Biography of r d laing family

About Life before Death

The first contact between R. D. Laing and the composers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley came about in 1976 when Howard invited him to contribute to a film interview for his documentary series Life Force (see Scrapbook).

At this time Blaikley was training as a psychotherapist at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation, where Laing’s celebrated ‘existential study in sanity and madness’, The Divided Self, with its thesis that madness can be a positive transformative experience, was a required – and inspiring – text.

Howard and Blaikley decided to approach Laing again with a view to some form of collaboration – a sort of marriage between music and psychotherapy.

Known for their hit songs in the 1960s and 1970s, they had also displayed a keen interest in broadening the scope of pop music, exploring interior and philosophical themes in albums such as Ark 2 (Flaming Youth), Private Parts (Peter Straker) and the eponymous M