Scouted at the tender age of 24 by Sony, a 3 day studio session led to a record deal and an album release of the session recordings called “Amen… So be it” which went double Platinum worldwide.
After a spell learning his trade on the road with the likes of The Pretenders, Tracey Chapman, REM and Ian Brown, Paddy’s second album, ‘Living’ proved so popular (15 times platinum) that he felt compelled to tour it.
After 5 years on the road, Paddy wanted to go back to his roots, his new album was mixed and recorded in his own house in Dublin.
An intimate gig at Red Gallery is a chance to hear some old favourites and new forthcoming material.
A percentage of the door takings will be given to the Children’s charity Little Hearts Matter, they offer support and information, and provide support and information to families who have been affected by a diagnosis of a single ventricle heart condition (half a working heart).
Thursday 25 September 2014 – Doors open 7.30pm
Tickets (on the door) £15 + Booking fee from Seetickets
“I had to stand in front of 100 bankers and speak for six minutes about why they should give us money. It’s so not my bag though, I mean. I was so uncomfortable.”
For his six-minute live pitch, Steve Fisher won funding from Hackney Giving Live this summer to fund another term of KimNara Music, a music programme for teenagers with learning disabilities, autism and complex emotional needs.
But Fisher and his wife Tina Pinder, who founded the charity, are no strangers to discomfort. KimNara itself started with an unfortunate accident.
“We were both professional musicians, and then she (Pinder) got run over by a motor bike.” The accident destroyed the nerves that lift her right hand. Pinder, who trained as a classical pianist from the age of five, was told she’d never play again.
But one enterprising doctor at Homerton Hospital, in his spare time, built Tina a mechanical contraption using Meccano parts and elastic bands to spring her fingers back up when she pressed them down, allowing her to play music once again. In the process, her priorities had shifted a bit:
“After that, rather than being an egotistic musician — because all musicians are — she came out of that wanting to give everything back.” That was 2006.
Eight years later, Pinder and Fisher, who left a fifteen-year career as an “acoustician to the stars” to join the project, are still throwing everything into the programme. Pinder has taken on a master’s degree in music therapy, and lectures on the subject at universities around the country.
When they join the programme the young musicians generally have “no social skills to speak of”, says Fisher. The aim is to inspire self-confidence through creativity and teamwork, using original songwriting, performance, and an extensive kit including electric guitars, fuzz boxes, drum kits and violins.
On evenings during the school term, the musicians work from the Huddleston Centre youth club in in Clapton, writing, composing and performing original tunes like ‘Internet Killed the Video Star’, the enigmatic ‘I’ve Got a Saucepan, I Want to Cook for You,’ and a song about the Scottish referendum, ‘Let’s Be United’. “We have one student in particular who’s very adamant about that,” says Fisher.
Recordings of the group’s songs on Soundcloud display no shortage of confidence. “I can rock the world, yeah yeah” is the hook on the energetic ‘I Can Feel the Music’; “It’s so hot you’ll probably melt” another track warns, of itself.
KimNara takes on 7-9 young people per term, supervised by three musicians and a youth worker. The young musicians are well-behaved, but excitable, explains Fisher: “It’s like when a footballer scores a goal and rips his shirt off. They’ll get that from just hearing the right chord.”
Most of the musicians have been with the programme for several years, providing an alternative to conventional therapies that “haven’t really got them anywhere”, says Fisher.
If funding allows, the musicians put on an end-of-term show, which starts with raucous live performances and ends in a Q&A and jam session with the audience. Put simply, Fisher says: “Everyone that comes thinks it’s the best thing they’ve ever seen.”
According to Fisher, the unique benefits of making music has to do with connecting both sides of the brain.
“There’s one lad, probably the shyest one we’ve ever had. He stutters. And he just didn’t want to know… It got to be two weeks before the show and he came in and said, I’ve written a song. So we bashed the song together and did it for the show. And a week before the show he said, again stuttering, I’m gonna be the MC! We said, okay, you want to be the MC, you’re the MC. We got to the show, he got the microphone — didn’t stutter once.”
Finding money, finding venues and finding time are constant struggles for KimNara music, but in the rehearsal room they keep things simple with two rules for the workshops: don’t hurt anyone, and try to keep your clothes on.
Deep Throat Choir are an all-female singing sensation from Hackney, and they’re on a mission. After a lauded performance at Green Man Festival last month, we talk to founder Luisa Gerstein about roots, visions and who they really are.
Deep Throat Choir – what a provocative name. What is behind it?
It is a provocative name but you forget that quickly. People barely batted an eyelid when we let it into the ether, and as far as where it came from it’s just a joke that stuck. It’s silly and not meant to be taken seriously, and for the most part people get that.
How would you describe your sound?
It’s so straightforward: voices and drums, just voices and drums. When arranging the songs I’ve liked being restricted in that way, and I think it’s good to have limitations in the tools you’re using. Voices are so powerful, so it’s nice to leave them alone for once. So far all the songs are covers, ranging from old soul to more recent indie songs. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time so I’ve got a backlog of ideas I want to try, and also to write specifically for the choir.
What’s your vision as a choir?
To raise our voices together on a weekly basis till we’re old cronies. I can’t tell you how good that feels!
What does East London mean to you?
It’s where we come together and sing, and it’s where a lot of us live, but I’d feel disingenuous to claim roots here – I started the choir by reaching out to female friends who like singing and they’re from all over the place. We get together in a beautiful church with incredible acoustics and it’s great to be part of a community – we’re one of four choirs who rehearse there and there’s always some kind of activity going on. I don’t think it would have been as easy to get it started anywhere else in London, and most of our performances are happily within a short radius of where we sing, so there is that sense of rootedness.
Where are you going next?
We’ve got a few more plans to perform this year, including a Christmas show at St Barnabas Church just off Shacklewell Lane. We’re going to start recording so we’ll be able to put some music out soon too. We’d also really love to do a castle tour around the UK next summer and a barge tour, so if anyone can help with those things then please get in touch!
The starting point for Zygmunt Day’s debut full-length record On Streets That Know was his decision to cover Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’, and the album extrapolates from this the idea that behind a less than appealing exterior lies a place with strong emotional bonds.
By exploring the experience of East London in terms of work and struggle, Day paints a picture by recalling scenes that are mostly melancholic but shrouded in a subtle sense of fondness for the location that inspired these songs.
Two years in the making, this record was written by Day and arranged with his band Echo Pressure. Clocking in at just under an hour, the eclectic instrumentation of folk-tinged pop songs makes for an intriguing listen.
On track ‘Hailstones’, a bleak picture of life recalling “streets of metal, streets of rain” is juxtaposed with a lively sonic backdrop; the song starting with gently fingerpicked guitar before melding into a three-minute funky disco coda which declines into a dissonant swell of brass and woodwind.
Elsewhere, on opening track ‘Everyone I Know’, the harmonies feel at times baggy as Day recites the mantra “still they try, still they try” against indie-pop guitar stabs. Despite the largely consistent vocal delivery, there are times where cracks begin to appear.
Echo Pressure turn the tales recalled on their head. There is a great of sense of optimism conveyed by the arrangements, bouncy bass lines and innovative instrumentation – all of which prevent this record from becoming a one dimensional attack on modern life.
Together the ten-strong group – most of them multi-instrumentalists – make great use of a variety of different timbres that weave in and out of each track, reimagining Day’s grey picture of England in glorious technicolor.
The album’s spoken-word closing number recalls a tale that will resonate with many East London residents, with Day wishing he “had the tools to make it here”, as well as referencing scenes along the River Lea (“skeleton of the gasworks down by the canal”).
Rooted in folk, the poetic landscape of Day’s East London environment, told with the help of Echo Pressure, results in an engaging take on the romanticism of decay and struggle, and with a sonic texture that guides the interpretation of the songs throughout.
Sam Lee, Rachel and Becky Unthank. Photograph: Sarah Mason
Among the casualties of World War I were songs and stories that been passed down from one generation to the next.
Recognising this, folk singer Sam Lee and Tyneside duo the Unthanks have collaborated on a project which they hope will bring these lesser known cultural relics to a wider audience.
A Time and Place – Musical Meditations on the First World War will see them perform music from the period, as well as their own songs inspired by stories told to them first hand.
“We’re looking at songs that would have existed in the common repertoire of the soldiers and have rewritten some of the stories from those who remember the war,” Lee explains.
The musicians form part of an 11-strong line-up which includes a string quartet, brass and video design by Matthew J. Watkins, of Gorillaz fame.
Mercury Prize-nominated Lee researched the project by visiting villages in Devon, Cornwall, Gloucester and Wiltshire, where he gathered songs and stories from local people.
“There was a 104-year-old woman who remembered as a little girl seeing a Zeppelin come down in her back garden,” he recalls.
“Another woman remembered meeting an old soldier who told this story about Bideford Bridge in Devon. The first time he crossed it was with all his comrades, but the second time he crossed over the bridge he was alone, as he was the only person to return to his village.”
Lee and the Unthanks have been turning these and other stories into new songs using existing melodies from the era, as well as reinterpreting old songs to make them relevant to World War I.
“A lot of the songs of that era were songs from the Boer War that had been rehashed, just as First World War songs were rehashed as songs for the Second World War. So it’s an ongoing recycling process that happens.”
With the loss of an entire generation of young men came, according to Lee, the “silencing” of a nation.
“Those were the people who were singing in the village pubs, they were the morris dancers, the storytellers, the great hope for carrying on the oral traditions of our culture and ancestral stories,” he explains.
“What was left in their wake was that inability for communities to feel like they could continue these things in their absence, so the dancing stopped and the singing stopped, and a lot of the traditions kind of disappeared.”
Lee is excited to be working with the Unthanks, who will be creating new music set to First World War poetry.
“We’re really great friends but we’ve never done anything but sit in pubs and sing our hearts out with each other. Sometimes you can be best of friends but your voices don’t sound well together, but with the Unthanks there’s something really nice going.”
Don’t Blow It in The Vector. Courtesy of Richard Sides
Featuring live musical performances from Theo Burt, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL), Mark Fell and Lorenzo Senni, artist Richard Sides presents a two-part programme across the weekend at the ICA, including screenings of his new documentary don’t blow it in the vector (2014).
Saturday 6 September 2014
1pm – 4pm £5 / £3 ICA Members
Theo Burt, EVOL, Mark Fell and Lorenzo Senni participate in a seated ‘lecture’ with performances. Each of these artists are featured in Richard Sides’ new documentary don’t blow it in the vector (2014).
8pm – 12am £5 / £3 ICA Members
Live performances from Theo Burt, EVOL, Mark Fell and Lorenzo Senni.
Sunday 7 September 2014
11am – 6pm
Free with ICA Day Membership
The ICA Theatre hosts a temporary installation screening Richard Sides’ new documentary don’t blow it in the vector, screened on loop throughout the day.
Having grown up in a rural suburb of Stockholm, Akiine arrived in East London on a mission to charm with her spritely Scandinavian dream-pop. She says she is influenced by “otherworldly feelings, melodies and heavenly harmonies”, to which her sultry vocals and beats attest.
Despite her sound being broadly classified as ‘pop’, her song-writing style isn’t in the least bit straightforward. “It’s very much based on emotions,” she says. “My inspirations are quite spiritual and I think that reflects the way I make music. Part of me feels like I should make 10 songs a day, but the majority of me has this feeling that I don’t really need to push it.”
Her song ‘Sunglassey’, part of a double A-side, has a beguiling calypso melody, with the natural world and mindfulness the main lyrical concerns. Follow up single ‘Frid’, however, is more about trance-like beats and has a stronger tone to the vocals.
Her live shows are filled with facial glitter, fairy lights and vigorous dancing. “I’m a little bouncy ball on stage, it’s a bit weird because the music is really chilled out but live it’s completely different; I get to go crazy and enjoy myself.”
Akiine uses many different textures in her music but is open to interpretation and discovery. “I’d like to incorporate more organic sounds into the music. One thing I really like (because I can actually feel it when it releases endorphins in my body) is the sound two glasses create when you do cheers. It’s so clear and kind of spreads in a millisecond like rings on water.”
Living in East London has also had a positive effect on her music. “I feel like there is hard work and ambition in the air here,” she says. “We’re all in it together crying and sweating but it’s a good vibe. It makes you focused.”
East London Radio
eastlondonradio.org.uk
@EastLondonRadio
East London Radio is a not for profit station which aims to give young people a route into radio through training and mentoring. On air since May 2013 and streaming since this March, it has 2,200 monthly unique listeners and studios in Waltham Forest, Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets. The station was set up by two friends and currently broadcasts 45 shows, put together by its 70 volunteers. Most popular are ELR Sports, presented by Steven Porter, and The London Culture Show by Mel Palleschi.
London Fields Radio
www.londonfieldsradio.co.uk
@ldnfieldsradio
London Fields Radio produces radio podcasts for the “creative community of London Fields and beyond”. Broadcast from The Wilton Way Café, the station was set up in 2009 and has 25 people involved with its 21 shows. Sunday afternoons are when most of the recording takes place. Dimi Shoe is presenter of The Travelling Show, as well as a barista and the café’s assistant manager. Asked about the type of shows the station broadcasts, she says “anything goes as long as it is ‘cafe friendly’ and offers a chilled atmosphere”.
Hoxton FM
www.hoxtonfm.co.uk
@Hoxton_FM
Hoxton FM broadcasts a lot of its shows live from venues and different locations. Around 80 per cent of its presenters are DJs, making the station more focused on music than conversation. Dan Formless, one of Hoxton FM’s founders, sees it as an opportunity to “connect DJs and venues”. The station has 5,000 monthly unique listeners, with its most popular show broadcast by Normski at Zigfrid on Hoxton Square on Fridays.
Whipps Cross Hospital Radio
www.wxhr.org.uk
@WXHR
There has been a dedicated radio service at Whipps Cross Hospital since 1969. Patients can listen to news programmes, music and sports, and each Sunday reporters hit the wards to visit and interview patients. “We talk to them as mini-celebrities, which they love,” says Phil Hughes, a former BBC worker who has been volunteering at the station since 1971. Hughes says that hospital radio is a unique way to engage with patients and make them part of the community. The station accounts for 72 per cent of all radio listened to in the hospital.
Other East London radio stations
Hoxton Radio
www.hoxtonradio.com
@hoxtonradio
Reel Rebels Radio
www.reelrebelsradio.com
@ReelRebelsRadio
Shoreditch Radio
www.shoreditchradio.co.uk
@shoreditchradio
London Turkish Radio
www.londraturkradyosu.com
@LondraTurkRadyo
Those old enough to remember legendary Dalston nightspot The Four Aces may need no introduction to Newton Dunbar, its charismatic owner.
Jamaican-born Dunbar opened the club in 1967, naming it after a brand of Jamaican cigarettes, and remained in situ for over 30 years.
Early on Dunbar booked Ben E. King, Jimmy Cliff and Desmond Dekker to play at The Four Aces, establishing it as the place to hear pioneering soul, reggae and ska. Even when the club transformed into Labyrinth in 1988, with reggae making way for acid house, jungle and happy hardcore, Dunbar still had an office upstairs.
It’s no surprise then that 45 years since the club opened, music is still Newton Dunbar’s main occupation. Only now, no longer the boss watching from the back of the room, he has reinvented himself as a DJ.
Going by the name DJ Newton Ace, Dunbar plays old school reggae on Haggerston radio and has a weekly residency at Charlie Wright’s.
“When The Four Aces was taken away I was left in a void with nothing to do,” he says. “But I saw it coming and I prepared mentally. When it finally went, I decided to have a good rest and I looked around. Travel-wise I went back to Jamaica a few times and then I got back and it was reality time.”
The “void” was the result of the club being forced into a compulsory purchase order by Hackney Council in 1998. It was then boarded up and left to decay until being demolished to make way for luxury flats in 2007.
Dunbar took the original sign for The Four Aces, which was taken down “very ceremoniously”, and uses it as a prop for his DJ sets. In this way, he says, The Four Aces lives on as a concept.
“I decided to use the sign as a concept, and when people ask me what that means I say the New Four Aces is wherever I play. I take the concept of the original and I manifest it in what’s happening now.”
Dunbar came to London in 1956 with the idea of studying law. When that didn’t work out he got a job on the railway, then worked as an engineer before starting out as a club proprietor. As such, it’s no surprise that Dunbar says becoming a DJ was more the work of “providence” than any grand plan.
“A friend of mine asked me to DJ in the Eastern Curve Garden in 2007,” he recalls. “Over 300 people turned up. They liked the music and I could pick up the vibes so I was allowed to play on carte blanche. When we got to the final hour they all walked to the side where I was playing and applauded. I was blown away.”
Now in his 70s, Dunbar says his new occupation “keeps me from looking for the carpet slippers and for my brain to wither.” Clearly, though, there is more to it than just keeping active.
“Sometimes you realise that music is a very spiritual thing,” he says. “If you are fortunate enough to be able to dispense something that relates to spiritual aspects then that’s a very good fortune, and I’m lucky to be doing what I’m doing.”
Listen to Newton ‘Ace’ Dunbar on Haggerston Radio every Tuesday from 4–6pm
www.haggerstonradio.com
The tragic story of Britain’s first and only openly gay professional footballer is the subject of the debut single by three-piece Elephants and Castles.
‘Fashanu’ is a tribute to Justin Fashanu, the Hackney-born footballer who committed suicide in a lock-up garage in Shoreditch in 1998.
Singer Robin Spencer, a primary teacher in Hackney who used to be an apprentice footballer, met Fashanu as a six-year-old on a football course in the school holidays.
“His presence and charisma made a big impression on me,” says Spencer. “I had his poster on my wall and followed his career so was really shocked when I found out he’d committed suicide.”
Fashanu was Britain’s first black £1 million player, but experienced homophobic abuse throughout his career.
In the late 1990s he was accused of sexually abusing a 17-year-old boy whilst working as a coach in Maryland, US.
Fearing he would not receive a fair trial, he fled to England where he was found hanged two months later.
In his suicide note he denied the charges and claimed the sex was consensual.
Despite the sober subject matter, ‘Fashanu’ the song is an upbeat, guitar-driven number with a strong melodic refrain.
“We like having serious messages and stories in our songs that mean something to us and to juxtapose them with upbeat tunes with really nice melodies and harmonies,” says Spencer.
“Lots of great bands have done that in the past and I think it helps put the message across.”
