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.”
Why do you think FGM goes under the radar in the UK?
It’s down to our lax legislation: there are too many holes. British Kenyans are clinics’ biggest customers. In this country there is a race concern within the law – how do we differentiate between cosmetic surgery and FGM? Is it a black and white issue? In Kenya women are taking legal action, protecting themselves. Here, FGM can be a way of gaining control of culture, tradition and community. Western populations need to be involved in this conversation.
What does Little Stitches mean to you?
It has meant increasing amounts as time has gone on. I didn’t understand the physical reality and complexity of FGM before. The play’s humanising, flesh and blood relevance has moved [FGM] from being something one should be aware of to a civic responsibility. [With the play] I want to remove negativity and shame, and deal with this problem in a long-lasting way.
How did this sensitive subject matter first capture your imagination?
An African film, Moolaade, captured my attention. It brings the tensions of the practice to the surface, with ancient rites and a sense of the sacred, which is so alien to my culture. There’s so much acute pain in the physicality of FGM and I’m still informing myself of it.
How is it working trying to create such a powerful piece of theatre?
We’ve spent a lot of time building up openness and trust. It’s tough, but engaging and empathetic. I’m so happy with the casting, everyone’s so motivated by the aims of the project. The hardest part is the emotional process and reining in the impassioned discussions. We’re trying to keep it as concrete as possible, and to ground it when we veer off into discursive territory.
What are you bringing to the mix?
A stripped down production, in terms of movement and set. Characterisation is at the forefront, with detailed digging behind the media front line. Too much silence – even within families, between mothers and daughters – around FGM perpetuates the tradition, fermenting resentment in this unspoken traumatic experience. We’re trying to make this everyone’s business.
Little Stitches is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 29-30 August
WickED ways: Anna Freeman Bentley with her paintings at Hackney WickED 2014. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The first time I went to Hackney Wick was for a party in the autumn of 2009. It was late, it was dark and I was by myself. I felt anxious walking by the A12 among isolated warehouses to reach Fish Island. Back then the area was referred to as ‘the desolation on the edge of the East End’ for good reason.
But on reaching the party, I soon realised I had stepped into the life of a vibrant community of artists, who lived and worked in warehouses, and maximised their potential by creating, experimenting and collaborating with each other. Performances were raw and challenging.
This is a side of Hackney Wick many visitors at this month’s Hackney WickED festival might never have seen or heard about. The weather was glorious with uninterrupted sunshine and the vibe on the streets very relaxed. Parents showed up with their kids, people walked their well-behaved dogs while revellers tucked into offerings from innumerable street food vendors.
Of course, the festival is all about art, and visitors embraced this by visiting artists’ open studios. Heading for a beer at the Crate Brewery in The White Building, you might have come across Gretchen Andrew, wearing a light blue Google Glass. The contemporary painter was showcasing work she has been producing during her three months’ residency at Space Studios using Google Glass to “record the creative process and translate the physicality of it to my viewers”.
It was curious to see how many artists were influenced by their family trades. Jewellery maker Clarice Price Thomas’ father was a clockmaker. As a child, she looked on with wonder at clocks’ mechanisms and is now combining traditional clock making techniques and machinery in an innovative take on jewellery design.
Anna Freeman Bentley’s dad was a civil engineer. “I grew up looking at structures and building sites” she explains, which feeds into her paintings. She is currently looking at Hackney, how the area is changing and the impact of gentrification on the physical environment.
Over two days of exploring the festival, I was surprised to see that beyond official studios, few alternative work/live spaces opened their doors to the public. In almost a voyeuristic way, I missed stepping inside artists’ living rooms and bedrooms and being able to confront the honesty of their art within the intimate context of a home setting.
It meant that the festival lacked the thought-provoking, authentic experiences that I, for one, had come for. At the same time, people were willing to shell out £25 on the door of a warehouse to get into the Tuckshop Summer Carnival on Wallis Road.
As, privately, artists complained to me of having to leave their studios next year due to regeneration plans, I gained a sense of how sanitised the Wick could become.
Grime is of the essence at alternative opera festival
A fraudulent psychic, persecution in Mussolini’s Italy and a shepherd’s marriage to a semi-divine nymph are some of the subjects set to feature at this month’s festival of alternative opera Grimeborn, at the Arcola Theatre.
Ten productions, including new operas and small-scale re-workings of established favourites by Monteverdi, Massenet and Handel, are to be staged throughout the month in the Arcola’s two main studios.
Eye-catching operas include Women Box, a triple bill of musical theatre and opera about women’s boxing and the rise of the female conductor; a new translation of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea; and The Medium, an invitation to a séance with dark voices, magic tricks and flying spirits.
Now in its eighth year, Grimeborn aims to turn the stuffiness of the English summer opera season on its head, with its name a playful reference to the Glyndebourne opera festival.
The Arcola’s Artistic Director, Mehmet Ergen, calls Grimeborn “a breeding ground for original voices and some of the stars of tomorrow”.
The festival prepares vocalists for future roles by giving them the chance to perform in a more intimate setting and aims to attract new audiences to opera by adopting a bold, risk taking approach and by selling tickets at affordable prices.
Grimeborn 2014 is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 7 September
Secret Cinema Presents Back to the Future. Photograph: Al Overdrive
Secret Cinema’s Back to the Future has been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons, but now that the production is underway, was it worth the wait?
Fifty quid is a lot to pay for an evening’s entertainment, but when I heard Secret Cinema was to stage my partner’s favourite film ever I swallowed my reservations and shelled out. And after the debacle of both suspending ticket sales after a booking system crash (that’s a lunch hour I’ll never get back), not to mention a spate of cancelled shows, Secret Cinema’s homage to Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 classic has finally gone ahead. And the good news is: it’s great.
Arriving at the not-so-secret-location beside the Olympic Stadium in full fancy dress, the ‘residents’ of Hill Valley are treated to a lovingly-recreated film set replete with 1950s-era stores, a high-school dance in full swing, and dozens of actors manfully attempting American accents with varying degrees of success.
Entering into the spirit of things, we wished away the looming carbuncle that is the ArcelorMittal Orbit and danced around with strangers as 1950s cars circled the venue. The queues for food were eye-watering (a 45 minute wait for a so-so £6 hot-dog was a special kind of hell) but the lines for the rides move more quickly as the evening wore on. Indeed, the best view of the production is to be had from the top of the Ferris wheel, where the scale of the undertaking becomes clear.
My advice? If you love Back To The Future, and who on earth doesn’t, you’ll love this. The usual East London gripes apply – overpriced drinks and hipsters abound – and the success of the show is almost certainly dependent on good weather. Nor can you move without an opportunity to spend more of your cash – on haircuts, clothes, records, comics and much else. But if you park your gripes at the door (along with your mobile phone) and make sure to turn up on time, there’s plenty to justify the ticket-price and then some.
A live band introduced the film, which the audience good-naturedly quoted along with as actors played out scenes. Fairground rides, food, drink, shops – the event is billed as an ‘immersive experience’ which is a pretentious way of describing what it is: a party for the fans. And it works, not least because at the heart of the whole evening is a terrific film, one everyone’s seen countless times, a big slice of eighties nostalgia repackaged and sold back to us with cream on top. When the credits rolled, we danced the night away, before we made like a tree – and got outta there.
Break the chain: food producers meet shoppers at Number 90 in Hackney Wick
I recently went to Hackney Wick and ate handfuls of flowers from Sussex, buttery cheese made in Tottenham and a delicious lamb stew cooked by people who didn’t know what ingredients they had to work with until hours earlier.
A Dutch fruit farmer from an orchard in Sussex was walking around stuffing nasturtiums into people’s mouths. There was music, there were dogs, there were kids. There was art on the walls and people sipping drinks out by the water.
In short, it was glorious. But where was I? It was the massively over-subscribed and hugely successful launch of Hackney Wick Food Assembly, and I can’t wait to go back.
What is a Food Assembly? First launched in France, there are now chapters all around the world. Members simply browse through a list of local produce online, pre-order and pay for what they want. Then they come along to the assembly every other week to pick up their groceries and have a chat.
The idea behind Food Assemblies is to re-connect people with food and the people that produce it, as well as their own communities. It’s about giving a fairer deal to farmers, bee keepers, fish mongers and bakers.
It’s about realising Sainsbury’s and Tesco don’t get to control the way we shop.
The emphasis is on local, seasonal food with none of the produce allowed to travel more than 150 miles. The idea is that as more local assemblies start flourishing, we won’t need to keep schlepping food around the world in lorries and boats and planes.
It’s a great example of e-commerce technology being leveraged to boost local economies and help loosen the chokehold big supermarket chains have on the food we eat.
The first to go live in the UK, Hackney Wick assembly is based at Number 90, and producers include the Better Health Bakery in Haggerston, Lockie’s Shellfish in Greenwich, Wilde’s Cheese, Dalston Cola, Brambletye Fruit Farm, Marsh Produce, Brockman’s Farm Produce and the London Jam Factory.
Massimo Zepetelli, Hackney Wick’s assembly leader, says the idea is to give not just food producers a spotlight, but also local artists. Every week there will be a different guest chef in the kitchen, different DJs on the desks and work from artists on the walls.
“I don’t think anyone anticipated 500-plus people to walk through the doors on a Tuesday evening, but this all shows a clear demand for locally sourced food in Hackney Wick and this is the biggest aim of the Food Assembly.”
It’s surely a telling sign that even as all the last crumbs of taster foods were eaten the place was still buzzing with chatter and people were still spilling out on to the deck. This isn’t just about re-connecting with local producers, it’s about re-connecting with our communities.
This is just one of three assemblies opening in London this summer and I’ll raise a toast to many more following in their wake.
An 89-year-old with Parkinson’s won a prize last month for his debut short film, Friend or Foe?, exploring what ‘control’ means to someone living with the condition.
David Rose, from Hackney, won a Mervyn Peake Award for the two-minute film, starring a ‘talking eye’ in which he can been seen showing off his dance moves to a Brazilian soundtrack.
“My body won’t always respond to my intentions. My feet are the worse, they simply turn a blind eye,” explains Rose in a voiceover at the start of the film while a close-up of his eye, involuntarily opening and shutting, ‘speaks’ the words.
The Mervyn Peake Awards are run by the charity Parkinson’s UK and celebrate the talents of people with Parkinson’s.
“They said make a film that lasts no more than two minutes, and the only other thing they said was that the theme is control,” says Rose.
“To me that meant that although there’s no cure for parkinson’s we can at least try to control things. There are two ways particularly: pills, taken on time every day and lots of them. The other thing is keeping well-exercised. I tried to make a film that illustrated those two things.”
The main section of the film sees Rose look deadpan into the camera while dancing to a song by the Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso.
“I was going to do all sorts of things like get my son playing his saxophone, but then I did the dance and people seemed to like that,” he says.
Rose, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 14 years ago, used to work as a producer and director at the BBC and Channel 4, although a filmmaking credit has until now always eluded him.
He explains that he arrived at the title Friend or Foe? by approaching people and asking them what the word ‘control’ meant to them.
“They said things like prison, regulations, no smoking – things that were rather limiting. But I thought there are also sides to control that are beneficial. So I’m saying ‘is control a friend to us or a foe?’ At the end I knock out the word foe and say it’s a friend. To have some sense of control is friendly. It’s a friendly interpretation of the word.”
Whether it be post-it notes, flyers for events that have been and gone, or the random stuff that accumulates in bags and pockets, we all have some experience of ‘kipple’.
Science-fiction author Philip K. Dick coined the word in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later filmed as Blade Runner), defining it as the everyday detritus most people can’t help but surround themselves with.
Heedless of the author’s warning that “the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization”, photographer Dan Tobin Smith has decided to completely cover his Shoreditch studio with thousands of objects for an installation.
Public donations for The First Law of Kipple, which opens next month for the London Design Festival, have so far included a pink, plastic nodding poodle, roller blades, fake grapes, diving flippers and a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.
“I first read about ‘kipple’ when I was 14 and it always stuck with me,” says Tobin Smith. “It can mean clutter but it also has a psychological aspect because of the way waste or clutter affects you.”
Objects are to be arranged so that the floor becomes a sea of graduated colour. Visitors can then navigate through the artwork via pathways laid out amongst the objects.
“One of the quotes I really love from the book is that no one can win against kipple except temporarily and in one spot. I like the idea of temporarily trying to organise and categorise kipple using colour.”
Tobin Smith describes himself as a science buff with a particular interest in the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, commonly understood as a measure of disorder.
Kipple has been described as domestic entropy, the physical manifestation of misguided energy in human life. The installation aims to question the boundaries between beauty and usefulness and address the epic proportions of waste that humans create.
“It inspired me to start thinking about design and products – we make so much stuff but we’ve got limited resources.
“I read a quote from someone saying ‘why do we have to design new chairs when there are a lot of chairs that already exist.
“Often it’s bound up with taste – we think because it’s beautiful it’s okay. But if it’s useless, it’s useless.”
Selva Rasalingam and Nabil Elouahabi in The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes. Photograph: Judy Goldhill
Seeking asylum in Britain is no laughing matter, but journalist and screenwriter Rashid Razaq’s new black comedy is perhaps an exception, using well-observed wit to take aim at the cultural superiority and political insensitivity of the West during the Iraq war.
Perhaps inspired by Fuentes himself – famous for his rotating narrators – Nicolas Kent’s direction sees the play, based on a short story by Iraqi author Hassan Blasim, jump giddily forwards and backwards in time between 2006 and 2011. Projected politicians appear on the walls but their confusing speeches, presumably intentionally, provide little context.
Saleem Husain, played movingly by former EastEnders actor Nabil Elouahabi, is a street sweeper, used to cleaning the carnage left by car bombs on the streets of Baghdad with his colleague Khaled (Selva Rasalingham). Hiding in a van full of frozen peas he makes his way over the border to England – a reassuringly “godless” place. Saleem turns over a new leaf and adopts the name of famous Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes after seeing a handsome picture in a magazine.
While the videos of Bush’s and Blair’s garbled justifications of invasion draw grim smirks of derision, Carlos’ new persona provides Fawlty Towers-style gags. We meet him reeling off the eight wives of Henry VIII he has learnt for his citizenship test while on a dirty weekend with posh totty Lydia (Caroline Langrishe).
The amenable Carlos tries to convince UKBA he is an atheist, fleeing persecution from God, only to be told: “God is not on our recognised list of dictators, Mr Husain” by a dour Scottish case worker, played by the talented Sara Bahadori.
But Carlos’ fresh new start soon begins to lose its shine. No matter how much inane trivia Carlos ingests, the memories of his homeland are as hard to erase as his stubborn Arabic accent. Carlos’ composite identity – a suave Mexican with the demeanour of an English gent – gradually erodes, leaving a Sunni Iraqi tormented by his nightmares.
Rashid Razaq’s play shows us not only the psychological damage suffered by those forced to seek asylum, but reminds us that the complexities of sectarian conflict are not reducible to tick boxes on an immigration form.
This somewhat enigmatically entitled collection of short stories by Jeremy Worman follows the Hackney-based author’s debut collection Fragmented in 2011.
The stories are divided into two sections, ‘Places’ and ‘London’, with some set in far flung destinations such as Russia, as well as in Surrey and East London. ‘Christmas Games’, an insight into a mother and son relationship, demonstrates the clarity of Worman’s prose style. But the story is punctuated by disturbing moments, such as when the son plays with Scalextric and dreams of crashing his mother’s new ‘friend’ on “the worst corner at Silverstone”. Then, after he feels his thigh being squeezed, he reveals: “I got an erection.”
These characters return in ‘After Father’s Funeral’. The mother and son are now at the father’s funeral.These are characters that “need love”. Worman’s descriptions often seem superfluous in other stories – “gloomy” rooms, voices “like grenades” – but here he writes with a sobriety that illuminates the character’s state of mind.
The image of the father’s coffin, as it “moved easily into the flames” is followed by the downing of a pint. The movement of the coffin and the act of drinking show a flushing out of memory, a sort of anaesthetised look at life.
‘Old and New’ takes place on the 38 bus route, along Balls Pond Road. As vivid a picture as Worman paints of the area, the story struggles to delve deeper than surface description, and some of the dialogue falls flat, such as the old woman’s cry of “young-uns!” and a nurse’s exclamation that there is “no racism in me”. It feels too obvious and lacking in anything particularly new.
The collection works better in stories such as ‘Stairs at 29 Mehetabel Road’ or ‘Harry Slocombe’s East End Return’ with the former a touching exploration of place and history as layers of paint are stripped off an 1863 Hackney terraced house with hidden histories revealing themselves from underneath the paint.
Despite the variable quality of the stories, it is excellent writing overall. One only wishes Worman had narrowed his focus on London as when he does the collection really comes alive.
Swimming with Diana Dors & Other Stories is published by Cinnamon Press. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9781909077225
