Music, Sport & Entertainment

Matt Thomas spent sixteen years inside the music industry, from 1991 to 2007, working at major record labels in progressively senior management roles. He worked across breaking artists and household names, developing a first-hand understanding of the commercial pressures, cultural dynamics and human cost that define the industry at its highest levels.

In 2007 he moved into artist management, where the work shifted from commercial to deeply personal. Managing artists in demanding professional environments, he encountered the full range of crises the industry produces: addiction, breakdown, conflict within professional teams, and the particular grief that comes when a career built around identity begins to fracture. It was in this period that he trained as a mediator, learning to navigate high-stakes disputes and difficult interpersonal relationship issues between artists, managers, labels, and beyond, with discretion and skill.

By 2013, he had pivoted fully into crisis consulting and case management, bringing his industry knowledge, dispute resolution training and clinical networks together into the practice that became Bulbarrow Consultants. He is co-founder and Chair of Trustees of Music Support, the UK's leading mental health and addiction charity for music industry workers, and was a Director of Attune, a specialist organisation providing mental health and addiction support to people working across the creative industries, for four years.

While music is where this work began, the skills are not industry-specific. Matt is regularly sought by clients in film, television, sport and wider entertainment, where the same dynamics are in play: high public profiles, intense commercial pressures, identity bound up in performance, and a culture that makes asking for help feel like a liability. The work is the same. The context is understood.

He also co-presents Empathy for the Devil, a podcast exploring the psychology of addiction, crisis and recovery through the lens of music, fame and the creative industries. Conversations the industry finds it hardest to have, conducted honestly.

Alongside his crisis and case management work, Matt is recognised as a specialist in the emotional impact of ADHD, and in particular the dark common ground between ADHD, mental health difficulties and addiction. He has delivered talks, presentations and workshops on the subject to clinical and industry audiences, and created the Chaos Orchestra platform, which includes the "What Flavour is your ADHD?" tool, an innovative framework for understanding the individual presentation of ADHD in adults.

What looks like breakdown is more often a developmental reckoning. The adult tasks of the twenties, stability, intimacy, responsibility, generativity, do not fully take hold in a music career. The work itself requires the opposite in order to participate. Matt has written this up in A State of Suspended Arrival, a paper mapping how the industry's structures block adult development across sixteen domains, and what that means for the people who arrive at the other end without knowing what hit them.