Chorlton Arts Festival 2012

Chorlton Arts Festival launched on Thursday 17th May and if you haven’t yet attended an affiliated show then you’ll have missed the likes of Stuart McCallum, The Tourists, Jesca Hoop and the preview night for Liz West’s curious Trolleys exhibition, as well as promotions by Manky Poets, Chorlton Film Institute and Playback Theatre. But there’s plenty more to follow during its second week, as the festival director Philip Hannaway describes.

Now Then: Last year Badly Drawn Boy opened the festival from the precinct balcony overpass; are there any plans for similarly inventive spectacles?

Philip Hannaway: Well we launched this year with secret performances from Alan Cochrane and John Bishop, which was pretty special. Coming up this Sunday [27 May] we have an outdoor performance on [Chorlton] Green complete with grand piano. There also are a few surprises over the Chorlton Weekender so keep a look out on the streets! You should also look out for the work of our Digital Arts Collective; there will be happenings all over Chorlton as the festival comes to a close.

Badly Drawn Boy

NT: One of the more complex multi-arts shows was the gig featuring Swimming, Dallas Simpson, headphones, video links and a detached audience at St Ninian’s Church – can you explain how this worked?

PH: This was a really amazing night. The band actually performed in the Church Hall away from the audience who were in the main church. We watched video of them performing live in the other room. Dallas Simpson (a sound artist) moved around the room and we pick up through our earphones what he is listening to. He used all kinds of tubes and equipment to pick up various sounds of the band. It was a totally unique event and a first headphone only gig in Chorlton. If you had walked into the church there would have been complete silence. It sounded amazing.

NT: The festival is also about highlighting the local arts and music in the area and many of these shows will be free entry. For those spoiled for choice, could you personally pick out and recommend any of those to attend?

PH: There have been so many great events in the community this year and in the last few days of the festival there is even more to look forward to. I’d make sure you check out our street art exhibition by local artist Trafford Parsons – you’ll find his work on shop shutters around Chorlton. Perfect for a stroll in the evening. There’s also our visual arts exhibitions in Electrik, Marble Beer House, Battery Park and Oddest and a really bold art installation at Creative Corner Café from award winning Elysion Productions. There’s also loads of free music going on around Chorlton over the weekend including some parlour sessions at Dulcimer. All the information can be found on the festival website. Of course you would not want to miss the Weekender headliners as well, including Dutch Uncles, The Handsome Family, Chew Lips and Lanterns On The Lake.

NT: How can the festival benefit local artists and musicians?

PH: I think by firstly providing a platform for local artists to show their work. But also the festival provides an opportunity for their work to be seen alongside artists from around the country and the world. We try to be an outward looking festival, which never forgets that it has the community at heart. We hope that local artists will be inspired by what other people are presenting at the festival as they develop their own practice. As for music the festival gives an opportunity for local bands to perform alongside some of the best talent from around the UK and beyond, giving them an opportunity to be part of a great line-up right on their doorstep.

NT: Venues such as Dulcimer are locally renowned for staging regular and dependable live music; what can we look forward to there during the festival?

PH: There’s loads going on in all our venues. Over the Weekender at Dulcimer you’ll see local bands Blind Atlas and I Am Mechanical perform, there will also be an all day event on the last Sunday of the festival [27 May] with loads of local musicians performing. Also in Electrik on the last night of the Weekender you can enjoy a One Deck Session from club night Pop Till You Drop.

NT: How closely do you work with venues when deciding the festival schedule?

PH: Very closely, the festival would not be possible without the support of the venues.

NT: Are there any less frequently used venues to look out for?

PH: There are loads of events at Creative Corner Café this year for the first time; it’s a great space, with great people running it for the right reasons. Everyone should check it out.

The FlashTag team

NT: How important is it for the festival to accommodate initiatives such as the FlashTag flash fiction writing competition into the programme?

PH: Really important; any event that allows people to take part creatively is really important to the festival. It’s a fantastic way for people to get into writing and as a festival we are all about people getting stuck in and trying new experiences. FlashTag flash fiction delivers on all of these.

Words: Ian Pennington

Images: Courtesy of Chorlton Arts Festival

Chorlton Arts Festival and Flash Tag call for submissions

The organisers of Chorlton Arts Festival are preparing for its twelfth year in 2012, with the town-spanning multi-arts celebration scheduled for 17th to 27th May.

Tickets are available for the larger events via the Chorlton Arts Festival website. Standouts so far include The Handsome Family, Chew Lips and a solo show by Cinematic Orchestra’s Stuart McCallum, while Swimming will perform the first ‘binaural’ headphone event to appear in Chorlton, at Wilbraham St. Ninian’s United Reformed Church. For that, a live performance by Nottingham band Swimming will be broadcast to a separate room from which binaural artist Dallas Simpson will remix the sounds before they reach the headphones of audience members.

On the literary side of the festival a group of Manchester based writers, editors and bloggers named FlashTag will judge a short story competition, which will culminate in a literary event as part of the festival on 23 May. The deadline for submissions is 27 April and guidelines for entry can be found on the FlashTag website.

The FlashTag group are also involved with the organisation of National Flash Fiction Day, which will take place on 16 May and will accept entries until 10 April.

Words: Ian Pennington
Images: Courtesy of Chorlton Arts Festival

An edited version of this article first appeared on Manchester Mule.

Chorlton Arts Festival: Dislocation Dance @ St Clement's Church, Monday 23rd May 2011

I love pop music. I have always loved pop music, even before I understood what it meant or where it came from. When I was a teenager, I loved the dominant sound of the day – britpop. The first album I ever bought was Moseley Shoals by Ocean Colour Scene. I listened to The Longpigs, to Oasis, to Blur, (take a breath), to The Bluetones, Echobelly, Cast. When I was a little bit older, I began to listen to their antecedents – Paul Weller, The Jam, The Beatles. The fucking Beatles. To make it to the Beatles, I had to battle through, past or around Space, Menswear and fucking Suede. Well, it was worth it when I got there.

Unlike many people who are interested in pop music, the house in which I grew up was not particularly musical, or at least it was not soaked in the sounds of Western pop. My parents listened to Bollywood playback singers, more so in the car than in the house. My father’s favourites were, and still are, people like Mohammed Rafi, while my mother preferred the female singers, such as Lata Mangeshkar. So it was only much later on that I heard Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen, and began to trace historical influences less obvious than the simple Beatles – Smiths – Stone Roses – Oasis trajectory.

It was at that point that I began to get into post-punk, listening to the bands that had been emerging around the same time as Factory; associated with it, influenced by it or subsequently influencing it. I was attracted to the darkness, the misery, the exposition of a beaten post-industrial landscape created by Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Of course, this misery was often clothed in upbeat melodies, and many of the songs were love songs. But they were not flippant, they did not ignore where they came from, they were mired in it. There was no attempt to escape it, nor to festishise it through explicit reference. It simply was. You could hear it in the reverberations of the singing, in the strained guitars, in the muffled - not quite defeated, not quite defiant - anger. Songs like Hand in Glove by the Smiths and, of course, Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division are perfect examples.

I had never heard of Dislocation Dance before reading through the programme for the Chorlton Arts Festival. It bills them as experimental jazz punk, and describes them as having been initially signed on the same label as Buzzcocks, before signing for Rough Trade at the same time as The Smiths. A bit of further research has informed me that they were friends with the Factory crowd. They were once flown back from a tour of the USA by one Anthony H. Wilson, after a mishap with their original tickets left them stranded there. This has all built up a picture of something really quite exciting. So I’m excited.

I arrive in the hallway of St Clement’s Church, with the partition doors still closed while the band sets up. We can hear them sound checking, and they sound a little more conventional than I had imagined, a little more bubblegum. But that’s OK. It’s quite possible to be happy and heartfelt, or saccharine and ironic, or for the soundcheck songs not to be representative of the whole set. There’s any number of explanations, so I don’t think too much about it. I look around me and see a crowd that makes me quite happy to live in Manchester. Not a group of hipsters eager to impress, but mostly people over the age of thirty. I wonder if some of them remember the band from the 80s, or if some of them actually know or knew the band personally. There are also a couple of children under the age of ten, whose parents I assume are here too.

So the doors open, and we file into the church. St Clement’s is a beautiful building, dimly lit tonight to create a lovely warmth. The band is set up in what I think is known as the chancel, in front of the altar. The evening sun shines through a stained glass window above, showering them in shimmering blues and reds. We sit in the crossing, surrounded by shadows.

Ian Runacres tells us they will start with softer tunes before getting on to the heavier stuff. So they kick off, with Phil Lukes singing the first three songs, while also playing ukelele. He has a deep, rich voice that fills the church and seems to work well in the absence of the bass guitar for these songs. Jon Board plays trumpet and (I think) French horn to add some texture. This is enjoyable pop, with a touch of the wistful, and reminds me of Teenage Fanclub.

For the next few songs, Ian Runacres takes over on vocals and Lukes replaces his ukelele with a bass. This creates a real change in the sound, as Runacres’ voice is higher-pitched and his range a little narrower. The songs lose that wistful touch and seem to vacillate between self-indulgent and glib. Some are both. A song called Shinjuku Junction has the lyrics, “Shinjuku Junction / East meets West / We see the best of all around us / The best meets the rest.” I begin to see where certain aspects of britpop came from. His voice is not unlike Ian Broudie’s and some of these tunes remind me of The Lightning Seeds. I fucking hate the Lightning Seeds.

I begin to contemplate what it is that I love in pop. Whatever it is, this is not it. When Lukes takes over singing again, I begin to wake up a little. His voice has a greater resonance that seems to penetrate real feelings, whereas Runacres’ seems to bounce off them. He introduces one song, “Like most of my songs, it’s about my misspent youth.” Misspent how? Why? I don’t feel that this music is attempting to breach the superficiality of the imagined experiences of our youth. And pop music can do that. I know it can do that, I have seen it do that. I came here tonight expecting to hear these guys do that.

Not all pop music analyses, not all pop music describes, not all pop music is about pain, or is qualified by pain. But it does have to engage. At least make me dance, make me tap my feet. Tonight I’m not engaged, I’m floundering. Runacres seems to be enjoying himself, which I’m heartened by. But this seems to be a reminiscence of something for him and his band. It sounds pleasant enough, but it is ultimately unedifying for those of us who do not share a history with him. It is tame. While Lukes seems to mean it more, his ultimate lack of conviction is belied by his introduction to The Ruins of Manchester: “It’s not my fault, it’s just a song.”

This is not angry, nor is it impassioned. It is certainly not experimental. It is a kind of plodding pop that carries no meaning for me. One review I found of their work in the 80s described it as “background music for the foreground.”

Pop music can do more than this.

Words & Images: Piyush Pushkar (Piyush also writes the Doctor Magiot blog)

Chorlton Arts Festival Launch featuring Badly Drawn Boy, Thursday 19th May 2011

Congratulatory backslapping is rarely a spectator sport, but the oratory build-up creates a swelling of pride in the precinct's populace, who're later led through Chorlton Arts Festival's newly opened metaphorical doors by the subsequent strums of an elevated Damon Gough, aka Badly Drawn Boy.

Gough initially completes a Chorlton FM radio slot before volunteers, contributors and organisers are thanked in various short speeches. And onto the night's performers. First, a schoolgirl dance troupe's R'n'B dance mix tests the soundsystem, which in turn awakens the decent-sized early evening audience.

Despite operating under a thinly veiled disguise of ‘special guest’ until the morning of the event, Badly Drawn Boy, one of the three patrons of the festival (the others are John Thomson and Carol Ann Duffy, since you ask) is an obvious choice to draw in the crowds. His warm, homely reflections know how to twang on the heartstrings of reminisce, although his lofty presence intermittently loses audience attention.

For the man himself, it must be surreal; standing mid-balcony overpass – acoustic guitar in hand, microphone afore – faces glaring upwards almost in celestial worship. Positioned below, the amplification rises up to him. The sensation must be one of flying atop the soundwaves to tour the rooftops of his hometown. Or perhaps it just affords him an alternate view of the chipped lurid green precinct decor.

Regardless, the Chorlton resident talks us through a tour, of sorts, stopping off between songs to indicate locations relevant to the occasional ditty. Chorlton Cafe is evoked by ‘Journey From A To B’ and Born In The UK’s title track due to the album’s cover photo, while ‘Is There Nothing We Could Do?’ was written in response to Gough's own soundtracking of The Fattest Man In Britain, which features an amble down Wilbraham Road. There isn't a 'local landmark only' policy in set-list selection though, as 'You Were Right', 'This Electric' and 'The Time Of Times' also resonate past the shop windows.

He’s keen to state the reason behind his bird’s eye view. {this way:UP} is the National Lottery and Arts Council funded answer. The project also explains why you’ll see artwork in high places through the town until the end of the month, although as far as I can tell only Gough himself warrants a skyward glance at this particular precinct positioned point of the festival.

Words & Images: Ian Pennington

Arts, Music & Events Preview, May 2011 (Part Two)

We’re now deep into festival season with Sounds From The Other City and FutureEverything (look out for our Steve Reich review in the next few days) already having passed us by. But the festivities, along with the weather, are just warming up; here’s what to look out for in the closing days of May.

Tonight (Thursday 19th) at 6pm is the launch of Chorlton Arts Festival (CAF) in Chorlton precinct, as artwork created in line with the {this way: UP} theme will be unveiled by special guest, Chorlton resident and CAF Patron, Damon Gough (aka Badly Drawn Boy). BREAD Art Collective have positioned the artistic contributions in unannounced locations through the town; above eye level to provoke shoegazers into a varied view. Amongst the art portrayed will be a preview of a project co-curated by Doodlebug and Alexandra Arts, which takes a lead from JR’s Inside Out socially cohesive guerrilla art by asking local schoolchildren to take and pose for portrait photographs while considering what the area's parks mean to them.

Friday 20th is the first day of action at Friends of Mine’s three-dayer in a Cheshire field (FOM Fest 2011), which boasts Walls, From The Kites of San Quentin, The Fall, Toro Y Moi, Jim Noir, Working For A Nuclear Free City, The Longcut, plus plenty more besides.

All the while Chorlton Arts Festival will be ongoing until the end of the month; best to check their listings to pick out a selection of the live music, spoken word, literature, DJs, comedy sketches, visual arts, drama and participatory improv.

Retro soul maestro Bill Withers is the subject of a night in homage to his recording career at Soup Kitchen on Sunday 22nd, featuring recent documentary Still Bill, live performances (not by the man himself, albeit) and DJs. More music follows on Monday 23rd in the form of Three Trapped Tigers at Night’n’Day Café; the avant garde noise merchants have been booked in to top a bill ahead of Tall Ships by the ever-progressive and ambitious promoters WotGodForgot. That is unless you’d prefer the alt-folk dabbling of Hey! Manchester of a Monday evening; in which case they’re offering Juliana Barwick’s solo choir dreamscapes at Kraak Gallery, with past Now Then Manchester interviewee Najia Bagi providing support.

One for environmental activists next: Kindling Trust has organised a get-together for otherwise disparate groups all striving for similar goals. The Bull’s Head pub on Thursday 26th.

And soon enough there’s another Bank Holiday weekend. Wet Play and Hoya:Hoya are vying for attention on Saturday 28th; they have Deep Space Orchestra at Kraak and Brainfeeder’s mind-melting Lorn at Roadhouse respectively.

The standout for Sunday 29th / Monday 30th is Eurocultured, nucleated along the New Wakefield Street bars and inclusive of another veritable multinational line-up. The headline-grabbers are Scando-techno sextet Slagsmalsklubben, Israel’s Balkan Beat Box and the effervescent performer David Thomas Broughton, but fail to explore at your peril; Mind On Fire, Doodlebug and Hoya:Hoya are amongst those flexing curative muscle, with Naomi Kashiwagi, Aardvarck and Vieka all confirmed. Not to mention the must-see live street art.

Monday 30th is also the day to catch another festival: Dot to Dot.

Words: Ian Pennington

Arts, Music & Events Preview, May 2011 (Part One)

Thanks to Sounds From The Other City (review to appear very soon) and a subsequent hectic week, another preview has missed a large bite out of the month. But no longer must you wait!

This evening (Monday 9th) Post War Years stride the Deaf Institute stage with earnest indie pop, then tomorrow (Tuesday 10th) PVT make a prompt return to this city with support from From The Kites Of San Quentin and The Narrows (see penultimate and final paragraphs).

Soon after that, FutureEverything hits hard with a variety of live music (previously under the FutureSonic moniker) and plenty more besides (hence the Everything alteration). From Wednesday 11th ‘til Saturday 14th, the Now Then Manchester pop picks are Gang Gang Dance at Ruby Lounge (11th), Steve Reich at RNCM (12th), Das Racist at the Roadhouse (13th), King Kong Soundtracked by Sunday Best linchpin Rob Da Bank - and with support just announced from Veí(13th) - and Martyn / Daedelus / Kyle Hall at Jabez Clegg (14th), but you’ll seldom leave any FutureEverything show disappointed.

In the ‘plenty more besides’ column, the Handmade fair at Victoria Baths on Saturday 14th is a standout. It includes a fanzine convention organised by Shrieking Violet, Antony Hall’s physical oscillators and Fablab workshops. You’re better browsing the official website for more info on the whole four days...

Outside of the main FutureEverything programme is a one-off for Concrete Moniker’s The Electronic Exchange, who’re taking on a full band format in the Umbro Design Space HQ on the Friday. The following night at the same venue is another worthy option; Mind On Fire curating a record label showcase.

Saturday 14th holds a couple of other cards up its sleeve; spoken word specialist Kate Tempest’s funky backing band Sound of Rum have been booked in for a Deaf Institute show, while Contort Yourself return to Ruby Lounge with DJ Funk in tow. Tough choice.

The deadline for your Manchester Art Crawl submissions is Sunday 15th, so keep that one in mind. It’s a Manchester International Festival fringe event and is welcoming of “all visual, audio, digital and time based artists of all career stages. All non artists wishing to deliver ideas in a contemporary art context (information available via website),” so say the organisers, who’ll consider shows proposed to be staged from 2nd to 16th July.

If you’ve already submitted your proposal, mellow your body while sharpening your mind for a Sunday afternoon Scrabble Club showdown at Deaf Institute. Best to brush up on those match-winning two-letter obscurities before you go.

Onwards to Thursday 19th when Hit‘N’Run welcome back previously lauded Submotion Orchestra for a quick return to the Mint Lounge. Friday 20th at Islington Mill is hard to say no to; a free gig featuring Google-unfriendly Baltimore curios Thank You. Unless, that is, you’d prefer to attend a thought-provoking (and very relevant) greenroom theatrical show by Michael Pinchbeck named ‘The End’.

More events to follow later in the month, including Chorlton Arts Festival (which launches on Thursday 19th).

Bandcamp is proving more and more popular in cutting out the bloodsucking major label middle man and a couple of local tips on that bandwidth are The Narrows, whose single went live last month, the Well Weapon Records alt-indie compilation (and art fanzine) and Broken Bubble, who’ve been prolifically been distributing more than their fair share of high-quality ambient glitch-tronica; most recently with Macka’s bittersweet twinkly callousness Piano Works.
And finally, recent interviewees From The Kites Of San Quentin have challenged laptop remixers to rehash their upcoming single ‘Stoopid’.

Words: Ian Pennington
Images #1, #5 & #6: Courtesy of Well Weapon Records