James Prime

Music Health and Well Being

Is a professional musician of 35 years experience specialising in Songwriting and keyboard performance. Original member of UK band 'Deacon Blue', writer of 'Fergus Sings the Blues' 'Loaded' 'Queen of the New Year' and 9 studio albums. Previous to Deacon Blue worked and recorded with Johnny Hallyday, John Martyn (4 years) , Altered Images, Little Richard, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton. Began as Musical Director of Cumbernauld theatre. Holds two lifetime acheivement awards " Tartan Clefs' awarded by Nordoff Robbins music therapy.

Grace Notes: A UWS Interprofessional Learning Experience

in collaboration with the Alzheimer Scotland Centre for Policy and Practice

Grace Notes project is an interdisciplinary learning project bringing 18 students from adult and mental health nursing, Masters Songwriting and  Commercial Music together with people with dementia.   The students pool their expertise and creative skills to capture stories of  individuals whose voice may become lost to others and to turn these stories into songs. In this way  students learn from each other and directly from people with dementia. Importantly the outputs of their collective creative and scholary talents shared as part of Dementia Awareness Week, will  contribute to dementia awareness raising. 

C.H.E.M (Feb 2017 to present) A VP Funded research project

a multi-disciplinary research team comprising contributions from the Schools of Education; Health, Nursing and Midwifery; and Media, Culture and Society. 

Brighter Star- The role of music in family bonding, learning and development through the oral tradition of music

• Community-based creative arts practice which focuses on song-writing to develop family learning.

• the objectives of the research project in summary are:

  1. to explore the key drivers that underpin the existing knowledge on effective family learning processes.
  2. to map the core competences (knowledge, skills, attitudes) that are common to an effective family learning workforce
  3. to develop a toolkit which provides smart and efficient ways of information-sharing and partnership between stakeholder groups within a family learning workforce.

Brighter Star : To develop an umbrella foundation for projects involving music health and well being. A collective of 'off the shelf' projects and teaching materials that encourage exploration of the power that music has as a therapy.

This would eventually be made available to a variety of institutions

To allow music graduates to develop employability skills in the area of Music AS Therapy as distinct from Music therapy.

Working collaboratively across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines: Childhood Studies, Social Care, Mental Health, Nursing, Education and encouraging knowledge transfer

Book Chapter

Beech,N, Gilmore C (2015) Organising Music: Theory, Practice, Performance Rock music on the big stage pp368 Cambridge University Press