Prime minister says music was ‘great joy’ of his youth and he wants to reverse ‘degrading of creative arts’

Keir Starmer, far right, spent much of his youth travelling to rehearsals and benefited from the generous provision of music education in the 1970s. Photograph: Family handout/Labour Party

His father – as we know – was a toolmaker, and he has spoken often of the pebble-dashed semi where he grew up. But when Keir Starmer addressed the Labour party conference this week it was a less familiar aspect of his childhood that he chose to highlight.

One of the things that had given him “great joy” as a child, “as well as the football, obviously”, was playing the flute, he told delegates in Liverpool. “I don’t think you were expecting that, were you?”

The instrument had given him “so many opportunities”, Starmer said, including his first ever trip abroad on a tour to Malta with the Croydon Youth Philharmonic Orchestra (CYPO). “These early encounters with art and culture, they change us for ever … But those opportunities don’t go to every child, do they?”

For Andrew Turner, listening to the speech at home, it was an unexpected blast from the past. “I was completely amazed – but it brought back lots of nice memories.” Turner, who has recently retired after a career in technology, was an orchestral contemporary of Starmer’s in the late 1970s – although as a viola player, he doesn’t recall the big-haired future prime minister among the bank of flautists (“to be frank, string players don’t always talk to woodwind players”).

Given his own experience in the orchestra, however, “I’m not surprised he has mentioned it,” says Turner, “because I suspect for him, like for me, it was a formative part of his teenage years. Normally, other things that you do as a teenager are great fun, but this was something that really helped shape me.”

The extent to which music dominated Starmer’s younger years has arguably been underappreciated in the countlesss profiles written about him this year. The most musically accomplished prime minister since Ted Heath played not only the flute but the violin, piano and recorder; from the age of 11 he was a junior exhibitioner at the Guildhall School of Music, catching the train alone every Saturday morning to the capital from his home in Hurst Green, Surrey.

Starmer’s Sunday mornings were then spent in rehearsals for CYPO, under the charismatic leadership of Arthur Davison, a former director and deputy leader of the London Philharmonic. It was, at the time, one of two youth orchestras in Croydon, reflecting its then well-funded music provision in local schools.

Davison, a “larger than life” Canadian, was passionate about popularising classical music to wide audiences, and set high standards for his young musicians which also raised their expectations of themselves, according to his son Darrell, who is now also a distinguished conductor.

“He would keep a really a tight ship, because he believed that they could produce really good music. There’s something [about] an orchestra, almost a collective subconscious that sometimes helps you to play better than you thought you could.”

Perhaps, as a result, Starmer was far from the only member of the orchestra to go on to great things; another contemporary (on trumpet) was Matt Dunkley, now a leading conductor and arranger who orchestrated, among other things, the Barbie soundtrack and Billie Eilish’s Bond theme No Time to Die.

Dunkley says he frequently runs in to senior musicians who were CYPO alumni. “It created so many musicians who went on into the profession. But more than that, it created generations of children who had free access to music lessons and instruments.”

Things have changed in the 40 years since, according to Jon Regan, the conductor of CYPO’s successor, Croydon Youth Orchestra, and the co-head of the music education provider Croydon Music and Arts. The more generous provision of the 1970s has long gone, he says, and though CMA is backed by the Department for Education and Arts Council England, “we’re being asked to do more and more with less,” he says. “I’m sure you’ll find a lot of organisations around the country saying something similar … We can’t reach out to as many people because of the funding cuts in both our sector as well as in schools.”

Starmer has said he “passionately” wants to reverse the “degrading of creative arts and music” in state schools; he now has the opportunity to do so.

Dunkley agrees it is immensely important. Musicians he meets of his own and Starmer’s generation are drawn from diverse backgrounds, he says, “but with the younger ones coming through it has become, again, a more privileged, middle-class thing – purely because of economics”.