We Don't Need No Education: The Story of BIMM & DIME

We Don’t Need No Education is Kev Nixon’s uncompromising account of how modern music education lost its way - and how it could still be saved.

Told in two parts, it charts a transatlantic rethink of what learning music should look like. Part One begins in the UK, with Nixon’s experiences at the top of the British music industry, and his co-founding of BIMM - the Brighton Institute of Modern Music in 2001 which they opened in four cities over ten years, making BIMM the biggest music college in Europe.

We Don’t Need No Education exposes how universities sidelined modern music, misunderstood popular culture, and treated contemporary musicians as an academic inconvenience. Nixon argues that education became obsessed with theory, hierarchy and qualifications, while ignoring how quickly the music world was evolving to the great benefit of millions of young people.

Part Two moves to Detroit, Michigan where the story widens into Nixon and his wife Sarah Clayman taking their UK model and bringing it into the American higher education market, a brave and pioneering venture in possibly America’s greatest music city. Against the backdrop of 2013 Detroit, a city shaped by Motown and the motor industry, and economic collapse, Nixon & Clayman created DIME. Detroit becomes both a classroom and a case study, showing how modern music can be taught seriously without being stripped of its cultural roots. Against all odds DIME was a rapid success and opened a second college in Denver Colorado within two years of opening.

Across both continents, We Don’t Need No Education is also the story of Nixon and Clayman’s twenty years of unrelenting desire for the bone fide music industry to take a stake in educating for its own future. But even after deals were signed, each time the world of Private Equity was there to scupper their plans and make sure that every time, money was prioritised over music.