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Exhibition reveals rich cultural history of Stamford Hill’s Jewish community

Sharing his story: Malcolm Shears. Photograph: Hackney Museum

A new exhibition charting a crucial period in the history of Stamford Hill’s Jewish community is opening at Hackney Museum this month.

Sharing Our Stories: Jewish Stamford Hill, 1930s–1950s focuses on the memories of seven members of the Jewish community through film, photography and written stories.

Topics covered will include migration, first impressions of London and some surprising insights into what everyday life was like in Stamford Hill more than 80 years ago.

“Things that are now associated with Jewish Stamford Hill were quite unusual back then”, said Niti Acharya, manager at Hackney Museum, speaking to the Hackney Citizen.

“One of our interviewees told us about how, in the time after the war, it was still considered unusual if you heard someone speaking Yiddish in the area.”

Tzvi Rabin also provides material for the exhibition. Photograph: Hackney Museum

Now home to Europe’s largest concentration of the highly orthodox Haredi Jews, Stamford Hill has changed markedly in the years since.

“There were different reasons for the community originally settling in the areas”, explained Acharya.

“Back in the 1930s, Stamford Hill was this leafy suburb away from the hustle and bustle of the East End, where a lot of the Jewish community lived. It was almost like moving to the countryside.

“But there was also a second group who were already based around Dalston and Hackney, and so Stamford Hill was just the logical progression. There were good transport links and it was just a nice area.”

In stark contrast with the Stamford Hill of 2016, Acharya explained that cheap property prices and lots of available houses were also a big factor in attracting families to the area.

“After the war a lot of people were leaving Hackney. East Enders were decamping to have a better way of life and there had been a lot of damage to the area during the war – so it was a lot easier to buy in Hackney then.”

The reasons for the consolidation of Stamford Hill’s very traditional Haredi community have much to with one man: Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld.

The British rabbi played an instrumental role in kindertransport (the transportation of refugee Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Great Britain), and was head of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, an organisation founded in 1926 that aimed to protect Hasidic Judaism.

“Rabbi Schonfeld was keen on harnessing communal relations and banding together to make Jews fleeing persecution feel welcome”, said Ms Acharya.

Kindertransport: Children of Polish Jews from the region between Germany and Poland on their arrival in London in February 1939. Photograph: German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons

One of the seven interviewees was initially brought over to London via kindertransport, and she has recounted her journey to the UK as part of the exhibition.

Young people from Teen Action, the Hasidic Orthodox community group in Stamford Hill researched, developed and designed the display with the help of Hackney Museum.

“We’ve been working with Teen Action for a few years, and we were keen to work on this with them”, said Ms Acharya.

“We aim to help groups explore Hackney’s rich cultural history, and this has been particularly interesting because it’s given the younger generation of the Stamford Hill Jewish community the opportunity to engage with their history.”

Sharing Our Stories: Jewish Stamford Hill, 1930s–1950s is at Hackney Museum from 13 September –9 January.

September 9, 2016
Up, up and away! Disabled artist lifted off the ground by 20,000 helium balloons

Artist Noëmi Lakmaier lies in front of the altar of St Leonard’s whilst balloons are attached to her. Photograph: Grace Gelder

A disabled artist has been lifted off the ground by the force of 20,000 helium balloons in St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch.

Noëmi Lakmaier, a Vienna-born artist, attempted the feat for a performance art piece called Cherophobia.

The 48-hour long performance is taking place in St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, as part of Unlimited, a festival celebrating the work of disabled artists.

Assistants ready the balloons for the lifting attempt. Photograph: Grace Gelder

Audiences are welcome to go along and view the performance, which is also being broadcasted live to arts venues and streamed on the internet.

At St Leonard’s the audience will see a team of assistants inflating party balloons and attaching them to Lakmaier as she becomes suspended in the air.

Suspension of disbelief: Noëmi Lakmaier takes off as the balloons lift her off the ground. Photograph: Grace Gelder

Lift off! Noëmi Lakmaier is suspended in mid-air. Photograph: Grace Gelder

“I can fairly easily imagine how it will start,” the artist told Unlimited prior to the performance. “I think once we go further than that towards a middle and an end, it becomes far less predictable.

“I think it’s the whole bunch of balloons pulling upwards and the contrast to my body pulling downwards that’s the metaphor.

“I suppose it’s also got a lot to do with who’s in control, because in a lot of my work, and including in Cherophobia, I put myself in a position where I’m completely out of control and at the hands of others – both my team and audience members.

“But essentially I’m in control of everything because I’m the one orchestrating it… I like that play of push and pull with control.”

Cherophobia takes its name from a psychiatric condition which is defined as “an exaggerated or irrational fear of gaiety or happiness”.

“I think it’s going to be quite an all-encompassing experience for the viewers”, said Lakmaier in the same interview.

“The more the room fills up with balloons, the less space there is for anything else – the more it will be a physical challenge to negotiate space.”

Cherophobia will be running at St Leonard’s until 12 noon tomorrow (9 September).

Up-lifting: A balloon’s eye view of the project. Photograph: Grace Gelder

Tied up: Assistants make sure the balloons don’t get tangled. Photograph: Grace Gelder

September 8, 2016
Matchbox memories: the toy car factory that dominated Hackney’s industrial landscape

By-gone days: The Lesney factory in Hackney Wick

For many grown men Matchbox toy cars evoke childhood memories of afternoons spent driving over mountainous sofas and screeching around table-leg bends. For others, bargain hunters and boot-sale stalkers, they can now mean five figure sums.

Yet in a new book, motoring journalist Giles Chapman reveals the key to the success of these miniature must-haves was the army of Hackney women hired by Lesney Products – the firm behind Matchbox toys – to produce them.

With bonnets, boots and windows that opened, as well as diggers and trucks with off-loadable cargo, Matchbox’s attention to detail meant that by the 1960s their fleet of miniature cars was at the top of every boy’s Christmas list.

Industrial landscape

And with rising demand came a domination of Hackney’s industrial landscape.

By 1959 Lesney appeared to occupy just about every existing building in Eastway by Hackney Marshes.

But Lesney’s crowning glory, a result of Matchbox’s success, was its gigantic factory, which until 2010 stood proudly beside the canal on Lee Conservancy Road by Mabley Green.

Completed in 1963, the imposing concrete giant became an instant local landmark. By 1966 its workforce stood at 3,600 and, Chapman notes “was easily the largest employer in the borough of Hackney”.

With a brand new factory and demand at an all-time high, Lesney needed labour and they found it in the armies of local women who worked full and part-time on the assembly lines.

The pay was competitive and, Chapman says: “Leslie Smith, the director of Lesney, came up with a novel brainwave to make sure the Matchbox conveyor belt would never be wanting for nimble assembly hands”.

Perks of the job

To entice the women of Hackney to join the Matchbox ranks Lesney bought a fleet of redundant buses from London Transport, painted them in Matchbox’s trademark blue and yellow colours and offered free transport to and from work, as well as help with the school run for their children.

Chapman adds: “Unsurprisingly with this perk, there was never any shortage of potential employees despite the fact that such tasks as assembling the vehicles, applying the stickers and packaging the final products, can’t have been anything but deathly dull.”

Transport hub: Buses used by Lesney for its workforce

Yet camaraderie and a good working atmosphere prevailed in the Lesney factory.

Len Mills, a former tooling and engineering manager recalled: “It was like a family. Lesney was not so much a job as a way of life.”

In 1967 Lesney, with the help of its largely female workforce, was awarded its place in The Guinness Book of Records when its annual output reached 100 million models and by 1969 output had soared to a million units a day.

Alan Anderson, whose mother Mary took up a part-time job at the factory in the mid-1960s, recalls her setting off for work each night after he’d come home from school and had his tea: “Her job was in effect quality control. Dud ones were binned but quite a few fell in handbags, quite innocently I’d imagine.

“Often, however, fully-built cars found their way there, too. I think my nephews have them now, in a tailor-made Matchbox storage case. I shudder to think their worth due to sheer rarity if my brother and I hadn’t played with them!”

Though Lesney’s Matchbox range ceased production in September 1982, its legacy continues today, in the memories of those who played with them and for the collectors who are cursing the same boys for racing their miniature Mercedes along curbs and smashing them up whilst playing at rally racing in the mud.

Britain’s Toy Car Wars: Dinky vs Corgi vs Matchbox is published by the History Press. ISBN: 9780750965941. RRP: £20

Coupé-d up: A Matchbox sports car

September 7, 2016
Along the Hackney Canal – book review: ‘A refined eye for the sublime’

Photograph: Freya Najade

In her astute and poetic introduction to photographer Freya Najade’s latest book, writer Esther Kinsky explains how East London’s “canals and the River Lea form a layered landscape of urban histories, of comings and goings, of the shifting interferences of land and water and nature and man”.

She’s describing a complex network of collision and change, and she touches on how a landscape, in the eye of its many beholders, is distinct and subjective.

“But not everyone feels the need to decipher it,” she writes.

Najade is one of the few, and her stunning collection Along the Hackney Canal is testament to her patience, her refined eye for the sublime and her apparent urge to explore the diversity of experience and place.

For a project focused on what might seem like a relatively narrow, objective topic, the images – always effective – are remarkably disparate and personal. It’s this variety and versatility that really elevates the work.

The collection begins with a moody, Dickensian scene of bare deciduous trees, placid water and thick mist. Slim branches intertwine and protrude at gothic angles. You can easily imagine Abel Magwitch, of Great Expectations, emerging from the deep; it’s a great start.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Amongst the photos that immediately follow is a series of more abstract shots of the water, with close-ups of its contents, which include a ducking swan, dreamlike reflections of puffy clouds and a plastic Iceland bag suspended in the flow.

Photograph: Freya Najade

There’s a painterly quality to some of these compositions, with colour and texture taking on an almost impressionistic dimension. One shot, of a mass of non-descript green matter in water, could easily be compared, in part, to a Turner – or even a Monet.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Flicking further, we encounter perfect arrangements of yellow-flowering bushes in full bloom, a cormorant arching its wings against a tangle of brown thicket, and a CCTV camera shooting vertically from foliage, recalling the gas lanterns of a stereotypically Victorian topography, but with a more sinister, voyeuristic edge.

Photograph: Freya Najade

Photograph: Freya Najade

Litter, or waste, runs throughout – an abandoned trolley, a derelict moped and a cardboard packet floating amidst a swirl of iridescent specks are juxtaposed by, for example, the flesh of red berries and a twist of brambles covered in frost.

Photograph: Freya Najade

A few images in particular are simply spectacular, and whoever at Hoxton Mini Press edited the project did a sterling job selecting which to draw specific attention to.

Roughly half of the photos are afforded a double page, some of which are extremely special: there’s a row of pastel-coloured houseboats lining the foggy banks of what looks like the Lea Navigation; there’s a gathering of Orthodox Jewish people running races on marshland; and there’s a snap of long golden grass, dry and swaying in an almost Southern-gothic manner.

Photograph: Freya Najade

You can imagine these three dramatic prints hanging in grand frames on the walls of our swankiest galleries.

Kinsky, in her intro, also writes about how “Freya’s gaze is not directed into the distance but into the depth of her field of vision, searching for the underlying layers of older landscapes spelt into the land”.

There is something in this that rang especially true for me when considering an image towards the end of the collection.

At the front of the shot is the canal, behind it a relic of old heavy industry and scattered further back are the traces of London’s relentless development; it’s a scene worth studying.

It would be a huge pleasure to work through Along the Hackney Canal in tandem with author Helen Babbs’s brilliant recent release, Adrift: A Secret Life of London’s Waterways.

Along the Hackney Canal is published by Hoxton Mini Press.
ISBN: 9781910566114. RRP: £14.95

Photograph: Freya Najade

Photograph: Freya Najade

September 5, 2016
Sleepless, Shoreditch Town Hall, preview: exploring Fatal Familial Insomnia

Jake Ferretti in the play Sleepless, at Shoreditch Town Hall until 14 September

Margaret Thatcher famously ran the country on five hours a night, but for many a fitful night’s sleep can destroy any hope of functioning like a reasoned human being.

Insomnia, however, comes in degrees of severity, and at Shoreditch Town Hall this month a new play explores the most rare and horrifying strain of them all.

Sleepless is inspired by the true story of a family and the disease that cursed them for generations, playwright Hannah Barker tells me.

“The inspiration comes from a book called The Family Who Couldn’t Sleep, a true life account written by a science journalist about a Italian family that has this very rare condition called Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI)),” the playwright says.

“It’s this frightening thing that belongs in a horror movie really because it’s this condition where your pupils become like pinpricks, you sweat profusely and you just really struggle sleeping.

“What that progresses to is complete inability to sleep and a slow and quite painful death over the course of nine to 18 months.”

Balvinder Sopal and Andrea Quirbach in Sleepless

The play takes the form of a detective story in which a woman whose mother has died in mysterious circumstances goes on a journey to find out what really happened.

In the process she learns about this peculiar genetic disease that robs you of sleep and progressively shuts down the mind and body.

Barker, a Londoner and former Dalston resident, says her theatre company Analogue, which has a reputation for combining powerful storytelling with rigorous scientific research, wanted to delve into the real life implications of having the disease.

“We wanted to show what it would really mean for a human being. There’s the fact it’s a rare human condition so there’s not a lot funding for research into it. So it really puts into question the value of a human life and how many people need to be affected for it to be worth it.

“On top of that there’s the question of living under the shadow this genetic disease. If you do have the disease there’s a 50 per cent chance you’ll pass it on to your children, so if you decide to have children you could be effectively handing down a death sentence.”

This may sound somewhat morbid, but Barker and the cast counter a potentially gloomy subject matter with moments of lightness and an exploration of the subconscious realm between being asleep and awake.

“What’s interesting about this show is what you can do within that zone of sleep and wake, you’ve got real creative licence to explore what’s in your subconscious,” Barker says.

As the daughter pieces together the jigsaw with the help of a doctor, becoming more of an unreliable narrator in the process, the play reaches an unexpected denouement.

Although reluctant to reveal more, Barker is confident the play will keep audiences wide-awake.

Sleepless
Until 14 September
Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT
shoreditchtownhall.com

September 5, 2016
Concert pitch: September gig guide for East London

Thurston Moore. Photograph: Vera Marmelo

Merzbow and Thurston Moore

Never before have Japanese noise musician Merzbow, Hungarian drummer Balázs Pándi, Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and Sonic Youth great Thurston Moore performed live together. Or at least until now. The four solo artists released acclaimed ‘avant album’ Cuts of Guilt, Cuts Deeper last year. And this month they are set to perform it live for the first time at St John at Hackney.

28 September
St John at Hackney, Lower Clapton Road, E5 0PD
stjohnsessions.co.uk

The Invisible

South London three-piece The Invisible will be at Oslo this month, playing songs from their impressive third album Patience. The group have defined their music as ‘experimental genre-spanning spacepop’ with front-man Dave Okumu’s impressive CV including production credits for the likes of St Vincent and Amy Winehouse.

28 September
Oslo, Mare Street, E8 1LL
oslohackney.co.uk

Sing for Samaritans

Vintage clothes boutique Paper Dress Vintage is to host a night of live music in aid of Central London Samaritans this month. Indie rockers Belle Roscoe and singer-songwriters Will Connor and Nadia Rae are confirmed for the fundraising event, with some ‘very special guests’ yet to be announced…

7 September
Paper Dress Vintage, 352a Mare Street, E8 1HR
paperdressvintage.co.uk

Hairy Hands

Hairy Hands, the moniker of electronic musician James Alexander Bright, will be playing a free gig at the Sebright Arms this month for the launch of his album Magic. If the rest of the album is anything like single ‘YNA’ then expect watery synths, liquid funk and sultry melodies.

21 September
Sebright Arms
31–35 Coate Street, E2 9AG

Opera Cabaret

Mezzo-sopranos Lore Lixenberg and Lucy Stevens will be performing songs and arias by baroque maestro Henry Purcell at The Old Church this month. The Opera Cabaret describes itself “a spectacular celebration of music and fun”and will feature Elizabeth Marcus on harpsichord.

Music for a While
10 September
The Old Church, Stoke Newington Church Street, N16 9ES
theoldchurch.org.uk

September 5, 2016
Barred: prison play asks if art and education can rehabilitate offenders

Barred playwright Dean Stalham

A theatre company is this month staging a play that asks searching questions of the criminal justice system.

Barred is set inside a cell in the infamous Strangeways prison, where two characters debate whether art and education are viable means of rehabilitation for prisoners.

For 52-year-old playwright Dean Stalham the answer is, undoubtedly, yes.

Stalham, who now lives on Chrisp Street, grew up on a council estate in Burnt Oak and left school at 15 with no O-Levels.

He says he had “no conception of what art was” until serving a six-year stint in Wandsworth prison for handling stolen prints by Warhol and Dali.

Stalham was one of 13 inmates (out of more than 1,500) allowed to take an art course. During the course he made a painting of Mickey Mouse in a Warhol style with the caption: “This is not Mickey Mouse.”

It was selected for inclusion in an exhibition of offenders’ art, an experience that changed Stalham’s life.

His family went along and saw the painting sell for £250. The news galvanised Stalham, but not as much as when his brother told him that he thought he had talent.

“It was like a bolt of lightening,” Stalham recalls, and the belief it gave him rekindled in him an interest in writing plays.

“My first play I wrote in prison was performed by actors from the Royal Court in front of 200 inmates. Just the applause that I got was enough to say this is it this what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Stalham says.

Since his release in 2006, Stalham has devoted his life to art. He founded the charity Art Saves Lives and introduced Billy Bragg’s band for former prisoners, Jail Guitar Doors, at Glastonbury.

He has had a film shown on Channel 4 and written several well-received plays, including 2010’s God Don’t Live on a Council Estate.

“The underbelly of society have been drip-fed for hundreds of years the idea that art’s not to be trusted, that art doesn’t put food on the table, that art doesn’t pay the bills and therefore they don’t have art in their lives,” he says.

“But once art’s in your life the world’s a better place. With art you can communicate, and if you communicate you share and the whole world opens up to you. I know that it does work because I’m living proof of it.”

Barred was performed at The Royal Court last year. Back then it looked at the theme of mental health in prison. Stalham was encouraged enough by its reception to adapt the play with a different theme this year.

“Most of it’s based on my experience,” he explains. “It’s two men in a cell, and one of them believes he can get rehabilitated through education, and the other, who can’t read or write (something there’s a lot of in prison), has no faith in that whatsoever.”

Last year, the actors involved all had first-hand experience of the criminal justice system. This year Stalham has cast his net wider.

Playing the lead is Nigel Travis, who has worked as a fire fighter for 22 years and runs a boxing club for underprivileged kids in Moss Side, Manchester.

Stalham says casting people from a range of backgrounds is an important aim.

“It’s about showing there is a talent and a passion out there capturing and nurturing and encouraging it,” he says.

“I don’t want to get on a soapbox but I just think we’ve got a rawness and a gutsiness that probably trained actors haven’t got and that gives the play an edge.

“Without wanting to be, we’re very unstructured but stories are stories and whether they’re structured or not shouldn’t matter as long as it’s engaging and entertaining.”

Barred
Brady Arts Centre
15/16 September
192-196 Hanbury Street, E1 5HU
(Free admission)

September 2, 2016
Saddled with Shakespeare: The Handlebards ride to Geffrye Museum

The Handlebards’ all-female troupe. Photograph: The Handlebards

How different Shakespeare’s plays would have been had bicycles existed in his day.

Richard III might have declared: “A bike! A bike! My kingdom for a bike!” and that famous stage direction in The Winter’s Tale “exit, pursued by a bear” may not have resulted in the death of poor Antigonus.

This month an all-bicycling theatre company giving new meaning to the phrase ‘play cycle’ by pedaling more than 1,000 miles across the country to perform Shakespeare.

The Handlebards are two acting troupes (one male, one female) with four members each. They load up their bicycles with set, props and costumes and perform Shakespeare on the hoof in a manner they describe as “energetic, charmingly chaotic and environmentally sustainable”.

On a national tour of more than 50 venues, the group’s all-female crew will be stopping off at the Geffrye Museum for “knee-slapping, inventive, off-the-wall,” performances of two Shakespeare classics: Romeo and Juliet, his tale of star-crossed lovers, and early comedy The Taming of the Shrew.

The cycling actors embarked on their first tour in 2013 and have performed in schools across the country as well as performing in India, Singapore, Malaysia and Myanmar.

In 2014 the group won the Edinburgh Fringe Sustainable Practice Award for saving 50.2 tonnes of CO2 by travelling by bike.

Romeo and Juliet (9 September)
The Taming of the Shrew (10 September)
The Geffrye Museum
136 Kingsland Road
E2 8EA
geffrye-museum.org.uk

August 31, 2016
Too late to stop Nao: interview

Nao: “Vocal acrobatics and flair…” Photograph: Jeff Hahn

The story of Nao is not one of overnight success. The 28-year-old East Londoner this year released her debut album For All We Know to some acclaim, with critics hailing her vocal acrobatics and flair in taking the sounds of her old school idols and bringing them up to date. But in contrast to the fame-hungry, manufactured stars of today, the rise to prominence of Nao (née Neo Jessica Joshua) is the result of years of hard work. She has been gigging since the age of 14, studied jazz at music school and been a session vocalist for the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Kwabs. Here she talks about East London sounds, the joy of jamming and ‘wonky funk’…

You grew up and live in East London. How does that come through in your music?

East London has always been a hub for fresh and original music. When I was growing up in my teenage years we were listening to pirate radio stations and grime crews like Heartless Crew and Pay as U Go. They were all people who weren’t signed and were just on the hustle and I think that influenced me in following my own nose. It made me think, ‘I love making music so I’m just going to get on the grind and hope that one day it works out.’ It’s beginning to.

And your recording studio is on Ridley Road, home of the famous market. Do you find inspiration there for your music amongst the market stalls and traders?

I love hustle and bustle and Ridley Road definitely has that. When I’ve been in the studio working without windows or people for a long time I’ve started going out in Dalston, clubbing a little bit just to let my hair down. And I was hearing all these new tunes that people were getting down to and I was like ‘ when did this music come out?’ So it helps me keep up to date with new music that’s for sure.

It’s been a rollercoaster couple of years for you, from your first EP in 2014 to a MOBO nomination, playing Glastonbury twice, coming third in BBC’s Sound of 2016 poll and now a debut album under your belt. How are you coping with the success?

Well I’m not Adele so I don’t get mobbed down the street but it’s definitely a new path for me. I’m realistic though. I understand stuff goes up and stuff comes down and that with the music business you can’t really hold your self-esteem to it because it’s fickle. So I just make music because I love it though obviously I want other people to enjoy it too.

Does the fact you’ve been gigging since you were 14 make you appreciate this all the more?

Yeah, 100 per cent. I’ve been gigging most of my life around London and around the world actually and when I was doing those shows I was a voice of other people’s projects, a singer just floating around. But it did teach me about stage presence, about performing and it taught me about how to be a professional and I learnt my craft trying to be good vocalist. I appreciate that all those years have helped me in my late 20s hopefully be at a good standard.

You worked with some well-respected producers on For All We Know (Grades, A.K. Paul, Loxe, John Calvert) yet there’s something quite homespun about it, like the inclusion of voice memos. What was the rationale there?

You’re right, it’s definitely not all that polished. I recorded all the vocals in my cupboard at home and sometimes you can hear a train going past because I live by the train tracks. There’s a couple of voice memos in there, one in front of a song called Happy and another straight afterwards. And that’s basically an insight into how that song came about. When I make music I leave my phone recording for hours because you never know what you’re going to come up with. So I was recording me and my friends jamming around and we started to form the bass line and then you can hear the chorus developing. I just wanted to show that it’s not about being in the studio with Pharrell, it’s about sitting with people you’re comfortable with, jamming it out and finding a song within that beautiful moment.

You studied vocal jazz at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which suggests to me you’ve always been very serious about a career in music. When did you realise it was something you wanted to do full-time?

I knew I wanted to be a musician from very young, but not from watching Popstars on TV – there was something about dancing around in a video didn’t click for me. Some of the musicians I love are pretty old school, like Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin. They’re amazing musicians and that’s why I went to the Guildhall to study jazz because it was all about musicianship, and I got to compose for orchestras and arrange for like big bands and things like that. Hopefully throughout the album you can hear strong musicianship because that’s what I’ve always wanted to get across.

You’ve described your particular type of music as ‘wonky funk’. What does that mean and why have you felt the need to invent your own genre?

Well a lot of people connect me to R&B and I see R&B as quite a particular thing. It’s quite smooth, it’s quite silky, it’s quite… I don’t know, it’s quite sexual sometimes. But I feel with my music there are so many colours in there: there’s funk, there’s R&B, there’s electronic future music in there. It’s just an amalgamation of all the things I grew up listening to, so for all those people putting me into one bracket because I don’t sound like Usher I just made up my own genre. The funk I take from people like Prince and Michael Jackson who I love and the ‘wonkiness’ is my own interpretation for the moment that we live in. My music doesn’t sound retro, it doesn’t sound like it’s recorded in the 70s, it sounds new I hope, it sounds contemporary.

For All We Know is out now on Little Tokyo Recordings

August 26, 2016
The Hard Stop, an interview with filmmaker George Amponsah: Language of the unheard

Protesters in Tottenham voicing their anger at the police shooting of Mark Duggan.

Five years after the death of Mark Duggan and the subsequent riots, many Londoners from black and minority ethnic communities still struggle to trust the police. The 2013 inquest into Duggan’s death at the hands of police found the shooting to be a ‘lawful killing’, despite many witnesses testifying Duggan had not been armed. A gun was found at the scene, but it bore none of Duggan’s prints, blood or DNA. An expert witness went as far as to testify it was “very difficult” to imagine the deceased throwing the gun to the spot where it was found, some 20 feet away, after he had been shot twice. Marcus Knox-Hooke and Kurtis Henville, two childhood friends of Duggan, were determined to find justice for him and the resulting documentary, The Hard Stop, explodes historical tensions between law enforcement and London’s black community. The film’s director George Amponsah reveals what East London said about the film, what divides Londoners, and how to protest.

How have Londoners responded to the film?

We screened it at the East End Film Festival in June and afterwards had a panel with two police officers. Emotions were high: feelings of sadness, feelings of anger and a sense of injustice. There were a lot of questions asking those officers how they felt the police might change some of the patterns of behaviour reflected in the film – the main pattern being a history of not being accountable when things go wrong.

Is there a clear dividing line between people open to Duggan’s story and the people who are not?

I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not trying to be evasive in saying this but I’m a filmmaker. What I know is films and trying to tell a story. Part of the motivation for making The Hard Stop was that I wanted to make a film that was about an important subject and about my home. I was born in London. I’m British. In many senses I’d be satisfied with the film as long as it is something that provokes debate and discussion. Because what’s important to me in some ways is that Martin Luther King quote that appears at the beginning of The Hard Stop: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s just important for a debate and discussion to be had rather than for a significant amount of people to think their voice and opinion is not being heard, and is being discounted – so much so that they find themselves taking to the streets and getting involved in the kind of disturbance that we saw in Britain in 2011.

What advice would you give to young Londoners who want to carry on the conversation started with this film?

Try and get involved in things that are constructive and creative. Try to find a way of protesting where you’re getting your voice heard, where it can’t be discounted, and certainly in a way where you know you’re not going to be imprisoned or find yourself on the wrong side of the law.

thehardstopfilm.com

August 25, 2016