about to do some musical direction with an Indie Film Company and am studying Shamanism to add to my range of therapeutic interventions as well as my lifestyle.

20-odd years

What do you find most satisfying about your job?

Meeting fantastic survivalists, their stories and diversity, and collaboration – making a team and having the freedom to work as the assignment requires. On the support side, this never more needed with clients yet organisationally once-excellent work practice is dying in the face of well-intentioned targets combined with arbitrary budget cuts. Hence my shift to working mostly independently. I think my current main gig, presenting www.mixcloud.com/andy-bungay for Wandsworth Radio is a good opportunity to turn back the tide a bit and I’m grateful for the freedom I have to welcome eclectic voices and hopefully create a warm yet challenging vibe.

Is your work primarily a means to an end ie money or the motivating force of your life?

It became the driving force- it started when fellow hostel dwellers – I had escaped a glue-sniffer in psychotic rage in a dodgy property- asked me to help them write letters home and I realised I had a knack for helping them solve problems expressively.  In very different contexts I think that’s what focused creativity does.  Now, I’m inspired by the extraordinary people  I interview for the radio show who say and practice this at a higher level having gone their own way.

When you were 8, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A military bandsman – I was then experimenting blowing into  a watering can courtesy of my Dad

Did you get there  – and if not, are you happy/sad that you didn’t?

It was my first job in 1980 and my first university of life.  It got the mojo formally fired up at the required speed. A surprising boho, eclectic environment,  often a hoot and home to some utter geniuses from whom I learned further to my mentors at school and such.  We’re still in touch today as the current corps depletes.

What is your dream job?

Several illusions are shattered when you see the political weather and eviscerated culture constraining those who ‘make it’. I think these days it’s all about work/life balance, which for me is rolling into the radio studio at loopy hours and soon chugging across the river to my houseboat and making mischief.