Phil Beadle - Rules for Mavericks: A Manifesto for Dissident Creatives

Rules for Mavericks is irreverent, stimulating and absorbing. Theres a mixture of humour and wisdom on every page. Its an insight into how thinking like a maverick can have practical benefits. Phil Beadle writes in a way that is personal and therefore easy to relate to. He demonstrates how deciding to think and behave like a maverick can change your work and personal life for the better.

Rod Judkins, author of The Art of Creative Thinking

Phil Beadle is one of the most important voices in British education. His latest book is not just about the true nature of the word maverick. It is about perhaps the most important educational gift we can give, namely the courage and curiosity to truly be ourselves and not apologise for it. Maverick, as he explains, is a label often stuck on people who dare to challenge convention. It is not something they necessarily chose for themselves. But convention can never adequately describe us. Our deepest hopes and dreams are far too profound for it. Obsequious deference to convention can never really make great scientific breakthroughs, create great art or stand against tyranny. Nor can it speak to the hunger for learning in any child. It is a prison all of its own. Phil is not just some provocateur or agitator, as much as those who fear mavericks might like to belittle him with that cosy and ill-explored label. He is allergic to bullshit and he speaks for freedom against a mediocrity that can ruin lives.

Ben Walden, Artistic Director, Contender Charlie

Voices in the wilderness are seldom heard with clarity. This book is the exception. Mavericks cant be made, but they can be given the space and support to fly in the face of conformity with alacrity. Phil Beadle wears the badge conferred on him with uncomfortable reticence, but delivers a message in tune with his original thinking, emphasising the importance of straying from the flock whilst hiding in full sight of the wolves. Sometimes controversial, but never less than eye-opening and thought-provoking, which is what any self-respecting moderate demands of their mavericks. As society careers towards ever-narrowing options in a disenfranchised democracy designed to govern from the top down, polemicists become ever more important voices: a rule book for railing against the top might just be the most useful tool of all. Read it and build with it.

Pete Wilkinson, Director, The Jerwood Space

The successor to Camus The Rebel, Phil Beadles Rules for Mavericks rocks, dips and swerves like no other book of this type ever has. It is a true original, combining anthropology and philosophy with a new way of looking at our world. It is revolutionary in scope and speaks not solely to intellectuals, but to all of us. The clarity of Phils writing opens up the closed and high grounds and lets us all in to the palace of intelligence. This is no mean achievement and the book is more than a must-read.

Jim Douglas, author of Tokyo Nights

Are where you are nice to people who have been nice to you. There have been a good few people who have been nice to me. I thank them and in particular IAN GILBERT and JIM HICKEY. Id also like to thank CHRIS ROBERTS both for his writing over the years and for agreeing to write the foreword to this book (Chris is the Godhead of British music writing and author of Idle Worship, the best book ever written on fandom), Safia Aidid for giving us permission to quote her quite brilliant article and also DAVID BOWMAN for being open minded enough to be convinced.

MAVERICK, LIKE GENIUS OR LEGEND, HAS OFTEN BEEN OVERUSED, DRAGGED OUT OF CONTEXT TO SIGNIFY ANYONE OR ANYTHING THAT GOES AGAINST THE GRAIN, HOWEVER TIMIDLY OR SELF-SERVINGLY. Phil Beadles Rules for Mavericks resets and reaffirms the sterling significance of the term. Now, more than ever, we need it to mean something. In an era when the ever-bursting babble of instant mass communication has politicians portraying themselves as their polar opposites in order to score points and light entertainers profitably passing themselves off as bohemian rock and roll rebels, the true MAVERICK must not die out.

As Beadle writes herein, No one will discover you. Theyre all too busy doing what you, yourself, should be doing: trying to discover what is special about themselves. Its nobodys job title (but your own). Similarly, nobody can really tell you how to be a MAVERICK or precisely what one is. Neither can anyone tell you how to exude charisma. But if youve got it in you it can be coaxed out. Being (a) MAVERICK may be perverse, but correctly channelled it could propel you further along in the board game of life than any number of sensible and considered moves. Creativity, despite the vacuity of most Hollywood-style believe-in-yourself follow-your-dream platitudes, is an inexact science and an art with an impulsive heart.

In what we still somehow call the post-war years, the great mavericks have been bold enough to dance to their own drum but savvy enough to snare the popular imagination. I was lucky enough to interview David Bowie four times and can confirm that he had it. The balm of charm, the greased wheel of appeal. HE WORE A LUDICROUS AMOUNT OF BOOKISH LEARNING LIGHTLY AND HAD A FURIOUS ONGOING INTEREST IN THE NEVER-MOTIONLESS NOW.

The first man to convince me that the Internet was going to be a big deal, he famously and incontrovertibly looked uncannily younger than his years, at least until what a very Welsh and very drunk Dylan Thomas might have had he been lifted clumsily out of context dubbed the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, Blackstar ones. As a teenage fan grown up, Id stare at him across the table or room and note how he might have changed his hairstyle or dress sense he never looked like his most recent photo but that he was indisputably David Bowie. THE FREE MALE, UNIQUE. HED BRIM WITH IDEAS, ABSURDLY ARTICULATE AND ENGAGED COMPARED TO MOST POP STARS, OR COMPARED TO MOST HUMAN BEINGS. He was either very interested in and stimulated by the conversation you were having or supremely adept at pretending to be. Whilst some of that may, of course, have been practised showbiz schmooze, the life force was genuinely strong in him, the aura attractively alien. He was making the absolute most of every second on Earth.

So its little wonder that throughout his matchless career he was able to suss out and surround himself with the best talent. And, prior to that, he had the guts and garters to shrug off early misfires and frustrations and pitch himself headlong into the Ziggy Stardust role, which no experienced manager or industry expert would have recommended in a zillion years. He didnt so much tear up the rule-book as incinerate it and fly on the fumes.