What happens when a man loses his voice to Parkinson’s disease — and responds by making an album with some of Britain’s greatest musicians? For Ian Grant, Paul Mitchell, and John Caulcutt, the answer is Think Loud 4 Parkinson’s: a limited-edition vinyl and CD collection that brings together legends from The Stranglers, Fairport Convention, Big Country, the Sex Pistols, and more, all in service of finding a cure.
In this episode of Think BIG and LOUD, LSVT Global’s podcast, host Beth Peterson sits down with the three driving forces behind the project. What emerges is a story about Parkinson’s, friendship, stubbornness, and the extraordinary power of music to break down barriers of culture, language, class, and isolation, that other fundraising efforts simply cannot.
“Think LOUD became a bit of a mantra for our everyday interactions before we even thought about writing the song.” — PAUL MITCHELL
THE ORIGIN STORY
It Started With a Lockdown, a YouTube Video, and a Rolodex
Like many meaningful things, Think Loud 4 Parkinson’s began by accident, or rather, by a series of small, organic steps that no one could have planned.
It was COVID lockdown, early 2020. Ian Grant, who had spent much of his life in artist management, stumbled across a YouTube video of his friend Paul Mitchell, a producer and audio engineer, playing a cover of All By Myself. Ian had recently watched the Rolling Stones and the Doobie Brothers record remotely during the pandemic, each musician in their own home, the footage edited together to look like a live performance. He had an idea.
“I contacted him and said, can you do that?” Ian recalls. “I didn’t quite know how they work.”
Paul said yes. What followed was a proof of concept: could musicians, each recording their parts at home, be assembled into something that sounded like a real band? To avoid royalty complications, they chose House of the Rising Sun, a song so old that nobody owns the copyright. Ian opened his Rolodex, made calls, and the pieces began falling into place. Arthur Brown. Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols. Tony Butler from Big Country. The Stranglers.
The original beneficiary was Help Musicians, a charity that had stepped up in the first week of lockdown to pay £500 each to over 17,000 working musicians who had been, as Paul puts it, “cut off at the knees.” But four years later, after Ian wrote the Think Loud song, inspired directly by his LSVT LOUD® speech therapy, a radio presenter in Tasmania named Shane Bryan asked the obvious question: why not do a whole album and monetize it?
And that was that.
THE LSVT LOUD CONNECTION
“Think LOUD” as Therapy — and Then as a Song
Ian Grant has Parkinson’s disease. And like many people living with the condition, one of the most disorienting effects has been on his voice, the gradual fading of something so fundamental it’s easy to take for granted until it starts to go.
His speech therapist, Pip Steers, introduced him to LSVT LOUD, the intensive evidence-based voice treatment programme. The experience was revelatory, not just clinically, but personally. “It enabled me to do more,” Ian says. “When your voice is gone or going down, it’s a very disillusioning time.”
LSVT LOUD’s central mantra — Think LOUD — became part of Ian’s daily routine, a conscious recalibration of effort and output. His family knew the signal: when his voice started to fade mid-conversation, it was a reminder to Think LOUD and bring it back up. It became a phrase the whole team used, long before anyone thought of turning it into a song.
When Ian finally did sit down to write the lyrics, the therapy poured directly onto the page. The chorus, Think LOUD so you can be heard / Think LOUD so you don’t miss a word, says exactly what it means. One verse references the AH exercises that form a core part of the daily LSVT LOUD regimen. “Start every day with an AH,” the lyric goes, and Paul set it to Beatles-style backing vocals to make it joyful rather than clinical. Another verse references the John Coleman book on living well with Parkinson’s.
“It enabled me to do more. When your voice is gone or going down, it’s a very disillusioning time.” — IAN GRANT
The song found its lead vocalist in Leo Sayer, someone Ian has known since 1968, who grew up with him and brought enormous heart to the recording. It’s now the theme tune of this very podcast. LSVT Global’s own CEO Dr. Cynthia Fox discovered it on YouTube and brought it to Pip Steers, who recognised Ian’s voice immediately. Organic doesn’t begin to cover it.
MAKING THE ALBUM
Nineteen Drummers, a Laptop Couriered to Arthur Brown, and One Guitar Player in Perth
The technical challenge of making a remotely recorded album is deceptively simple to describe and enormously complex to execute. Paul Mitchell lays it out plainly: everyone records their part to a click track at home, sends their audio stems via WeTransfer or Dropbox, and Paul lines them all up so they start at the same point. When you press play, it sounds like everyone’s in the same room.
What he doesn’t mention, until pressed, is what it actually took to make that happen.
For House of the Rising Sun, Arthur Brown desperately wanted to sing it, but he had no laptop, no recording software, no microphone. Paul solved this by purchasing a laptop, loading it with the right software, couriering it to Arthur’s home with headphones and a microphone, and then using remote desktop software to operate the machine while watching Arthur sing on FaceTime. The video you see of Arthur recording his vocal, that’s happening in real time.
For Let There Be Drums, Ian’s tribute to the 1960s Sandy Nelson classic, the logistics became almost surreal. Hank Marvin recorded his guitar parts in a friend’s studio in Perth, Australia. The legendary Kodo drummers in Tokyo sent back not just a high-resolution stereo recording but footage from six camera angles. Roger Taylor recorded his drum part in Guildford, Surrey. Three musicians, three continents, one track.
By the time the song was done, it featured nineteen drummers.
Other tracks carry their own remarkable stories. Hugh Cornwell from The Stranglers and Richard Thompson of Fairport Convention had attended school together — their first concert was a band called the Nashville Teens playing their hit Tobacco Road. When Ian brought them together to record a version of that song for the album, the original Nashville Teens singer Arthur Sharp, by then elderly and unwell, heard it before he passed away on Christmas Day. He gave it his blessing.
The album’s track Meet on the Ledge, a Fairport Convention anthem, features twenty musicians who were all originally booked for the Cropredy Festival in 2020, a festival that couldn’t take place because of lockdown. It was recorded so they could play it together anyway, broadcast on Radio Oxford, and had never been released on physical media before now.
What You Get with the Album
- 20 tracks in total — 15 available on streaming, 5 exclusive to the physical release
- Exclusive tracks include live recordings from the Gary Brooker Memorial Concert
- Leo Sayer’s rendition of Eleanor Rigby — chosen because, as Leo says, “all the lonely people” speaks directly to the isolation of Parkinson’s
- A lip-synced performance of A Whiter Shade of Pale featuring the late Gary Brooker of Procol Harum — assembled by Paul from existing recordings so the band could perform it live on stage with Gary’s voice above them
- A full-color booklet with photographs and Ian’s full story
- A download voucher for the digital version
- A QR code on the back linking to where you can buy more
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Music as a Fundraising Tool — and Why It Works
John Caulcutt has spent years working in charitable fundraising, and he’s clear-eyed about what makes music different. “Raising funds for any charity is probably one of the most competitive industries known to man,” he says. “People historically have all tried to fish in the same pond.”
Music sidesteps that problem. It crosses barriers of culture, class, and language. It reaches fan bases worldwide. It gives people a reason to engage that isn’t purely transactional. And when the personal angle is there, when Ian Grant can call Hugh Cornwell directly because he managed him, when Pete Townshend knows Ian well enough to write a personal email, the conversations that result are different from any cold approach to a major charitable trust.
Pete Townshend himself is a case in point. Ian spent nine months pursuing him, through a commitment to perform in New York for a new production of Tommy, through delays and competing demands. Eventually, Townshend wrote back: he had too much on his plate and was getting older. But he added something unexpected: “One thing I do have is money. My charity may be able to support yours.” And it did.
Coldplay’s management, while unable to contribute a recording, offered two backstage concert tickets. Those tickets, auctioned at a Cure Parkinson’s event in London, raised £4,500 for the charity.
The Ozzy Osbourne connection came through an extraordinary chain of coincidences: Arthur Sharp of the Nashville Teens was managed by Don Arden, whose daughter is Sharon Osbourne. A filmmaker named Phil Alexander, who happened to be documenting the Black Sabbath farewell concert at Aston Villa’s ground, knew Ian. He raised the Think Loud project with Sharon and Ozzy’s team. Black Sabbath’s reunion show is giving its proceeds to charity and Think Loud 4 Parkinson’s and Cure Parkinson’s are now in the conversation.
“Music is a wonderful way to raise money, to retain hope. And social media has allowed that to be pushed out far and wide to fan bases across the world.” — JOHN CAULCUTT
The team is already thinking about what comes next. A concept called Fest Aid, inspired by a conversation with Kevin Cahill, one of the original founders of Comic Relief, would invite festival artists to donate a live recording from their festival set. Most of that material is recorded and then never used. If a major artist with 23 million followers donated one track and asked their fans to buy it, the math of what that could raise for Parkinson’s research are staggering.
LOOKING FORWARD
Hope, Research, and Why It Matters
Cure Parkinson’s, the UK charity that receives the album’s proceeds, currently has six active research programmes running simultaneously. This year alone, those programmes require £4.1 million just to continue. The drugs being explored include repurposed medications, compounds originally developed for diabetes, for vertigo, that show promise in slowing or modifying Parkinson’s. The search for a cure is real, active, and underfunded.
John puts the need simply: by 2050, one in every 50 people is projected to develop Parkinson’s. That number doesn’t change by itself. It changes because people raise awareness and funds, because governments are pressured to invest in research, and because organisations like Cure Parkinson’s have the resources to carry promising trials across the finish line.
Paul describes what happened when he logged into a Richard Thompson fan group on Facebook over a recent weekend: ten people, all discussing the album, all asking questions, all, it turned out, touched by Parkinson’s in some way, not as sufferers themselves, but as family members, friends, carers. “We’ve already started to raise the conversation,” he says. “We’ve got a long way to go. But that gave me a lot of hope.”
For Ian, who continues to practice the LSVT LOUD principles daily — Think LOUD — the album is personal in the most direct sense. It started with his voice fading and his determination not to let it go quietly. It grew into something that has connected world-class musicians across five countries, raised thousands of pounds for research, and turned a therapy mantra into a song that plays at the beginning and end of a global podcast.
“Somebody out there is doing something to help them — raising funds which will go towards a cure. That’s what everybody who’s got Parkinson’s wants to hear.” — JOHN CAULCUTT
Listen to the full episode of Think BIG and LOUD wherever you get your podcasts.
To purchase the limited-edition vinyl and CD of Think Loud 4 Parkinson’s, with all proceeds going to Cure Parkinson’s, visit the link in the show notes. The Think Loud song and video, performed by Kindred Spirit and Leo Sayer, is available for download and streaming on all major music platforms.
AI (Claude) assisted in the translation of this content from a podcast to a blog, edited by humans of course.