“The ocean never apologises for its depth, and neither should you. The ocean carries broken shells and still makes music with them.”

There are moments working in prisons when everything simply comes together. Moments when the stars align and something extraordinary happens. Those are the days when I don't need to over-direct, over-rehearse or overthink. I simply create the space and watch the brilliance of the group emerge - their enthusiasm, their courage, their willingness to say, "I'll give it a go."
And sometimes, the talent takes your breath away.
Yesterday at HMP Hollesley Bay was one of those unforgettable days.

I was joined by two of the finest, most instinctive musicians I've ever had the privilege of working with: Johnny De'ath on drums and Marcus Bonfanti on guitar. Before we arrived, someone had quietly mentioned that one of the men could really sing.

They weren't exaggerating.

There was no rehearsal. No sheet music. No warm-up. Just a quick introduction...
"Hey man, how are you doing?"
...and then we launched straight into Lose Control by Teddy Swims.

What followed was one of those rare musical moments that reminds you exactly why music exists.
I've sung professionally for many years, yet I found myself learning. Listening. Being humbled. This wasn't about perfection (although it was pretty darn close); it was about honesty. About trust. About musicians instinctively listening to one another and creating something far greater than the sum of its parts.
For a few precious minutes, we were transported somewhere else entirely - that place only music can take you. A place where sound becomes emotion, where lyrics become lived experience, where a voice carrying truth can silence every distraction in the room. The rawness. The interpretation. The hand-on-heart beauty of it all.
It was simply extraordinary.

For the performance we shared eight songs together, including Breakfast at Tiffany's, What a Wonderful World, Three Little Birds and Ain't No Sunshine. Men stepped forward to take solo lines, many doing so for the first time, delivering them with confidence, style and genuine panache.
That's what I love most about music.

It doesn't erase individuality - it celebrates it. Every voice is different. Every personality brings something unique. There is room for differences, for standout performances, for vulnerability and confidence to exist side by side. Yet beneath it all is something much bigger: a shared purpose. A community moving in the same direction.
Everyone had a part to play.

Second Stage ensured we were beautifully lit, transforming an ordinary prison space into something that genuinely felt like a performance venue. Three of the men took complete responsibility for running the PA system, doing so with real professionalism and pride. Between songs, introductions and reflections on the sea were delivered with warmth, humour and enthusiasm, weaving the performance together into something that felt cohesive and meaningful.

And then, almost before we'd had time to process it, it was over.
We looked at each other with exactly the same thought.
"Wow."
Twenty men.
Eight songs.
Less than twenty-four hours together.
A performance that felt polished, authentic and full of heart.

It's amazing what can happen when people are trusted, encouraged and given the opportunity to shine. When exceptional musicians give generously of themselves. When prison staff believe in what's possible. When people stop being defined by their past and are instead seen for their potential.
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Like the ocean, none of us should apologise for our depth.
And like the ocean, even lives that carry broken shells can still make beautiful music.

​

​MICHAEL LITTLE
MAY 05, 2026

How does Adam Green and the Prison Choir Project create a safe context within a high risk environment? The last set of posts have described three sets of relationships that are fundamental to answering that question. I have seen them at work in nearly all the innovations with which Ratio has been involved this last decade. Not just in micro interventions like Prison Choir Project, but also in complex system change operating across a local or regional government area.
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Each relationship shapes, and is shaped by the context in which we live, work, learn and play. The first of the three sets of relationships operates through agency, our capacity to make choices, act and impose our will on the world, individually and collectively. Collective agency is the primary agent, since it shapes and is shaped by individual agency. By changing the physical environment -working in the chapel- and the people relating to each other -prisoners alongside officers and professional musicians- and the reason for being together -the disciplined and repetitive rehearsal of beautiful music for public performance- Adam Green creates a context in which participants see the potential to collectively shape their world. They may fail. But they have a sense of ‘together we can do this’.

This context shapes behaviours, and most importantly via the relationship between, on the one hand healthy conflict -the agon- and, on the other hand, behaviours that allow one person or group to restrict the agency of another, for example violence and psychological aggression. Where people come together, conflict is ubiquitous. We don’t all want the same things. You will know this from your family life. You experience this at work. It is part of community. As difficult conversations about how we live peaceably with each other give way to violence and psychological aggression, agency becomes restricted, ‘I’ begins to eat away at ‘we’, and minority groups -the rich, those brandishing historical power, those grabbing power- come to dominate. In the prison chapel, the context is one of agon.

The third relationship is between ‘we’ and ‘I’. In the prison chapel, the context is transitory. It exists during the rehearsals, and it endures for a few months after the public performance. But it can spread much more widely, and last much longer. I previously mentioned Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s analysis that suggests the United States became a ‘we’ society and no longer an ‘I’ society in 1925, a context forged, they say by civil society.1 It lasted until 1965, as the authors like to say, tongue in cheek, ‘at about the time when Dylan switched from acoustic to electric guitar’.
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These three relationships operate through context. They shape and are shaped by the context. They strongly influence our social networks. They matter when it comes to the decisions we make collectively and individually. They therefore guide our behaviour to others.
As I say, this argument will manifest itself again and again in the evidence and policy examples throughout the remainder of this story. But first there is a gap to fill. At the heart of the diagram, there is a box marked ‘contexts in which we relate’. Now is the time to give this box more definition.

1 Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing, 2020

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Tilly reflects on her time with the Prison Choir Project in HMP Wormwood Scrubs:

Rory Pilgrim, ‘Go Find Miracles’, 2025
July 2025 
A short film about the making of Go Find Miracles, a new sound artwork by 2023 Turner Prize-nominated artist Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo station. The work has been developed in collaboration with HMP/YOI Portland and the Prison Choir Project, as well as the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) and the Feminist Library in Peckham.

​Visit the project page here. 

​Go Find Miracles is a new sound artwork by 2023 Turner Prize-nominated artist Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo station commissioned by Art on the Underground.

This new work emerges from Pilgrim’s long-term work with those affected by the criminal justice system. Recorded in two underground locations, with Go Find Miracles, Pilgrim asks how we go beneath the surface to imagine new structures of repair and possibility.

The work has been developed in collaboration with HMP/YOI Portland and the Prison Choir Project, as well as the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) and the Feminist Library in Peckham. Go Find Miracles can be heard at Waterloo Underground station along the travelator connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines, between 14-25 July 2025.

Rory Pilgrim works collaboratively and in dialogue with others, across music composition, performance, film, drawing and text, reflecting and redefining how we come together to shape social change.

Go Find Miracles focuses on the role that the Isle of Portland, a small island in the English Channel, has played in shaping London through its quarries. Portland stone has been used to build many of London’s most iconic buildings, including the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, TfL’s historic headquarters – 55 Broadway, and Waterloo station itself. Trains to and from Portland’s closest station, Weymouth, arrive and depart from Waterloo – which acts as a gateway to the island, whose resources have built so much of the capital.

The Isle of Portland is also the site of two prisons, including HMP/YOI Portland, and the former site of prison barge HMP Weare and the Bibby Stockholm which temporarily housed asylum seekers. The labour of the people imprisoned on the island has historically shaped its landscape, with the many stone quarries originally being worked by imprisoned people who were initially brought to Portland in 1848 to construct the 2.84-mile-long harbour breakwater.
Expanding from Pilgrim’s long-term collaboration with communities on Portland and developed following a workshop at The Feminist Library in London, which used collections of intersectional feminist literature from the 1970s until the present day, Go Find Miracles explores the ways that the law impacts our lives and our environment. Reflecting on the idea of a miracle as an opening for change and a prayer as a sequence of connection through the words we share with each other, the artwork is structured around a call and response prayer.
Go Find Miracles was recorded underground in a Portland stone quarry, amongst the layers in which deep time connects us with our modern world, and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross London Underground station: bringing voices from Portland and London together.

The sound work takes the form of a conversation, spoken reflections and poetry by Carina Murray and Holly Upton are accompanied by music composed by Pilgrim and sung by soloist Robyn Haddon, alumni of the Prison Choir Project, and a further choir of singers with whom Pilgrim has previously collaborated for projects including pink & green, 2024 and RAFTS, 2022. The lyrics and melodies of the work have partly been written together with men from HMP/YOI Portland.

Constituting a prayer of call and response that ultimately traces a 10-minute loop without end, Go Find Miracles asks, if we break the loop, is it here we find space for miracles?

Go Find Miracles can be heard alongside visual artworks by Pilgrim depicting songbirds carrying messages between London and Portland. These drawings are installed throughout Waterloo Underground station making visible the listening experience and the ripple of connection between the two places explored in the work.

An expanded leaflet documenting the development of Go Find Miracles is available to collect from the station. A short film by 2025 Jarman award nominees, Other Cinemas, about the making of Go Find Miracles, will be available to view on art.tfl.gov.uk from 21 July 2025.
Go Find Miracles is the third audio commission developed in collaboration with The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Space’s at Risk programme (CCSaR) to spotlight and amplify grassroots organisations they have supported, and produce audio installations that can be heard across London Underground stations.

Credits
Collaborators: The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk team, The Feminist Library, HMP/YOI Portland, Learners from HMP/YOI Portland & The Prison Choir Project
Design: Wolfe Hall
Production & facilitation: Elizabeth Graham & Rory Pilgrim
Composition: Rory Pilgrim
Speakers: Carina Murray & Holly Upton
Sound recording & mixing: Lucas August
Sound editing: Nada Smiljanic
Singers: Adam Green, Darren, George, Marcello, Robyn Haddon, Todd Harris, Seraphina D’Arby and Marged Siôn
TfL Colleagues: Fernando Soler & Lota Anyakora
Recorded in an Albion Stone Ltd Portland stone mine on the Isle of Dorset, The Crypt Studio and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross Underground station.

​read more....