If art imitates life, then what better art form than photography, which exactly replicates what we see?
Stephen Gill, photographer, conceptual artist and serial chronicler of Hackney, might not agree. Aware of the limitations of traditional documentary photography, Gill is interested in expressing concepts beyond the merely descriptive.
In two recently published photo books, he continues to broaden the frontiers of the medium. The first, Best Before End, is a collection of photos of East London made using energy drinks. Psychedelic images bearing little resemblance to what the eye sees is the result of Gill placing objects inside the camera before taking the photos, then immersing the negatives in the drinks.
A bare-footed guitar player on stage, traffic, undergrowth, hands and limbs suddenly gain an abstract, fantastical quality. Images shift position and are manipulated to reflect the giddy pace of urban life, just as energy drinks are a symptom of it, something one-time Jolt Cola junkie Will Self points out in the book’s foreword.
East London is more recognisable in the series that makes up Talking to Ants. Here the city and natural world entwine: a building site overlooks a calm stretch of water; a figure appears buried by undergrowth; and a bespectacled man with shoulder length hair sips from a bottle cap.
The ants of the title are a reference to Gill’s method of placing surrounding objects and creatures (including ants) behind the lens whilst taking photographs. A close-up of foliage includes the black outline of a broken ruler and a couple of wood lice, while a row of houses is strewn with pieces of soil.
Arranged randomly, the deliberate act of taking a photograph is suddenly subverted, with the end result not simply a representation of an environment, but also a product of it. This is image manipulation using an analogue lens that achieves more artistically than the digital enhancement of Photoshop.
Both books are published by Nobody. Talking to Ants, RRP:£35, ISBN: 978-0957536913. Best Before End, RRP: £44, ISBN: 9780957536951
Before moving to London, I watched David Lynch’s The Elephant Man and recognised his flickering Whitechapel freak-show dream-reel as something called the old East End. I didn’t spot it by extant landmarks. Instead, the old East End seemed to emerge from a well-worn confection of signifiers: smog, crowding, cobblestones, Cockney chatter, grinning bawds and ill-shod, street-smart beggar kids.
Lynch was tapping into an accumulated reservoir of fetishistic representations of the East End’s grit and squalor. There are countless variations on the theme, enough to comfortably accommodate both Jack the Ripper and Call the Midwife.
There is, it seems, an enduring hunger for an imagined old East End. In the context of modern British ‘keep calm’ retromania – the glinting flotsam of the jubilee flotilla – this doesn’t seem out of place. But the lure of East London’s memories seems very particular, and more powerfully mythic than the wistful patriotism of bunting-and-cake nostalgia.
I wondered whether the fervour for remembering was a sympathetic response to East London’s history of trauma, which is deep and perhaps unechoed in the rest of the city.
In a Poplar pie and mash shop with tiled walls and framed pictures of pre-war East India Dock Road I meet Ian Porter, a London tour guide and historical novelist. East End poverty, degradation and destruction might be the stuff of popular fascination, he tells me, but they don’t completely explain it. After all, Southeast London’s history was similarly traumatic. Bermondsey was a slum-scape and dumping ground for the city’s unsavoury industries – tanneries, slaughterhouses, soap works, breweries – and took an almost equally heavy beating in the World Wars. “But go into any library,” Porter says, “and there will be twenty books about the old East End. There won’t be any on Bermondsey.”
The crucial divergence is, according to Porter, that Victorian Whitechapel, not Bermondsey, formed the backdrop for the murders, which drew the gaze of the British literary and political classes towards urban poverty. “Nowadays you have all these tacky tours,” says Porter, “Actually, Jack the Ripper had a huge effect. Until 1888 no politicians would come down here. But now, the papers weren’t just covering the murders, they were covering the squalor, the poverty, the prostitution too. The East End becomes the template, if you like.”
Sensational newsprint quickly gave way to fiction as conduit for the consumption of the East End’s savagery. Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago, which narrated the moral descent of a Shoreditch slum boy towards violent death at 17, was a bestseller in 1896. The East End was being reconstructed in the reading public’s imagination as an urban wasteland of moral rot, an ‘other’ repository for their social anxieties.
The Victorians’ macabre preoccupations have wound their way into the bank of stereotype, which lend Lynch’s oblique visuals that unexpected connotative eloquence. The distancing effect of passing time has polished the horror into the sort of shadowy glamour commodified by the Ten Bells in Shoreditch, a pub famous for hosting the Ripper’s victims. Porter thinks the East End’s grisly historic reputation – from Ripper to Kray twins – underpins East London’s trendiness. “It’s that edgy charm,” he explains.
Edgy charm aside, memory is an identity-building project and not a static commodity. In today’s East End, this process is not only socially significant, but necessarily fractured, devolved and continuous. Established cultural signifiers can be endowed with new meaning. So the old East End – still cobbled, still gas-lit – can be code for hard working people, community and resilience in the face of bombardment, at the same time as it is the memory of urban degradation and corruptive poverty.
Rupture and change make us want to tell stories afresh. Every new building between old ones is a manifestation of absence, a gap in the architectural record, which demands explanation. A gap in a different record inspired Tabitha Stapely, leader of a resident’s association concerned with the regeneration of Roman Road.
Finding meagre archival data for Bow, she started to dig for stories that would frame the locality’s historic character. “Bow is about pioneers and radicalism, rule-breakers,” Stapely says. “Poverty attracts the social changers.” Stapely drafted the programme of July’s inaugural Roman Road festival to reflect the historic identity she sees there. Walks trailed Sylvia Pankhurst’s suffragette legacy through familiar streets, talks explored the Matchstick Rebellion and the Cable Street anti-fascists, and, in a local cafe, Bow’s elderly denizens shared their direct experience of a fading East End.
We have less and less access to direct experience of the wartime East End, says Stapely. The festival took place the same week that Gary Arber, of W.F. Arber & Co printing works on Roman Road vacated the premises. I met Arber, the octogenarian grandson of the company’s founder, and final custodian of the shop’s 117-year legacy, about a year ago.
He was in blue coveralls, and the shop was a relic in disarray – paper stacked ceiling high, walls chequered with wooden pigeonholes, the counter studded with the tacks and staples of ages. I told him I felt like I had stepped back in time. He told me he liked to time travel, too: with cotton stuffing his ears against the sound of motors, a hurricane lamp for light and a book of collected Victorian news bulletins open across his knees.
The encounter had a melancholy feeling. Perhaps it was because I thought he was seeking refuge in a time of beginnings, before the printing works was living history. Perhaps I was just dizzied by the looping circularity of the memory game. Indeed, as Arber and his printing press left the Roman Road, I found that in my own imagined picture-book of the old East End, with dockers and pie shops, pearly kings and kids playing in the bombed-out rubble, the shops all look a little more like his.
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.”
To all you gravy-loving Yorkshire pudding fetishists, here’s a place that’s sure to appeal. Bacchus Sundays is a new kitchen in Hoxton where the only thing on the menu is a roast dinner.
Apart from the food, there are two reasons I like it. The first is that they do one thing and they do it really well. The second is that it’s sticking around.
I love the creativity of the pop-up bar, and the restaurant model, but it sometimes feels like a competition in Instagrammable gimmickry that credits style over substance, so it’s good to see these guys run with their convictions.
We eased into the afternoon with a couple of exotic-looking champagne Pimms cocktails on the sunny pavement outside. Stuffed with vivid green mint leaves and ruby red strawberries, they tasted as good as they looked.
To start with we had a fresh and zingy mid-Atlantic prawn cocktail and some succulent ham hock terrine cut through nicely with sharp cornichons slices.
For mains you simply pick from beef, lamb, chicken, pork or nut roast, and there’s even a ‘bit of everything’ option for the indecisive.
We went with the pork belly and the Angus beef, both of which were really good as were the roast beetroot and glazed carrots, which make a pleasant variation.
The gravy was perfect and the stuffing for the pork was deficient only in there not being more of it.
The restaurant is an off-shoot from the Bacchus Pub & Kitchen, formerly a boxing club that interestingly took its name from nearby Bacchus Walk rather than the Greek god of wine.
Apparently the street used to connect Hoxton High Street to Pimlico Gardens – the late 17th century botanical gardens that were swallowed up during the industrialisation of the East End.
History lessons aside, if roasts are your thing then this is your place. Take the papers, see off the hangover with a Mug of Mary cocktail and tuck into some excellent grub this Sunday.
Even if you don’t remember Tom Campbell’s first book, you might remember him as that dark horse of City Hall who boasted about shoplifting.
In 2011 Campbell promptly resigned from his post at the London Mayor’s Office after explaining to the Evening Standard that he had a personal code of conduct for using chain stores: never buy, only steal.
The boast may have been a sloppily-made political statement (why not just actively buy from independents?), but nonetheless a refreshing bit of risky honesty.
Not surprising then, that Campbell counts among his influences the American novelist Jonathan Franzen, who won headlines by allegedly being rude on Oprah.
In The Corrections, Franzen’s white, angsty middle-class protagonist goes into a posh grocery store and stuffs some salmon fillets into his pocket, only for their juices to drip down his leg while he queues at the checkout. It’s a bizarre act of entitlement combining expensive tastes with wealth resentment. Annoying, but intriguing.
In Campbell’s new novel, The Planner, everyone is similarly annoying. And that makes The Planner a little bit addictive, because it’s fun to resent characters in books.
The title character James is, by all conventional definitions, boring. He works a thankless job as a town planner in Southwark Council. He spends his days poring over the finer details of a city he can barely afford to live in, surrounded by friends he finds insufferable as their vacuous success (bankers, lawyers) has come to define their personalities. They lack complexity, thoughtless amoebas blobbing their way through life.
Surely then James, martyr to his city, is more than meets the eye? Not so.
Unable to conjure any more noble motivations, James allows himself to become the mentee of high-flying ad man Felix, who introduces him to a glamorous, decadent lifestyle as a method of revving up his bland, night bus-using existence.
It’s the book’s central irony that this planner can’t plan his own life, which may be a bit overplayed – the professional/personal divide is nothing special. Fashion designers often dress badly. There are dentists with bad teeth. Lawyers who commit crimes.
Elevated to the role of protagonist, James’ task is to surprise and intrigue.
But he never does, forcing an altogether more cynical take away – there’s no enlightenment in having very little. Just more striving.
The Planner is published by Bloomsbury Circus. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9781408818268
Think delicious Chinese dishes are out of reach for beginners? Think again.
In Hackney the basic ingredients are right on our doorstep according to Chinese food expert and writer Fuchsia Dunlop, who says you can pick up the basics for a good meal from shops on Kingsland Road or Mare Street.
A holiday to China in 1992 kindled a curiosity about the country and its many different regional cooking styles that’s seen her become fluent in Mandarin, with five books to her name including the latest – Every Grain Of Rice – written as an introduction to some of the world’s most stunning food.
“Cuisine varies hugely by area,” she says. “In some ways it’s crazy talking about ‘Chinese’ food because it’s so different. It’s like Chinese people talking about ‘Western’ cuisine. If you think about the difference between Danish and Sicilian food – it’s pretty much like that in China.”
Her journey started off in Sichuan. It’s a province that borders Tibet in its mountainous western reaches, while in its eastern regions the fertile plains of the Sichuan basin have lent it the tag-line ‘Land of Plenty’.
In the capital, Chengdu, she became the first Westerner to study full-time at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, which is no small feat in itself, let alone the fact classes are taught in dialect. Food is typically very spicy, characterised by the Sichuan pepper, which tingles and numbs the lips, and chilli.
“They have dazzling flavours – the nearest equivalent is probably Thai food. You get salty and sweet and spicy and nutty – there’s lots of things going on and so quite a cheap meal can be very exciting.
“When I’m working at home I often make simple and delicious noodle dishes like dandan noodles with chilli, soy sauce, vinegar and minced pork.”
After 20 years of break-neck modernisation, China is virtually unrecognisable from the country where she first sailed past the Three Gorges in a boat and spent time in Chengdu. Back then, Chengdu was full of tea houses, clay duck roasting ovens and no sign of Western brands. Today it’s a major Chinese city with a skyline cluttered with skyscrapers, although the food apparently remains broadly traditional.
Today Dunlop is consulted widely on Chinese cuisine, leads culinary tours and is currently working on her latest book, with one foot planted in her Dalston kitchen and the other in China discovering new dishes.
“I’ve eaten some really weird things,” she says. “Goose intestines are a great delicacy. They’re cleaned and dipped into a spicy hotpot bubbling on the table. Then you dip them in sesame and garlic.
“In the West we don’t really appreciate eating things just for their texture. In China there are a lot of slithery, rubbery things that are real delicacies.”
That might be a step too far for some of us, but this beginner is definitely going to give it a bash.
“In my latest book, the recipes are chosen because they are simple,” says Dunlop. “You could go out to a Chinese supermarket on Kingsland Road and buy eight or ten jars that will set you up for making an awful lot of recipes. It’s just about taking that first leap, buying some ingredients you don’t have and building from there.”
The image of the British Left suffered an unfortunate blow in 2008 when the Google Streetview camera van drove past the offices of The Morning Star – the world’s only English-language socialist daily newspaper – the day after they had been gutted by a catastrophic fire.
“I think it’s been updated now,” says Morning Star editor Richard Bagley. “But for a while if you went to the address on Streetview you had the door hanging off, loads of smoke damage, the windows smashed and the company secretary with his head in his hands on the curb!”
The offices are in better shape today. Down the road from the Stour Space gallery in Hackney Wick, two smart red five-pointed stars sit above the door of a squat brick building, bookending the legend: William Rust House. Inside is a life-size brass relief of the eponymous one-time editor, done in jagged Vorticist style.
The newsroom holds a dozen state-of-the-art iMacs, a Palestinian flag and a pinup front-page from the paper commemorating the late trade union leader Bob Crow: “LOVED by the workers, FEARED by the bosses”. According to a whiteboard, James is ‘Worker of the Week’. Journalists drift in as the morning proceeds, a little sun-damaged from spending the previous day covering a march through central London by the People’s Assembly, an umbrella group for left-wing activists sponsored by the union Unite.
The paper has survived worse than fire in its time. When the USSR collapsed in the early nineties, it nearly took the Morning Star with it: since 1974 the Soviets had been funding the paper through buying thousands of copies a week and shipping them to Moscow.
The cash dried up not long after the Wall came down, causing a financial coronary at the Morning Star. Their building on Farringdon Road had to be sold and staff went unpaid. Bagley’s father, who started at the paper in the days when it was called the Daily Worker, left at this time because he needed to support his family. “Personally for him it was a very difficult time as well, seeing it all be torn apart,” recalls Bagley. “There was a lot of division, in-fighting, factional splits and acrimony. It was a very difficult period”.
Strikes by journalists in 1998 and 2009 again brought the Morning Star to the brink of closure. Pay was notoriously bad, the then-editor John Haylett writing in 2009 that “Every Morning Star staff member is told bluntly at interview: ‘The wages are crap. We work at the paper because we are politically committed to its aims’.”
Things have changed since then. Starting salaries are just over £20,000, with plans to increase in coming years. The staff wouldn’t give much away about their levels of political commitment, joking when asked that “some of us are more socialist than others”.
Funding comes from selling papers (cover price £1, circulation 15-20,000) and from fundraising from supporters. This includes jumble sales and second-hand book auctions, and, in September, a group of readers from Merseyside doing a sponsored cycle-ride from London to Paris. The paper is owned by the People’s Press Society, a cooperative with shares owned by readers.
Bagley points out that this is one reason why the Star’s editorial policy is different to other national dailies. The People’s Assembly march is a case in point. Unite paid for a free giveaway of the Morning Star at the demonstration, for whom it was front-page news. According to the organisers, 50,000 people marched through London on 21 June, though it was barely covered elsewhere in the press. Why?
“I think it possibly reflects the make-up of people in the media and what their outlook is personally,” is Bagley’s answer. “It’s also kind of like: ‘We don’t want there to be an alternative projected; that’s last century, left and right don’t exist.’ There’s a buy-in to this idea that this is it now; we’ve got this model, this is it, and nothing else is valid.”
For the same reason, Labour politicians who advocate nationalisation will be “gone for” by the newspapers. Says Bagley: “I mean the press is owned by oligarchs and pornographers. And the ‘hooray for the Blackshirts’ peeps at the Daily Mail”.
Since Bagley’s brought up the Mail’s Blackshirts connection, it seems fair to ask him about the support the Morning Star gave to Soviet repression in the twentieth century. The Morning Star backed the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, which saw tanks on the streets of Budapest and thousands killed.
The Morning Star masthead, with its red star insignia, would be illegal across much of eastern Europe (Estonia, say), much as Swastikas are forbidden in Germany. But this doesn’t much bother Bagley, who believes in the power of branding: “It’s just our logo. It’s not a Soviet star. And we’re not in Estonia anyway. I mean we’ve had that logo since 1966 – it’s our logo.”
A related legacy is a certain trigger-happiness with the word “fascist”. Bagley makes out the 2010 Conservative election campaign was “fascistic” for including “big slogans”.
With such loaded terms in play, politics can become a moral activity, rather than an intellectual one. Editorially, this moral preoccupation comes out in a tendency to commentate-as-you-report, with phrases such as “disgusting work capability assessment privateer Atos” used unflinchingly in the main news section. Bagley contends that this is simply doing more overtly and honestly what other papers do covertly. “We’re not ashamed to show who we are,” he says; which is why the front cover bears an explicit statement of the paper’s aims: “for peace and socialism”.
The paper’s stance follows the policy document of the Communist Party of Britain, Britain’s Road to Socialism, and the decision to do so is endorsed every year by shareholders in the People’s Press Society. Is this preferable to having to answer to the Barclay brothers or Rupert Murdoch? “I don’t get a phone call saying ‘this is your command today’,” Bagley clarifies.
“The broad thrust is that there needs to be an anti-monopoly alliance involving small shopkeepers, labour communities and trades unions, encountering the weight of the corporations and global pressures. That’s a comfortable place to be for a newspaper.”
What is striking is that, despite everything, it’s possible to feel extremely comfortable reading The Morning Star. Bagley’s view that we have a political monoculture is a valid one, and it’s worth giving serious time to his proposition that “under the guise of austerity, a lot of the advances made in the last hundred years are just being rolled back, because they’re not seen as required”. The typos and flagrant bias make you less angry than the stories it is actually reporting on do.
Wave Caps is the debut collection of poetry and short stories written by former Hackney Gazette journalist Miguel Cullen and designed by artist Alix Janta-Polczynski.
Here the avant-garde poet talks to Hackney Citizen about his Argentine roots and the breadth of his references – from the dust of Agrippa to black Nike golfing gloves – as well as the performance instinct of poetry
Spanish sounds and words fill Wave Caps. Could you tell me a bit about your background, and the influence of language on your work?
My father comes from Argentina, he moved over in the 1970s to work as a live-in Freudian psycho-analyst in a commune in Gospel Oak. My family out there are from the Provincia de Buenos Aires, and much of my writing is taken from my life out there, working when I was younger, during a difficult personal period for me. I was born and grown here in the UK, but studied Spanish at university and have been bilingual since birth. I read a lot in Spanish and talk a lot with my dad in Spanish, who loves reading.
I’m not native Spanish, but I think and write in Spanish, and in poetry, the natural voice speaks lines or fragments of lines to me very lucidly.
You used to write for the Hackney Gazette. How is it different writing poetry?
Yes I had a brief time at the Hackney Gazette, after longer work at other local London papers. I find that news writing is very much a discipline, but with poetry you have to be just as true to the facts of your reality as much as a news writer is true to the facts of the story.
What is your day job now?
I am arts editor for the Catholic Herald, in Moorgate. It’s very different from the rest of the free-lancing I do, which is for culture publications like Vice and Wonderland, and elsewhere, as well as being a full-time poet.
In ‘Gravediggaz – Niggamortis’ you write: “We are all sepulchred on cypress hills, tombed/ Like fingers in black Nike golfing gloves.” Could you try and describe juxtapostion between modern idiom and ancient civilisation in your work?
There’s a performance attitude to my writing, so when I mention people wearing one Nike black golfing glove, which was a trend at drum & bass raves, it’s part of my references, just as Agrippa returning to Rome in ashes, which I do later in the poem is, which I took from a Turner painting at the Tate Britain.
Equally the performance instinct in poetry, which may provoke harsher juxtapositions, is just as real an instinct as the description of ‘everyday truths’ that are prevalent in contemporary poetry. I’d definitely say I’m in the ‘avant-garde’ bracket of contemporary poetry, and this leads to images that are utterly opposite, to the point of being incomprehensible – I think I’m being led vaguely in that direction now.
The narrators of your poems often have a wistfulness for Argentina, but also a love of London. Does this reflect in some way your own displacement between the two?
Yes – indeed some of the love I have for reggae, drum & bass and hip hop comes from a love of minority cultures that I have through my lack of connection on a basic level with one of my mother countries.
My brother and I have always gravitated towards music that is exciting, vibrant, more kinetic, like hip hop, reggae, dancehall, reggaeton, all that, perhaps because we’re drawn to it through that. My last poem ‘Citoyen Des Deux Mondes’ talks of the “Talkers that step out of the hand” of the King, the talkers who were created by the way the British Empire took us. We’re Spanish, but the African and Asian diaspora still talk to me. As the sample in the book, the audio element, which is taken from Hackney then-pirate radio station Kool FM, goes to show. The book, designed, bound and with collages by Alix Janta-Polczynski, is published by Odilo Press, a poetry platform founded by the two. odilo-press.com/shop/wave-caps
‘Graduation’
The dad’s eyes were withered like fingerprints spurting out of control
His nose was like a hard-on through a stocking hat
His round frames were dodecahedrons clicking into place
Like the Terminator or the missing suspension of a psychotic
He looked like an Iranian living in High Street Ken
And his daughter, with skin like leaves
And lipstick like the small type of nipple-colour
We were graduating in the class of BA Hons 2014
We were my brother.
So now I understand, the place where the daughters of the rich
Middle-class people go. They go where we go.
It’s boring but it’s what I thought.
Being classless is being out of control of being out of control
About being like you,
Like you, and everything that is outside you that isn’t me and isn’t you
Doesn’t kill me yet, because today I’m with you.
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
