LeftLion Magazine - December 2012 - Issue 50

#50 DEC 12 / JAN 13

editorial contents 06

04

Ducks and Youths,

LeftLion Magazine Issue 50 Dec 2012 - Jan 2013

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20

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Kagoule Nottingham’s musical anoraks, in conversation

26

Craft Werks Big two-page special on some of Nottingham’s most crafty

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A Little Light Reading The Booker-shortlisted Alison Moore

28

The Unoriginal And Best The Damn You! Covers Party

LeftEyeOn People and things of Nottingham, caught on camera

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Nathan Miller The mother hen of Hatch

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Nusic Box Your Notts new music tip sheet

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We Are The 25% The Creative Quarter, explained

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41

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Andrew Wells Light-painting photographic trickery a speciality

Music Reviews Another twelve bands and artists get tabholed

Stop! Gamma Time!

Kappa Gamma: NottsMusic’s next big thing?

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42

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Feeding Time At The Zoo Coming this month: allNotts internet TV

Write Lion Poetry, reviews, and Katie Half-Price gets her hands on 50 Shades of Grey

The Bois Done Good Nottingham Ball Bois: your gayfriendly neighbourhood football team

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Social Artworking Reactor: reality gone wrong

45

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Shane Meadows The cover star of our first issue, revisited

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Noshingham Delilah, Desi Downtown and Turtle Bay get nibbled at

Clumber Street Your chance to have a duddoo tin as skill as ours

46

The Arthole Plus Notts Trumps, LL Abroad and Rocky Horrorscopes

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May Contain Notts The news diary that leaves its Christmas lights up all year round and doesn’t give a toss what the neighbours think

Part of me wants to make a big deal about it, and part of me would rather not, seeing as it’ll be our 10th anniversary next year, but sod it: welcome to the 50th issue of LeftLion. I could start going off about how we’ve kept ourselves afloat for over eight years, in a climate that believes that people are too thick to read magazines any more. I could mention how we constantly get the job done with no grants, no brought-to-you-by corporate sponsorship rammel, no nothing bar the advertising revenue we generate and goodwill from the people of this city. I’ll not lie to you; the people who put this mag together work like bleeders to make it as good as it is, and the people who contribute to it go completely above and beyond the call of duty. If you know one of them, thank them from me, and maybe even cop off with them.

This issue, we go over old ground (with a chat with Shane Meadows, who posed for the cover of the first issue, even though we stuffed half of them into brown paper bags and no, don’t ask me why). We acknowledge the time of the season (with our tuffeh tin and a showcase of some of the best local craftmakers), and even offer you the chance to own something from the LeftLion loom, in the shape of the centrespread many of you seemed to like last issue on a tea towel. Get over to page 40 now if you want Santa to bring you one.

Most intriguingly, we’ve pinned down the Creative Quarter to find out how they intend to lob out the millions of paahnds they’ve been given to de-mank The Lace Market and - finally! - give us a part of town that isn’t Chainy Hell or blasted by a Jaegerbomb. And we have to say, we’re very encouraged by what we’ve heard so far. When we interviewed Alan Sillitoe back in the day, we asked him what he thought Nottingham should be now it wasn’t a factory town. He said; “If you leave it to the people, they’ll give you the identity. The people of Nottingham are so positive in a sense, that when the factories go, a new identity will be brewed out of the people. You can try to give a place an identity, but it’s the people who live there that make it happen.” To which I, and the rest us here at LeftLionLand, can only say; “A-bleddy-men.”

Word To Your Nana, Al Needham nishlord@leftlion.co.uk

LeftLion Extended

credits Editor-in-chief Jared Wilson (jared@leftlion.co.uk)

Poetry Editor Aly Stoneman (poetry@leftlion.co.uk)

Editor Al Needham (nishlord@leftlion.co.uk)

Screen Editor Alison Emm (ali@leftlion.co.uk)

Third Wise Man Alan Gilby (alan@leftlion.co.uk)

Sport Editor Scott Oliver (scott@leftlion.co.uk)

Marketing and Sales Manager Ben Hacking (ben@leftlion.co.uk)

Stage Editor Adrian Bhagat (adrian@leftlion.co.uk)

Designer Becca Hibberd (becca@leftlion.co.uk)

Cover Rikki Marr

Art Editor Tom Norton (tom@leftlion.co.uk)

Photographers David Baird Ashley Bird Samantha Gallagher Tom Maddick Carla Mundy Rusty Sheriff Scott Wilson Alfie Wright

Community Editor Penny Reeve (penny@leftlion.co.uk) Literature Editor James Walker (books@leftlion.co.uk) Music Editor Paul Klotschkow (paulk@leftlion.co.uk)

Contributors Mike Atkinson Katrine Brosnan Wayne Burrows Ashley Clivery Ash Dilks Ian Douglas Neil Fulwood Rebecca Gove-Humphries Tom Hadfield Katie Half-Price Pippa Hennessy Katy Lewis Hood Andrew Kells Beane Noodler Joe Sharratt Graeme Smith Tim Sorrell Andrew Trendell Illustrators Bill Edwards Michelle Haywood James Huyton Steve Larder Rob White

Photography Editor Dominic Henry (dom@leftlion.co.uk) facebook.com/leftlion

twitter.com/leftlion

youtube.com/leftliontv

This magazine has an estimated readership of 40,000 people and is distributed to over 350 venues across the city of Nottingham. If your venue isn’t one of them, or you’d like to advertise, contact Ben on 07984 275453, email ben@leftlion.co.uk or visit leftlion.co.uk/advertise.

We’ve got an agency, don’t you know Introducing the new wing to the multi-faceted LeftLion empire; a design and marketing agency made up of the people who put this very mag together and mek it look so fancy. Formed when a group of us realised that after nine-odd years of commissioning some of the best creative talent around, we could actually do a serious job in this capacity for local businesses as well. LeftLion Extended can put you in touch with the writers, designers, photographers, illustrators and administrators behind the award-winning LeftLion, work together on your campaigns, and - most importantly - not skank you. Our marketing and sales manager is the man to talk to if you’re interested: ben@leftlion.co.uk leftlion.co.uk/extended

Noshingham

The LL food blog From the moment we launched Noshingham, our regular restaurant/kebab shop review page, we knew that we couldn’t go two whole months without writing about snap so we’ve launched our own standalone blog devoted to ramming things into your gob in Nottingham.

It’s maintained by regular Noshingham reviewer Ash Dilks (you can read his take on the Desi Downtown experience on page 45), who not only knows his way around the eateries of the ‘Ham, but he also knows that a stove can be so much more than a massive, immobile fag lighter.

Reviews, recipes, expert advice...it’s all on the menu, ready to be perused right now. noshingham.co.uk leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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MAY CONTAIN NOTTS

with Nottingham’s ‘Mr. Sex’, Al Needham

October - November 2012 1 October

It comes to May Contain Notts’ attention that its old school - Top Valley Comprehensive - has gone and changed its name to Top Valley Academy, which makes it sound like one o’ them sucky reality game shows they have on to fill time before the Lottery results. “Kayden, you were seen coming out of a Waitrose with some vegetables that weren’t in a tin. You are expelled from Top Valley Academy.” I don’t know why they didn’t just call it ‘Top Valley Unicorn Riding Centre of Excellence’, or ‘Cambridge University of Top Valley.’ Or, seeing as rival place up the road is actually called Big Wood School, why not ‘Massive Tits Comprehensive’?

2 October And why stop there? Let’s rename Nottingham ‘Mega City 69’, ‘Sex Island’ or ‘BAAMMM!’

3 October Goose Fair is the usual multi-vehicle pile-up involving the lighting rig of the 1979 Tubeway Army tour, the Viccy Centre food court circa 1983, and an abattoir of plush animals. Going nowadays is like trying to mash your bits over the bra section of a Littlewoods catalogue; something you do every now and then, just to remind yourself that it was a really important thing to do once upon a time. Personal highlights: 1. The posh farmer who had built an entire wall out of bin liners full of pork scratchings that he was offering for £100 each if you bartered him down, and 2. the woman on the fringes selling random helium balloons for a pound each, away from the five-pound-achuck Peppa Pig and My Little Pony ones, which had things like ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY NAN’ and ‘40 AND UP FOR IT’ printed on them. If I had been with an illiterate child or girlfriend, I would have had at least three off her.

4 October

A 64-year-old man gets done after chucking a drink over a 15-month-old baby in a pub in Arnold. The youth obviously chelped him, or they must have had a row over whose turn it was to pull the fags out.

12 October In one of those surveys that seem to pop up every month for no other reason than to remind us how horrible we are compared to Hull, Nottingham is named the third most congested city in the UK. Which makes us sound like we’ve got a really bad chest, and are about to cough up a gob of phlegm the size of Mansfield.

15 October

The Christmas lights already start to go up in town. Manky Santa lights going up a month before it means anything... massive pointless England flag every other summer... the Council House is slowly turning into that mentalist neighbour that mams warn their kids to cross the street for.

They’ll be having 3,000 cats running about next, mark my words.

18 October The council finally recognise that the revamped Trinity Square - TK Maxx in the front, 1970s East Germany in the back - is about as attractive as Ayatollah Khomeini’s come-face and needs a revamp. Why don’t they go back to how it was, when it was all flattened? It used to be great to come out of Viccy Centre and see this massive expanse of space, unencumbered by chainy rammel.

21 October

A local number one in the UK charts. Good old Jake Bugg, showing the rest of the country there’s more to Nottingham than crime and social deprivation with songs like Clifton’s A Hole, I Can’t Wait To Get Out Of This Dump and I Saw Someone Stab Someone Else, Because That’s What People Do In Notts.

22 October The cinema in the Cornerhouse cocks up its half-term screening of Madagascar 3 when it accidentally shows Paranormal Activity

4. According to the Post, children ‘ran out screaming’, but are now probably bragging to their mates that they got into a 15-rated film, rather like the kids at our school who had bumfluff ‘taches who claimed to have seen The Warriors at the ABC and then got served at Yates.

27 October Pubs in town announce that they are to ban anyone dressing up as Zombie Jimmy Savile on Halloween night, or at least they say they will when goaded into it by a Post reporter. But how would they be able to tell the difference between someone who has come into town dressed up as a decomposing corpse in a tracksuit, and someone from Bulwell who just wants a pint?

30 October Plans are announced for another go at reclaiming Robin Hood for the Motherland. This time, it’s actually in Sherwood Forest, will cost £13m, and - if the plans are anything to go by - will be a bit better than Tales Of Robin Hood, which mainly consisted of knackered-up robots who stank of wee. One problem; the name.

Discover Robin Hood sounds like the poor sod has been found under a pile of leaves, with his hand round an empty bottle of Lambrini and his trousers gone.

6 November

A nana in Bingham gets attacked by a ferret as she rides her mobility scooter to the shops.

8 November Someone on Fletcher Gate goes batchy and chucks things out of a first floor window onto police cars below, including what a bystander described as ‘big silver barrels’. A crowd gathers to watch, presumably in the hope that Mario would suddenly turn up with a big hammer, but sadly GameCity finished a week previously.

leftlion.co.uk/issue50

19 November Plans are announced to kill another pub near the train station - The Bentinck - and replace it with a Starbucks, in the latest attempt to turn Nottingham into every other city on this rammel little island, but with the same shops moved about a bit.

23 November After the nana-attacking ferret, Bingham has another vermin problem when someone leaves a cross wrapped in ham on a Muslim family’s doorstep.

24 November A convicted sex offender from Sneinton gets sent back to the Naughty Step after being caught in town trying to film up ladies’ skirts with his mobile. Sucky bell-end; all he had to do was go into town on a Friday night and pretend to be homeless.

He’d have hen slappers wearing belts for dresses practically stepping over him as he was laying flat on his back.

25 November What’s half man, half horse, and works in a pound shop?

26 November

The Broadmarsh Centaur. leftlion.co.uk/mcn

Local adverts ripped from the pages of history, by Wayne Burrows

Giftabulous – That’s Pearsons (1968) Yes, it’s a folksy drawing of Father Christmas traipsing daintily across white paper. OK, it might look a bit like Santa’s making off with rather than delivering that gift, but at least he isn’t whacking you repeatedly round the head with a job-lot of celebrities and a budget that Cecil B. DeMille would think excessive for a full-size replica of Ancient Babylon, let alone a sixty-second commercial for a few crackers and turkeys.

Some background: in 1968, Victoria Centre and Broadmarsh were still gleams in some developer’s eye, leaving the Square to a triumvirate of traditional department stores founded back when Victoria was still on the throne.

Jessop’s, established by the marvellously-named William Daft and Zebedee Jessop, became part of the John Lewis group as early as 1933 but kept the Jessop’s name until 2001, while Griffin & Spalding are now Debenhams, though you could be forgiven for thinking they were really a made up firm in a Harry Potter book.

Then there was Pearson’s, standing where Habitat used to be, the only one of the three not still trading in any form.

After a fire in the mid-eighties they closed for good, but it’s the loss of subtlety that grates as their low-key kind move on. Between now and January lies an inferno of tinsel, bad knitwear, police overtime, Slade, reindeer patterned socks and at least one EastEnders special to plumb the depths of abject human despair for your entertainment. A tiny Santa tip-toeing across a white page never stood a chance.

“Yes, well. Awful. Everyone goes on now about how eccentric he looked, but at the time people thought nothing of it. He had to be different to be noticed. Look at all the stars there have been - they’re all different, and they’re all obsessed with themselves, aren’t they? Look at Shipman - everyone thought he was a marvellous doctor, until it came out that he killed all those people. As for the BBC, according to a woman who came into the shop, they’ve got more films than the whole of the world put together, so they could have put anything on instead of a tribute show. Did we ever write to Jim’ll Fix It? No. We had no dreams as children.”

4

Plans are floated for a £26m revamp of Nottingham Castle after a public consultation. Sod the public, listen to me, because I’m going to say this one more time and then hold my peace forever; you clad it with plastic brickwork and turn it into a massive Castle Grayskull playset, have a big He-Man figure in one of the turrets, and let kids fire polystyrene boulders at a big Skeletor on the Council House balcony.

Advertising Sectioned

Jimmy Savile!

NOTTS MOST OPINIONATED GROCERS ON...

14 November

The Creative Quarter!

“What’s that? Oh, that sounds good. We really like The Lace Market - they’ve had some very nice bars and restaurants there.

It’s the kind of place where the older people go. And St Mary’s Church is marvellous.”

Barack Obama wins the US election!

“We were very pleased. Romney was much too right-wing. Even our Conservative lot wanted Obama to win, and it’s a good thing because he’s a decent chap. But he has aged a lot, hasn’t he?

He was a young man when he started, and he’ll end up bald.

In 2016, we want Bill Clinton back, not his wife. The best one they ever had, because he could play the saxophone, he had something about him, and he knew about world affairs.”

Christmas!

“We’re hoping to sell a lot of trees, obviously, and then a nice rest after that. We’ll be taking the staff to Merchants, but not until January. And we’d just like to say; Christmas is not just about our trees or cranberries or turkeys, but it’s about the Lord.

We are celebrating Jesus’s birthday, a new life, a new start, so let’s be nice to each other. And we’d like everyone to read Dogtooth Chronicals by Kirsty Fox in 2013. A marvellous book.”

Photographers with mild insomnia and an eye for the unusual will have the unique opportunity to play their part in the Saturday Night and Sunday Morning exhibition by leaving the cosy confines of their beds to create an on-line photographic portrait of Nottingham at 4am.

Using Flickr, the 4am Project has been inspiring photographers from around the world, resulting in a global on-line community whose photos illustrate just how amazing our cities can be at night.

Led by photographer Karen Strunks, the project comes to Nottingham at 4am on Sunday 25 November. She invites photographers to join her in the city centre to capture the strange and wonderful life on the streets while most of us are asleep.

Image: St. Ann’s © Roger Mayne

For project information and updates, and to receive your invitation to join us, please visit www.4amproject.org and @4amproject twitter

17 November 2012 — 10 February 2013 Mon – Sat 11am-5pm, Sun 12noon-4pm. Admission Free Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD Box Office: 0115 846 7777 www.lakeside.org.uk

LeftEyeOn

Notts, as seen through the lenses of the local photo talent over the last two months...

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leftlion.co.uk/issue50

Chippy Cobra

Special Moo

Carl Froch, after taking three rounds to put away Yusaf Mark at the Arena Dom Henry / domhenry.com / facebook.com/ CapitalFMArena

Artificial rural meets all-too-real urban, Hockley Alfie Wright / Flickr: alfie2902

The Fog on the Soar Is All Yours, All Yours Autumnal morning mists and frost over the lowlands near the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station Scott Wilson / Flickr: wilsonaxpe

PC-poor Turnout This polling station had only seen nineteen voters by 4.30pm on the day of the Police Crime Commissioner election Tom Maddick / tommaddick.co.uk

leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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‘The funniest show  on the planet.’

One Daily Mail

RUFUS HOUND as Francis Henshall

Man, Two

Guvnors

By Richard Bean based on The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, with songs by Grant Olding

      

Tue 29 jan – sat 2 feb 0115 989 5555 | trch.co.uk Photo by Hugo Glendinning

Daily Telegraph

Financial Times

Guardian

Heat

Independent

Mail on Sunday

The Times

Sunday TImes

WE ARE THE 25% The Creative Quarter: another regeneration project, an attempt to catapult Nottingham into the big league of British cities, a massive hand-out for the city’s arty sorts, or the last attempt to drag the city out of its chain-shop morass? Toby Reid, Director of BioCity and Creative Quarter committee member, reveals the people who will be tasked with shaping the destiny of The Lace Market over the next decade - and don’t look now, but one of them could be you... interview: Al Needham illustration: Rob White There’s been a lot of talk about the Creative Quarter, but what is it, exactly?

It stems from an initiative called the City Deal; eight Core Cities, including Nottingham, were invited to give a pitch for funding and resources from central government. The people at the City Council responsible for the pitch had to think about what to do with the money, and what was needed in the city, be it infrastructure, tourism, a new shopping centre, whatever.

Fortunately, BioCity were consulted in the decision-making process, and I saw an opportunity to implement some of the lessons we’ve learned about bringing high-tech, high-growth industries to Nottingham. These companies are vital because they provide good jobs, bring good money with them, and are sticky - unlike call centres, they don’t uproot and move away after a couple of years.

So where does the creative industry fit in?

The idea has been inspired by the success of cities like Austin, Texas and Boulder - places that have big, high-tech scenes that have a lot of venture capital going into them, but are complemented by an arts, lifestyle and social scene that has real artistic and intellectual credibility. That’s what attracts your gaming developers, scientists and graduates to a city.

They don’t want to work on an industrial estate; they want to be somewhere that has interesting gigs on a Tuesday night, a stand-up club on a Wednesday, a thriving arts scene, and all that stuff. We want The Lace Market to be that place. We already know what Nottingham is doing creatively; here is an opportunity to develop both industries hand-in-hand. While the bulk of the money will be going to the tech side of things, there will be a sum put aside to encourage local creative industry.

How will it work?

The company will have a team consisting of private sector people with creative connections, and people will be able to make bids to them for projects. So if you wanted to put on an annual music festival, or set up a fringe event for GameCity, or a networking session for techies, you can come to the Creative Quarter and say, “This is what I’m planning to do, this is how I plan to sustain it, and this is what I need.” Whatever that is help with licensing from the Council, apprentices to help build some stalls - we‘ll try to facilitate all that. While you provide the creativity and enthusiasm to drive it.

So it’s not going to be: “I want to do this, lob us a few grand...”

We’re not going to hand out money to companies who are struggling, just because they work in the creative sector. We want to support people who have bright ideas that are going to be financially sustainable in the long run and that can further the stated objectives of the Creative Quarter. Don’t say, “I need ten grand for this”. Say, “I want to launch a project, it’ll be great for the Creative Quarter, it’ll do X, Y and Z - would you like to help make it with me?”

So what if someone said; “I’ve got this brilliant idea for something that could happen in the Creative Quarter, and people would love it, but I can’t see any way of turning a pound off it - can you advise or help me?”

If it had sufficient merit, we might say; “OK, we’ll help you get it going for a year or two and help you find sponsorship” or

“We can help, and we’ll take a cut when you get off the ground”. We will be open to suggestions.

But it’s not going to be an Arts Council-type deal.

Exactly. We want an enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit right across the board. I think everyone needs to be like that; when we start to run business support events and marketing masterclasses, I want the guy from the dry cleaners to be there alongside the tech companies.

So if someone had a great idea for a project that would get people in Top Valley engaging with local artists, the Creative Quarter wouldn’t be interested?

Actually, we might say: “OK, go and do your project, and come back when it’s done and we’ll help you exhibit it in the Creative Quarter.”

Will there be a weighting of certain disciplines over others?

Everything will be on a case-by-case basis. If it can help put us on the map, if it can raise our profile nationally as a creative place to live and work, and if it can improve the environment, then we’ll give it consideration.

Obviously, a regeneration of The Lace Market is going to have a knock-on effect.

Totally. We need a nightlife that will attract people to come here and stay here. And you can’t do that with just ‘three shots for £1.50’ - it has to be event-driven, it has to be interesting, and it can’t be just a weekend thing.

Nottingham’s been notoriously bad at celebrating itself since time immemorial...

There are too many small pockets of excellence happening in Nottingham without an umbrella brand that pulls them all together to achieve the recognition they deserve. The Creative Quarter can be that. Creatively, things are really bubbling up in Nottingham to the extent that it can’t be ignored; I’ve met solicitors in their fifties talking about Dog Is Dead, for example.

Similarly, there are some amazing companies in Nottingham who are creating things that have been taken up around the world, but if you talk to anyone in Nottingham about them, they have no idea. We’re doing a terrible job of promoting ourselves. That needs to change.

So is the Creative Quarter going to be more than just another change of clothes for the city?

I hope so, because this time it’ll be aimed at sectors of industry that generate long-term wealth, that not only bind new people to the city but encourage kids to get into those industries. The exciting thing for me is that we’re not lying about anything when we say that Nottingham is a centre of creativity.

For years, Nottingham has been a place that you have to leave to have a creative career. Will that ever change?

That’s a definite goal. The idea that you can actually do things outside London is now taking root; for example, people are now seeing Salford as a potential destination to pursue a career in media. I think we can do the same thing here, especially when you factor in cost of living and quality of life compared to the south-east.

Will there be an attempt to reach out to people who still feel that places like Nottingham Contemporary are ‘not for them’ and aren’t aware that massive events likes WEYA are happening on their doorstep?

There should be. But the idea behind the Creative Quarter will be to create a microcosm of the aspirations of the city, and you’ve gotta start somewhere. If we put a little bit in this area and a little bit in that area, it would dissipate very quickly and you wouldn’t get people sparking off each other.

You’ll be soliciting ideas from people over the next year, but there must be creative companies and individuals out there who you’d like to get on board...

I don’t want to alienate anyone by naming names, so let’s say the people who are doing something different, something interesting, something quirky, something unique - those are the ones we want. They might be super high-quality, or they’re niche, or they’re finding a new way to do things.

When will you know if the Creative Quarter has worked? Are there timescales, or tangible goals?

The exact aims and goals are yet to be decided, but loosely - higher occupancy across the area in commercial, retail and residential. If it doesn’t suck people into The Lace Market area and give Nottingham greater national recognition, then it’s not worked. The early test for me will be whether those already here take ownership of it and starting referencing their presence in the Creative Quarter on their website and in their marketing.

So what’s the catch?

The downside - if all of this is successful - is that in the long term rents might go up and the creatives will be forced out to cheaper areas. But if that means that somewhere like Sneinton suddenly has more of a creative community that attracts attention, surely that’s better than what we have at the moment?

So what message would the Creative Quarter like to pass on to the people who are hoping to benefit from it?

That the Creative Quarter will belong to the people who already live and work here. We can bring a bit to the table, but the bulk of it will be driven by the people who already have ideas about how they’d like to see this part of the city develop over the next year or so. So far, it’s been nurtured by a small committee of volunteers, but it has to quickly gain momentum and be picked up, owned and driven by others, because if it’s left to a handful of people to push, it’s not going to go anywhere. facebook.com/CreativeQuarter

leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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EXTE N

NDED The people responsible for the award winning independent magazine, LeftLion (yes, the very one in your hands) are a collective of topline writers, designers, illustrators, photographers and administrators.

We have produced 50 issues of a publication that demands attention, and we’re all from Nottingham.

So isn’t it time you made use of us?

LeftLion Extended connects Nottingham’s best and brightest creatives with forward thinking companies who’ve had enough of off-the peg ‘solutions’. Our team have worked with a huge array of brands across the world – and if we can create something that’s been picked up in pubs on Friday nights for a decade, imagine what we could do for you.

LeftLion Extended can supply you with intelligent, powerful copy, design, branding, logos, photography and illustration - either individually or together in a full-blown campaign.

We’ll give you access to our extended family, so we can all work together to produce what’s relevant for your brand - and because we’re not based in London, we don’t charge London prices.

Interested?

Talk to Ben on 07984 275453 ben@leftlion.co.uk

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STOP! GAMMA TIME!

interview: Paul Klotschkow photo: Carla Mundy

Picked up by Denizen Records, linked up with Dog Is Dead, championed by Dean Jackson and glommed onto the Radio One playlist, it’s been a very decent year for Kappa Gamma and their freewheeling dream-pop stylings.

Time, then, to talk to Tom Towle and Max Starbuck of the band...

You were originally known as Cromwell Street. Did you change it because of the Fred West reference putting people off?

Max: We didn’t even know. We had a gig when we first started and needed a name - so we just named ourselves after the street that we played on.

Tom: Last year we did loads of Nottingham gigs but it started to get really samey and it almost felt like it was becoming a bit of a job, like playing The Bodega for fifty quid, it felt like a chore almost.

What did being played for a week on Radio One get you?

Max: Our Facebook likes and views on YouTube have certainly gone up. It’s been good leverage for getting better gigs. You have to to utilise those sorts of things to exploit yourselves.

Max: We want to make our Nottingham gigs feel more special.

How would you sum up 2012?

Tom: We are on a high at the moment.

Tom: We only realised the Fred West reference later on. Max came up with the name Kappa Gamma, and we were all just so fed up with looking for one we all said “yeah”. It’s got a good meaning behind it; it’s a fraternity in America that’s exclusively for deaf people. The Greek letters look good too.

How are you getting shows outside of the city?

Max: Normally it’s promoters getting in touch.

You came to a lot of people’s attention when you won a competition to support Dog Is Dead at Rock City last year.

What was that like?

Max: It was pretty scary, but by the time you get up there it is awesome. We did maybe change as a band after that.

Tom: When you do something big like that, it changes the way everything kind of works. It feels like we have been several different bands playing the same music. That was a big peak, where you get a glimpse of what it is all about when you are doing something like that.

How did you get involved with Denizen Records?

Max: Me and Julian did a college project at Confetti, where we had to record a song, Green Eyes; we decided to send the recording to Pete Fletcher at Denizen. He came back, said that he couldn’t stop listening to it, and invited us to the studio. We recorded all five of our songs, then he told us he wanted to sign us up.

Do you have any kinship with other bands from Nottingham?

Tom: Kagoule, they’re great people. We played with a band from Derby the other day called Cheap Jazz. They are one of those under-rated Derby bands.

Max: Dog Is Dead, of course.

Tom: We are forever covering for Dog Is Dead’s Pressure DJ sets.

I think in the last couple of months we’ve done it more than they have.

What’s it like starting out and getting gigs when no-one knows who you are?

Max: I think the best thing is to go and play Acoustic Rooms at the Rescue Rooms. I was very cheeky and originally asked if we could support Yuck, but the promoter said we could play the Acoustic Rooms instead. If a promoter is interested in you, or Danielle who runs the night, then they will put you on. In Nottingham it’s good to get onside with DHP because they have a strong foothold.

Is it important to be known outside of the city?

Max: That’s what we are focusing on at the moment.

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Tom: We haven’t asked for a gig in a while. Sometimes we will see a gig on a poster and really want to support whoever it is so we’ll ask DHP. We are trying to hold back on gigs so we can do a bit more writing. We’ve never had time to practice, and when we did practice we were just practicing for the next show.

The music you make is quite fashionable at the moment. Are you worried about that style becoming unfashionable and people moving on?

Tom: There’s a lot of that dream-pop thing at the moment. The way our music is going, there is a divergence away from that. We never set out to do anything like those other bands, and we don’t really listen to that kind of music.

How did you get the European tour support slot with Rolo Tomassi?

Max: They put out our 7” for us on their Destination Moon record label. James, the keyboard player, really likes the music that we make. He’s constantly outdoing himself with his kindnesses.

Tom: He didn’t let us know until we got asked by the booking agent three weeks before the tour. We managed to sort it out just in time. We literally got a van the day before.

What was life on the road like?

Tom: Smelly. The van was really old and rickety and only went 30mph. One place we played in Hamburg had an apartment for bands, and Munich did. All of the venues have band rooms with rows of bunk beds. I don’t know why we don’t do it in England as it makes a lot of sense. But our best gig was on the way home, in a squat in Holland.

Max: It was like a tiny shop front, like playing in Mimm - they crammed about forty people in there.

How did you get the daytime BBC Introducing... slot on Radio One? Max: I think because we did Dean Jackson of The Beat a favour...

Tom: He invited us along for a session, but little did we know that he was doing an item on East Midlands Today about music piracy. A week later we got an email from Dean saying that we were going to be played on Radio One. That’s probably our payment for helping him out.

Max: My low of the year would be telling my Nan that I wasn’t going to uni. She was very disappointed. I just want to be in a band. But believe me, Nan - I will go to uni one day.

And your aims for 2013?

Max: We want to get the album done.

Tom: We just want to make something that we can ride off for a while. Put a load of work in to it and surf it for a bit.

Will you mind if people download it for free?

Max: If people do download it and then like it, please pay for it.

Tom: It’s easy to take money off a musician signed to a huge corporate record label, but when it is an up-and-coming artist or someone who might not be doing it for the money, you have to give them a reward. I would love for the music to sell and do well, but I wouldn’t be gutted if it didn’t. You don’t want to get your hopes up.

What do you do in Nottingham when you are not being in a band?

Tom: We have a weekly Saturday DJ slot at the Rescue Rooms.

We enjoy it, not just because it’s good pay, but because you get to control the music.

Max: And you get loads of free booze.

Why does Kappa Gamma exist?

Tom: I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with making music, and this is my favourite way of making it.

Max: For that moment when we are at practice and jamming and then something clicks and it’s like “yes”.

Tom: Then you want to do that to other people, and make them go “Yes”. It’s all about creating and capturing something. It’s a really strange thing, and I don’t understand it, but why do people dance? Why does music exist? It’s really weird, but we like it.

Kappa Gamma play One Thoresby Street on Saturday 8 December 2012. Just Another/Wildfire is out now. kappagamma.co.uk

The Nottingham Ball Bois - your gay-friendly neighbourhood football team - are one of the few local clubs in a national league. But, as Scott Lawley (chair and full-back) and Craig Simpson (player-manager) point out, they do a lot more... interview: Joe Sharratt So how did the club come into being?

Scott: It all started in May 2006. A couple of guys who have both now left were the founders; there was a similar club down in Leicester and another one in Birmingham, so why not have one here in Nottingham too? After a year or so, we entered the GFSN - Gay Football Supporters Network - national league, and went on from there. We won the GFSN League in 2009, and the GFSN Cup a year later. We’ve now got about 25 people turning up to training, and about 50 members in total.

It’s worth pointing out that you’re actually a ‘gay-friendly’ club, meaning you have gay and straight players...

Craig: Yeah, we have a right mix. We had one season where we had probably up to five or six straight players. Because it’s such a friendly, organised atmosphere we get friends of friends coming along.

places like the OutBurst Youth Group to the Sports Education degree students at Nottingham Trent and Sheffield Hallam.

Does it anger you that you can’t just play the game? And that homophobia still exists to an extent that teams like yours still matter?

Scott: It’s an interesting question; if you could wave this magic wand and homophobia didn’t exist and it was a wonderful world out there, would this club still exist? It probably would because the social side is so strong.

Craig: It would be a good research project: do you play in this team because you want to play football and you don’t want to play in a straight team, or do you play as an offset from what you’ve heard on the scene and see it as a sub-group of the scene?

Scott: It almost got to the point once where we had more straight players starting a game, but then a few games ago we actually had an entirely gay squad for the first time ever.

this help. We’ve got one straight player who admitted he was probably homophobic before he joined the club and that his attitude has changed massively since. It’s small steps; you can’t change things overnight, and the league is very much a stepping stone. There’re more and more teams every year, more players getting involved, and more people hearing about it.

Scott: I think all the right noises are being made, but I think you’re actually trying to change cultural values at the end of the day - and you can’t do that with a piece of paper.

Do you have inter-squad relationships?

Craig: Oh yeah. People always veer around the subject, but some players do come along to meet guys. And yes, we’ve got partners who met though the team and are still together five or six years afterwards. I’ve had experiences and relationships with people within clubs, and we’ve had long term and short term relationships, and that’s reflected at other clubs where people have been together years and years. We haven’t had a marriage yet though, have we? That’s what we need, our first marriage.

Craig: To be honest that’s reflected across the GFSN League as well - you get a lot straight players who drift in and out.

The teams in Wolverhampton and Trowbridge actually have a majority of straight players but play in the gay league. I think when you get the organisation and a welcoming atmosphere you tend to get people to stick, so definitely a good mix. We’ve got a female player as well - I think we’re one of only a few clubs now that actually has a woman that plays for us, and we’re quite proud of that.

Do you think football is ready for another player to come out?

Scott: I think there will be a point where in a few years everyone will look back on this era and say: “what on earth was everyone thinking?”

Does being part of a national league get in the way of the social side of the club, or enhance it?

Craig: The good thing about the GFSN is you get to go to places where you wouldn’t normally go, so the social aspect takes on even more importance. We’re going to places like Edinburgh, Manchester and Brighton - and the idea of going down there and coming straight back is a bit rubbish, really, so we make the most of our away trips. The social side is just as important as the playing side, definitely.

Craig: To be honest, it’s quite easy to hide your sexuality at a football club. There’s this perception that the team is together all the time, but actually you train three hours in the morning then you go off and do your own thing. I think a lot of it is the agents covering up and protecting identities, although the first person to come out is on to an absolute winner, they’ll make an absolute fortune, I really do. It will come, it’s inevitable, it’s just a matter of time. Within football circles there are known gay footballers, but they’ve always been almost protected, and I think it’s having that leap of faith, definitely.

Scott: We get people who don’t want to play at all - they just come to the socials or come and watch the games. Sometimes we get people who’ve either just moved to Notts or just want to meet new people, but they don’t want to walk into a bar by themselves.

Craig: It’s a great way to meet new people, definitely; you’ve instantly got thirty or forty contacts. Not everyone who’s gay wants to go to gay bars, so we’re almost like an alternative way in, if you like. Obviously we do have links with the gay scene and the gay venues, but it’s a bit of an alternative to the gay scene.

What’s more important: the club’s achievements on the pitch or its work off it?

Craig: I think they go hand-in-hand. We always have this argument: are we a football club or are we a social club? The football is the core really, everything is built around that common interest in football.

Scott: We won the Rainbow Heritage Award, last year, which is for community groups that have put a lot into the LGBT community locally, so we were really pleased to get that. We’ve raised money for Nottingham Switchboard, and other charities.

One of the straight players has contact with a team up at Bestwood Park, and we played a fundraiser for them for their kids team - we played their dads. And we get asked by quite a few people to go and talk about homophobia in sport, from

Craig: Yeah, on the outskirts of football now you get a lot of gay people.

Scott: Sports broadcasting is actually full of gay people...

Scott: I think if you asked ten different players you’d get ten different answers as to why they’re here. Ten years ago or so, you’d have had a much higher age profile - you’d have the typical story of gay men who, because of homophobia or just because of the culture, or were put off football at school, didn’t really play until they got into their thirties. Now, the age profile is completely across the board; you still hear: “I’ve played in a local team and it didn’t feel right” from younger players.

Craig: I’ve never come across homophobic abuse, but I know people that have.

Scott: Sometimes it’s not necessarily that people have experienced outright homophobia, but they’ve played in atmospheres or cultures where they’ve felt that they just couldn’t come out. But for every team where there’s homophobic banter going on, there will be another team where someone can be openly gay and the team will be happy with it.

We’re seeing the FA’s anti-racism policy getting some stick at the moment - what do you think about their attempts to do the same for homophobia?

Craig: It all comes down to money, and the anti-homophobia budget is minute compared to the anti-racism one. Leagues like

Scott: Unfortunately, the only example of an out footballer in England is Justin Fashanu, and we all know how that story ended.

As gay men, how do you view the veneration of Brian Clough round here, given the way he treated Fashanu?

Scott: Obviously we’ve got a few Forest fans in our team, and they seem to be able to hold two contrasting opinions at the same time; holding him in high regard for being the manager that he was, but also recognising that what he did and said regarding Fashanu was wrong. To be honest, Clough himself admitted in his second autobiography that the way he treated Fashanu did leave quite a lot to be desired.

Are you still looking for players?

Craig: Definitely. Basically we’re very friendly, open to all, straight, gay, any shade in-between...

Scott: Whatever experience as well - if some people are a bit intimidated because they’ve never played before, you’re more than welcome to come along. nottinghamballbois.com

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The Meadows Issue One/Autumn 2004

www.leftlion.co.uk

Nottingham For Reel!

Shane Meadows Chris Cooke Miles Hunt C-mone + more

Forty-nine issues ago, we interviewed Shane Meadows for the first ever LeftLion Magazine. Since then he’s gone from being an underground Midlands filmmaker to a BAFTA-winning tour de force of both British cinema and television. We’re now on issue fifty and Shane took a break from working on his current project (a documentary about The Stone Roses) to give us a rare interview, reflecting on his early years learning his trade in Nottingham…

o u r s t y l e i s l eg e n d a r y You started out by making loads of short films around the city - take us back to the Shane Meadows of then…

I wasn’t even destined to make films; it came about by accident after being thrown off a photography course. I always had a love of film, but it always seemed like a very exclusive, condescending medium that I was never going to be part of.

The film clubs in the early nineties weren’t like they are now, it was all reserved for a very elite group of people who could afford projectors and 16mm film.

Is this when you developed your method of using relatively inexperienced actors?

I didn’t really need actors; I needed human beings. It wasn’t like I was some kind of magician, I just believed that everyone could act, because on a daily basis most of us do already. I’d done lots of acting with Paddy Considine at college and I remember thinking he was one of the funniest, greatest actors I knew, despite the fact he hadn’t really done anything on film at that point.

Small Time and Where’s The Money, Ronnie came out off the back of me running a short film festival in Nottingham called Six of the Best which was an angry response to the fact that I couldn’t find anywhere to show people my short films. I went down the DIY route and decided to try and get six films together and get them advertised. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many applications from other people. For the first event, I made five of the six films and for the second I made four. I also made all of the adverts and stuff in-between.

It’s not about training at RADA; it’s about giving people confidence and making them feel comfortable in their own skin on camera. I was the lead actor in Small Time and I was able to give performances because no one was watching me and I didn’t feel nervous. That was the bedrock, and still is, of how I work. If you spend a bit of time working with people without an obvious acting background, you can get them to play an exaggerated version of themselves, which works well for what I do.

Were you always confident in your own ability?

My confidence grew off the back of people’s responses to my films; and my views on working class life and humour. So while Small Time and Where’s The Money, Ronnie? are the first things people really know me for, there was a year or two before where I was making dozens of other shorts and honing my skills. I made a few mistakes, and to be honest made some pretty awful films, but even in the worst ones, people saw a charm.

The cast and crew of those films were basically your mates from Nottingham…

I lived on Jubilee Street in Sneinton and it was one of those times when a load of people that lived on the street were of a similar age and a similar ilk. I basically turned Sneinton into my own film studio: I was twenty, I’d been thrown out of college and there were single parents and students on every corner. It was a lovely little community that we turned into our bizarre version of Hollywood and for a year or two and we had the time of our lives.

A lot of that stuff is not releasable, because it was made in such friendship and humour. I didn’t know anything about clearance or about people signing contracts, and release forms.

We were just making films for the fun of showing them in our own community to our friends. Those neighbours included people from the Central Workshop like Dena Smiles and Gena Kawecka, who ended up as the female protagonists in Small Time.

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In your early days you were heavily involved with Intermedia - a now defunct media development agency for the East Midlands. How did that shape your career?

Graham Forbes from Intermedia was the person that literally taught me about short films. I would class him as one of the most important people for making my career happen, and they loaned me loads of kit to get started. There were times when my house got burgled and cameras were stolen because people around the Sneinton area had seen what I was doing. Some of the people at Intermedia probably thought I was part of it and was selling the cameras. But Graham stood by me and was like a father figure to me. He wouldn’t let me off and just made me work extra hours to make up what had been taken.

You got your big break there by entering Where’s The Money, Ronnie? into a short film competition...

Yes, and doing that single-handedly put me in a position to make things on a bigger budget. I saw the competition advertised on a corridor wall in Intermedia and Graham said: “Look, there’s £5,000 on offer for the winner, you should enter.” I didn’t think I’d stand a chance; I’d been making these films with my mates and the rules said that budgets should not be over £150k – whereas mine hadn’t even cost fifteen quid. I entered and, before the winner had been announced, I got a phone call which went to the office answer machine. It was Stephen Woolley’s assistant saying that Stephen loved my short film and, although he was only one of the judges, he really thought it was the best short film he’d seen in years and wanted to talk to me about projects.

Did you believe it was real?

No. I thought it was one of my mates winding me up because she spoke in this really posh voice. The return number was for New York and I was expecting it to be a gay escort line or something. But I phoned it back and it turned out to be the same woman who answered and it was genuine. They weren’t sure if Where’s The Money, Ronnie? was just a flash in the pan and they wanted to get me to work with this woman, Imogen, who was a first time producer to make a thirty-minute short together.

I told them I really wanted to make something longer and as I’d just finished making Small Time around then too, I sent them a ninety-minute cut of it. They watched it straight away and rang me back saying, “It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it proves that you can handle drama so we’ll back you. What do you want to make?”

So, how did it go at the actual awards ceremony?

It took me back to being a kid when they were doing a school raffle and there was a ventriloquist’s dummy as the main prize.

I remember sitting there, saying to God, “I’ll do anything if I can have that ventriloquists dummy, if I never win anything else, can I win this?” I never won that dummy, but a decade later I was sat there at the age twenty one thinking: “Please God, I’ll do anything to win this competition. I want to get a kiss from Emily Lloyd, who was hosting, and go home with a five grand cheque.”

Then my name came out as the winner. It was an amazing night. £5,000 doesn’t seem like a huge amount of money now, but at the time it seemed like everything to me. I went out for a meal with Stephen and Imogen after and tried wine that was more expensive by the glass than any three course meal I’d ever paid for. It was there that I was introduced into the world of film making and the other side of it all.

So next came Twenty Four Seven…

Yeah, I was going from working with about four people to having thirty or forty staff there to help me. I had a crew of actors, trucks and people building sets. It was one of the biggest leaps I ever made in my life and was probably the most scary thing I’ve done. I wasn’t ‘safe’ anymore. We made Small Time out of a minibus, but Twenty Four Seven had a genuine feature film budget and it wasn’t okay to fail anymore because one and a half million quid is a lot of money. If you make a mistake with twenty quid no one knows, but if I messed this up I would have serious egg on my face.

interview: Jared Wilson illustrations: Bill Edwards

Twenty Four Seven was the first of many features you wrote with Paul Fraser. How did the two of you first start working together?

Stephen and Imogen wanted me to get a script together. They asked if I knew any writers and I said I had a mate who had won an award, was on a writer’s course and had just finished university. Thank God they didn’t ask me what the award was, because it was the East Staffordshire under-twelve writing competition. I wasn’t recommending him to be cheeky, I’d always been really proud of him because I remember going round to visit him and reading his story and thinking, “wow, where’s that come from?”

They were a bit worried, because obviously you’ve got a first time producer, first time director and a first time writing partnership. But they gave us some money to buy an Apple laptop, go away for two weeks and see what happened. We drank a lot of gin, Fraser got off with the babysitter from round the corner, I played the fruit machines a lot and we somehow churned out a feature film script.

He really is exceptionally intelligent and I really don’t believe either of us would have left Uttoxeter without the other. We gave each other the strength to go to college and to do those things and so he was a natural choice. From this point it was very natural that for the next few projects we would continue to work together because we had become a team. It’s a bit like with Considine, once I get tight with someone and we trust each other, it tends to be a relationship for life.

At what point did Bob Hoskins get on board with the project?

Stephen had worked with Bob on Mona Lisa and knew if we got a script together he could get him to read it. Bob read it, he fell

in love with it and I went to meet him. When you get an actor meeting a first time director they can sometimes eat you alive, but Bob was telling me that I was really talented and stood by me throughout. While we were filming, if someone would challenge me on a certain problem Bob would say: “No, Shane’s the director.” Bob not only acted for next to nothing, he also gave me a lot of support in the process.

He was also happy to promote it with us across the world.

We went to film festivals and he was always getting flown everywhere first class. Because I was a nobody, the festivals and the film companies tried to book me into economy. But he wouldn’t go anywhere unless I was upgraded to first class – so they had to pay extra or else he wouldn’t go. It was incredible and that’s kind of an ethos that stuck with me. The one time you start to treat people differently, like in Once Upon A Time In The Midlands when everyone was on different wages, was when it went wrong.

Is that a lesson that you took with you to future projects then?

The thing about This Is England is that everyone gets paid the same basic wage and because of that it ends up that a community gets born out of that. When everyone’s on different wages you start to value people differently and a culture of jealousy kicks off.

Twenty Four Seven was also the screen debut of James Corden?

It certainly was, yeah. I was doing auditions for the part of Tonka and he leapt out at me. You could see it right from the get

go that he was the sweetest kid in the world and he was able, at sixteen, to rough it with a bunch of lads from Nottingham.

They were a serious bunch too, they had history together as they’d all been through the Television Workshop in Nottingham.

He got the craic straight away and totally penetrated them and became accepted. You could see really early on he had a rare and beautiful talent, a bit like Paddy.

There are several references to Notts County FC in Twenty Four Seven. Are they your team?

That all began on that film, I wasn’t into football but the father that does all the dialogue goes on about Notts County. That dialogue really came out of the actor’s mouth in the bar one night. I remember hearing him going on about how if a match was only eighty minutes, Notts County would be in the Premier League. I was laughing my head off just because he truly believed in this and was so passionate about it. It was brilliant dialogue and I had to stick it in.

Then I thought: “I need to go see this downtrodden team, the oldest, most historic team in the world who somehow have the worst luck ever.” I fell in love with the fact that it wasn’t about executive boxes and it was a load of really anxious, really angry people that were having a really bad time. There were all of these really stressed out old men and the stuff that was coming out of their mouths was brilliant. They were shouting at the linesmen and the ref, and I fell in love with it.

This interview is an extract from the book Shane Meadows: Critical Essays, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2013. shanemeadows.co.uk

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Formed at school - and still at High Pavement - the grunge-cum-post-punk stylings of Kagoule have got more than a few onlookers into a froth, with XFM already pricking up their ears and a support slot on the main stage at Rock City under their wing. Adjusting their toggles and unzipping their lips: vocalist Cai Burns and bassist Lucy Hatter.

Are you local people?

Cai: We were all born and bred here. I’m Sherwood. Lucy’s St Anns.

Why did you decide to form a band?

Cai: We were all just into the same music and played instruments that worked together. When we got together there was no plan at all. But as it has progressed we are finding out what we want to do. We just want to play in lots of different places and travel - that sounds like the most fun. It would be cool to have an album to prove that we did this.

Lucy: There is no five year plan or anything; we are just winging it at the moment.

Without wanting to pry, it’s common knowledge that your two are, erm, courting.

What’s it like being boyfriend and girlfriend in the same band?

Lucy: It’s occasionally stressful... It’s just the way it is.

Cai: We don’t really know what it is like not being this way. It’s handy as she’s always at my house for band practice.

Who writes the songs?

Cai: I will come up with a couple of parts on the guitar and an idea of how the song is going to go. I will bring that to practice and it will start from a couple of riffs and we’ll develop it.

It’s never lyrics first, I only sing with the band because we couldn’t find anyone else to sing, but I enjoy it now.

How easy is it coming up with lyrics?

Cai: I find that I can have fun with them, I don’t take it seriously. I’m not really one to write about ‘issues’ and stuff like that. It’s like story writing but they can be short and no one is going to care. I read a lot of fantasy books and I guess if any words are in my mind it will be something from them.

Lucy: It’s not like we are at college all day every day.

Do your tutors know about the band?

Cai: Yes they do. One Art teacher came to the LeftLion gig at Nottingham Contemporary.

Cai: We don’t want to be known as a ‘Nottingham Band’ as I don’t think Nottingham is better than anywhere else, it’s just got a lot of catchy fellas around at the moment.

Lucy: I thought that was weird. I don’t know if Cai did.

Where do you fit in to the music scene?

Lucy: We don’t. We are versatile.

Cai: I expected it. She warned me well in advance.

Cai: I feel like we fill a gap and are able to cover various venues where other bands might not work.

You supported Dog Is Dead at Rock City along with Kappa Gamma last year...

Cai: We entered a competition and fluked it. It was crazy, there were so many people in the crowd.

Lucy: I saw the video of Nirvana playing there on YouTube and that really put things into perspective.

How did you get involved with Denizen Records?

Cai: They got in touch with us after that competition. Pete Fletcher was one of the judges and contacted us.

What do Denizen Records do to help?

Cai: Organisation. They’ve really helped us understand ourselves and what we we doing.

They’ve brought more of a structure and a lot of knowledge. We have been working with Faley from Late of the Pier and he has been through it all with his band; he doesn’t let us make the mistakes that he did, it’s good to have someone like that. There’s access to a studio and they are recording everything. Without them I don’t think we would be in the same place at all.

Lucy: They’ve made us feel like an actual band.

What are you recording plans?

Cai: We’ve got a single coming out in January.

Lucy: You do write a lot about kings.

Lucy: And we are mid-way through an album.

Do the others in the band ever tell you when they don’t like something you’ve come up with?

Lucy: It’s usually me. There was one song that Cai made and I was absolutely convinced that it sounded like Foo Fighters. They wouldn’t believe me until we played it to Pete and Faley (at Denizen) and they said that it sounded like Foo Fighters and I was like, “thank God for that.”

Cai: We think we’ve got all of the tracks down for the album. We will have a couple more single/EP things following the January single to fill in the time, and the aim is to have the album out late next year. It’s very exciting.

How do you balance college life with band stuff?

Lucy: I don’t. I just go with it.

Cai: It’s not too hard. They happen at different times of the day and luckily college is quite infrequent...

Lucy: ...Dog Is Dead, Jake Bugg...

Were you aware of the local scene before you started the band?

Lucy: I think it’s blown up in the last couple of years since we’ve started.

Cai: We had no idea about any kind of scene.

It’s seems to have come about as we have progressed. I guess we’ve been part of the growth. I don’t think the quality of music is better now; I just think that there’s loads of music, so by chance there’s going to be more good stuff. There’s still a lot of crap, but there will be more good stuff.

When you are just starting out how do you go about getting gigs?

Cai: It’s really hard. You can just play the gigs where all you need to do is ask to play, but no one goes there expecting anything good.

It wasn’t that much fun playing those nights, but we needed to do gigs to get other gigs. We didn’t gig much, then we recorded an EP - once you have something to show people you’ve got proof that you are good enough for a gig.

It definitely helps to have a recording and it’s very easy these days to do something at home, it doesn’t have to cost much. It can be hard trying to get a gig as there are lots of people making music in Nottingham and the venues are bombarded with bands sending them music, so you have to force them to listen to it.

Rock City was one of our first gigs, we just got lucky...

Is it important for you to get gigs outside of the city?

Cai: We are looking to do more and more outside of the city.

Lucy: You can get stuck in the Nottingham rut.

There’s a lot of attention on the Nottingham music scene at the moment - Do you worry that the hype and buzz could distract from the actual music being made?

Cai: I don’t really like the idea of there being a ‘Nottingham Scene’. There’s a big range of music here, I don’t see why it should all be packed together. It separates it from different places, like where you are from, and I don’t think that is right. It’s handy as more attention is on the city, but we don’t want to be linked to...

Cai: The more places that know about you the better. If you are going on a tour and you’ve played at a venue previously they are more likely to let you play there again. We played our first headline gig in Leeds recently.

How much has the band changed since you started?

Cai: For the first few months there was no direction, we had no idea what we were doing.

But in the last year we have figured out what we want and what we want to sound like.

ANORAKNOPHOBIA interview: Paul Klotchkow photo: Ashley Bird

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The band has changed a lot and our attitude towards the band has changed. We understand it more, the sound has changed.

Lucy: And we’ve changed as people loads.

How would you sum up 2012?

Cai: We are slowly progressing. It’s good that we are still quite small as it gives us time to figure out what we want to do. Next year should be the year where we really go for it.

Lucy: We’ve not been pushed in the deep end.

It’s an exciting time, now is the moment it’s starting to happen...

Lucy: This is the pressure point.

Do you worry about it all imploding?

Lucy: When I think about it, but you just have to go with it. You can’t expect anything being in a band. You can’t expect any certainty.

Cai: If it happens, it does; but if it doesn’t, we’ll do something else.

What are your hopes for your album?

Cai: We want to tour it and just hope that people like it. The usual thing.

Will you be disappointed if people don’t buy it?

Cai: If people don’t buy it I won’t be too bothered as long as they listen to it. If they listen to it illegally or whatever, as long as they have heard us and it lets us do what we want.

If more people have heard us and we want to play somewhere there’s more of a chance that we can play there as we’ll have fans who want to see us.

Is your visual identity just as important as the way you sound?

Cai: Our visual identity is who we are as people. We aren’t trying to put on an image. We don’t want to try hard to have a massive image, or to make characters. The important part is us not having the image, but then that is the image.

What’s the biggest lesson that you learnt as a band?

Cai: Contacts are very important. Make friends with people. Otherwise you aren’t going to get anywhere.

Lucy: Stay on good terms with people. Don’t be a big headed moron.

Mudhole/Monarchy is out on Denizen Recordings in January. facebook.com/kagouleuk

So who is Alison Moore?

Alison Moore is a writer, born in Manchester in 1971. Her first short story was published in 2000 and her debut novel, published in August, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012. She lives in Wymeswold with her husband Dan and son Arthur and is a member of Nottingham Writers’ Studio.

Tweet us an outline of the plot of the The Lighthouse…

A man travels to Germany for a walking holiday, spending his first night at the Hellhaus hotel. Hoping to find himself, he becomes lost.

The character you are referring to is called Futh - or was it Fluff?

I wanted a forgettable name for a forgettable man and for this reason I love it when readers call him ‘Furth’ or ‘Fuff’. He began as a man sitting alone in a woman’s kitchen, and his shoes were hurting him; he was a middle-aged man hankering after a woman from his past and having a bit of trouble with everyday things.

When did you first get the idea for the book?

I started writing the above scene in Autumn 2009 but then stopped to write a short story. At the start of 2010, I came back to what then became The Lighthouse, putting this man on a ferry to Germany. The first draft took six months and the second draft took another six months, and then there was a whole lot of tweaking.

The previous Booker was criticised for its readability, whereas this one placed a greater emphasis on language and technical skill. What makes a good book - or come to think about it, a good competition?

I do like a good read and a page-turner, but I also want a book to impress and excite me with its linguistic and technical achievements. I think that if these prizes provoke discussion about books and writing then that’s valuable – one of the unexpected pleasures of reaching the longlist was how much people suddenly wanted to talk about my book.

So what was it like at the Booker ceremony?

Good fun. The venue was stunning, it was like eating your dinner inside a cathedral. And everywhere you looked there were faces you knew, and it can take a moment to realise it’s not actually someone you know, it’s Ian Hislop. All the other shortlisted authors are lovely, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed doing events with them. I particularly got to know Tan Twan Eng, who was very friendly; we arrived at the same time. Will Self came over to chat after dinner; he too is very pleasant and amusing.

Did you know that Salt were nominating you for the Booker?

Not in advance, but I knew before the longlisting that The Lighthouse had been entered.

How have you coped with the sudden frenzy of publicity?

It was bizarre, going from almost total anonymity as a writer to coming home from the Main Booker Prize party after the shortlisting to find dozens of emails about giving readings, appearing at festivals, talking to newspapers and radio stations not just in the UK but in France and Singapore, interest from agents and publishers, enquiries about foreign rights and even the first mention of a film. It was a bit overwhelming but also funny and interesting. The only real difficulty was scheduling things around our three-year-old, but how we’ve done it is to include him as far as possible, so he often comes to festivals and venues with us and then plays with his dad for an hour or so while I do the event, and in fact I think it’s been a great experience for him as well as for me. It has calmed down a little now but there are still interesting requests coming in – I did a piece for Russian TV yesterday.

Did you feel pressurised - the Booker can be quite a financial gamble for some publishers?

It almost knocked me over harder than the longlisting or the shortlisting did. It was so unexpected, and flattering because it meant they thought it stood a chance. I don’t recall feeling pressure, just a fizzing feeling whenever I thought about it.

How has the whole experience affected you as a writer?

It’s had a huge impact on me as a writer. Without it, my book would probably not be in Waterstones. The prize gives an enormous boost to media coverage and sales, which gives me some security as a writer. In terms of confidence, yes, it has given me confidence with regard to The Lighthouse and in a

It’s a beautifully weighted novel that gives just enough detail to arouse numerous possibilities. Is this a particular style of your writing, or something that worked for this particular novel?

I can think of other short stories of mine in which key things are suggested rather than explicit, but it seemed especially apt for this story in which the characters don’t always know quite what has happened either – so Bernard is piecing together ‘clues’ regarding what is happening right under his nose; and Carl, in the end, has only his horrible presentiment and an absence to inform him.

The novel is full of subtle warnings that characters - and occasionally readers - fail to notice. What kind of warnings or advice would you give new writers hoping to find a publisher?

I’ve had a very positive experience with my publisher, Salt.

Having an agent and editor I can totally trust has been an important element of that. Also I’d already had some experience of working with Salt through a story of mine having been published in one of their Best British Short Stories anthologies.

I think it also helps not to be dazzled by big advances and suchlike; to focus on the quality of the working relationship.

general way. But as for the next story, you never know if you’re about to write a turkey.

Nottingham seems to have really got behind you.

I’ve had a huge amount of support – from Nottingham Writers’ Studio whose Twitter campaign was wonderfully encouraging, and entertaining too, Nottingham Waterstones who hosted the launch and a very enjoyable signing session, Lakeside Arts Centre who all wore Ali masks on Man Booker night, and Nottingham University who hosted a talk about The Lighthouse before it was longlisted and have now given me an Honorary Lectureship. My family and friends are all very pleased and excited for me, and I get good practical support from my husband and my mother-in-law, who look after Arthur while I’m doing events and interviews. My publishers – Jen and Chris at Salt – have been working flat out.

You can invite four literary figures over to dinner who would you invite, and why?

Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and Futh – to see if I can finally get a decent dinner inside him.

The Lighthouse, £8.99, Salt saltpublishing.com

interview: James Walker illustration: Michelle Haywood

A Little Light

Reading

Alison Moore’s unsettling debut novel The Lighthouse explores grief, helplessness and abandonment in a style that threatens to crash against the rocks at any moment. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it’s the first glimmer from an important new writer...

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I AM THE EGG MAN

interview: Adrian Bhagat photo: David Baird

For five years now, Hatch have taken away the pretentiousness of performance art, brought back the fun, and have redrawn the boundaries of the stage by refusing to acknowledge them. Playwright Michael Pinchbeck is one of the founders, and the other Nathan Miller - used to put in serious work for an independent magazine you may have heard of...

What is Hatch for?

We wanted to help performing artists from the East Midlands, of whatever type, to develop their work and find places where they could experiment. Also we wanted to make spaces for the kind of work that might not find a home anywhere else, the kind of thing that isn’t a play or a piece of contemporary dance or a performance art work and might not sit in any of the existing spaces. Our tagline when we started was that we were a theatre without a building. The idea was that we could programme anything that wouldn’t fit into a theatre or an arts theatre, and we looked at the whole city as being our venue.

What was the catalyst that turned the idea into a reality?

Nottingham had been known for its interesting and innovative live arts scene and then that kind of ended with the closure of some venues and the end of the Performing Arts course at NTU. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything, but there just wasn’t enough. You always need lots of activity and more people doing more things to create something interesting. It was getting harder for the artists and we thought that if we could take on the work of finding a space and marketing a performance they could just get on with devising the ideas. The first year we had no funding at all so we didn’t pay ourselves, the venues, or our performers, so it existed purely on good will. Now, although we’re not regularly funded, we get money for individual projects and we do as much and as well as we can on the resources we have.

So who’s involved in making Hatch tick?

Michael Pinchbeck and I are the founders and co-directors, and Marie-Christine Bertram is the Project Co-ordinator, though in practice we all do a bit of everything with Marie doing the most.

She joined us in our first year on a work placement from New College Nottingham where she was studying and worked on a couple of projects, then went travelling for a bit and luckily came back. As we’ve become more established and had the opportunity to do bigger and more interesting things, we have had to bring in other people and we’ll have to do more of that in the future.

You describe the work you promote as ‘performance-y’. How would you define that?

We wanted to be able to take on anything with as wide a range of formats and genres that we could. We’ve had all kinds of acts including stand-up comedy, written theatre, dance and so on but we try not to define performance-y because we don’t want to exclude things that aren’t exactly performances. For example, Rachael Eite set up a load of televisions linked to microphones which picked up audience conversations. That was about the furthest you could get from performance without it just becoming a static installation. The idea is that work that is experimental, avant garde, or just weird could be presented in a context where it is more accessible than a fifty-year-old play

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or a ballet. It’s only difficult for people to engage with the arts if you tell them it is. By using the term ‘performance-y’ we avoid defining it and so don’t put people off before they’ve seen it.

Why is it called ‘Hatch’?

Michael came up with the name - I think it was originally meant for some other project of his that never took off. Hatch is a noun and a verb which sum up the twin ideas of what we do. As a verb it means ‘to break open in order to release the developed young’ which is quite a poetic description of our desire to find performance opportunities for new artists and those who want to try new things. Hatch as a noun is an opening that allows you access from one area to another which reflects our wish to open doors and allow artists to engage with audiences and other artists.

Recently you’ve been made an associate arts collective with Embrace Arts in Leicester. What does that involve?

Embrace Arts are part of Leicester University; they’re establishing themselves as a place for performance-y arts.

They’ve got a really nice building and facilities but they don’t have a black box theatre so while it’s not necessarily the best place for small scale touring theatre, it fits very well with what we do. Being an associate collective means we’ll be doing two events there each year for the next two years. When we first started in Nottingham we deliberately didn’t stick to a single venue but in Leicester we’ve always been based at Embrace Arts. In Nottingham the challenge is always finding the right space but in Leicester it’s about finding new ways to work with that same building. Luckily their building is changing and being developed and so new spaces emerge within the old one.

When you try to find a venue in Nottingham, what are you looking for?

Generally we are looking for people at the venue who are enthusiastic about working with us, whether they are actively interested in what we are doing or just happy for us to get on with it. We have to check everything with the venue to make sure they are happy with what’s happening. Sometimes you have to call them up and say “Is it OK if the performers take their clothes off downstairs?” or “are we allowed to spill paint on the floor?”. Sometimes they say yes and sometimes no. We did an event at the Loggerheads which was a perfect venue as it had all these different rooms and caves out the back. Someone at that event decided to get up on the roof and they were fine about that. It’s a real shame that place closed down.

What have you got coming up?

Our next event is called Hatch:Mass and will be at Spanky Van Dyke’s. It’s another unusual venue where we have to go in and work out how to make things happen around the, er, décor. The Nottingham acts include First Floor Theatre who invite you all to a party in their front room and Arletty Theatre

making a patchwork quilt of stories. Fourbeatwalk will be on hand producing hand-made cards for people to send from the event. We’re also bringing in acts from outside the area including Ali Matthews, AKA The Bitchuationist, with a cabaret based around the Book of Genesis, and Harry Giles with a game about capitalists and revolutionaries. On top of that, there will be live music, a mass Yugo yoga session, a love story about badgers and lots more.

How do you go about choosing acts for a Hatch event?

We’ve always had a policy of open submissions because it means we get as much choice as possible. We can only get funding for a limited number of projects so we’re in the happy situation where we get far more applications than we could ever put on. We choose ten or twelve for each event but we have to reject at least as many good ones. It’s a shame to turn good ideas down but you want to make sure that you present the best work in the best possible way so you choose the acts that fit with the theme of the event and the space it’s in. Hopefully the people we reject will apply the next time with an idea that fits better with that event.

The Gramophones Theatre Company is a good example of a Hatch success story…

The Gramophones’ first event together was Hatch:Abroad and they’ve done other things with us since. They’re a fantastic company of great performers who are really motivated and now they are at a stage where they have funding to build up their company, they have taken a show to Edinburgh, they’re touring and doing a show at the Playhouse. We don’t take credit for that but we’re absolutely thrilled that they’ve come through from working with us.

You were involved with LeftLion in its early days…

I went to school with Jared Wilson and Alan Gilby, and I knew Tim Bates - the founders of LeftLion. I was living in Liverpool when they set up the website, but got involved on the forum.

The first couple of printed magazines they put out were absolutely full of typos and errors, I’d moved back to Notts and when I suggested they get someone to proofread it they told me to do it myself. From there, I got sucked in and did various roles. That experience of working with LeftLion was a direct inspiration in setting up Hatch because it made me realise that once you have an idea about something that needs to happen, you can just get on and do it yourself and, if you are trying to do something to improve the city, people will support it. With a good idea and the right skills, you have a good chance of succeeding.

Hatch: Mass, Wednesday 12 December 7pm at Spanky Van Dykes hatchnottingham.org.uk

NORDMAN FIRS

4 ft £20 5 - 6ft £25 7ft £30 8ft £35 EACH NORWAY SPRUCE 5-8 ft £25

LIGHT FANTASTIC

Andy Wells is a man with a nocturnal secret: when not running Spanky Van Dykes, he can often be found creeping about the Notts countryside in the middle of the night, with a big bag of, er, ‘special equipment’. Actually, he’s one of the UK’s leading light painting photographers, with his amazing work having already been showcased in Times Square...

Ullsworth Water

“This is an easy one to do. Using a colour changing LED bar on a nighttime lake shore”

interview: Dom Henry How did you get into light orbs and light painting?

I’ve been doing this for about two years now, I must have come across something similar on Flickr.

What’s the attraction?

I’ve always had a liking for photography at night, because generally the camera can pick up stuff the naked eye can’t see. This is really just an enhancement of that; the long exposures of night time scenes work without the light painting, but they add a different dimension. I like creating that, it’s escapism. I love visualising the image I’m going to get and creating it. And being out at night is somehow very calming.

When’s the best time to go out?

It’s all lunar. The new moon, which is when there is no moon at all, so it’s pitch black really, really black. And the full moon, when

Field of Wheat

everything is lit up like silvery daylight. Winter is the best time; more hours of darkness to work in.

And you wear dark clothes so as not to show up in the shots...

I’ve been questioned by the Police a couple of times; dressed all in black with a massive bag full of equipment, in strange places where people wouldn’t normally be at that time of night. However, I do keep pics on the phone, so when you show them they’re usually quite interested, especially when they realise you’re not out badger-baiting.

Why orbs?

I’ve got a load of stuff for light painting slow exposures - torches and LEDs and so on - but I just keep coming back to the orbs because I love the cleanliness and the crispness. The clean golden light orb has become a kind of trademark.

“This was last August under a full moon. The simplicity of the cornfield, I like the depth of field and the crop circle feel. Focusing in the dark can be tricky, this is one of my favourites”

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How do you actually make them?

It’s a trade secret which I’ve refined, but the basic idea is a light on the end of a string.

I’ve made a device which does it. I love the precision of it. I also like a feel of placement, making it look like it’s meant to be there. There are a lot of light painters out there who fill the screen and have lots and lots going on, I just love the simplicity.

You exhibited your work in Times Square how did you swing that?

I won a competition and was invited to New York to exhibit on Times Square on the big screens, which was fun. I also got invited to join Getty Images through my images on Flickr, and had my first sale through them. I’m also sponsored by LED Lenser torches, who sent me a great big box of their stuff.

Is there a Nottingham light painting community?

Light painting has a big following online, but although I’m quite involved with it in the UK it’s still a pretty niche interest. There’s not many round here - there are some people who meet up with each other locally but it’s mainly an online thing. People should get on Flickr if they’re interested.

What else are you trying out?

I’ve been learning off-camera flash, as seen in my 366 project on Flickr. It’s incredible, a real learning curve. Not to mention Face Down Tuesdays or FDT’s which looks a bit like planking. So, it’s not all orbs, I need a break sometimes. It’s been fun taking shots and getting them on Flickr before midnight, though I’m looking forward to getting my life back when it finishes. flickr.com/photos/31843304@N02

Ogmore by Sea

“That’s a cliff top in South Wales in a full moon, you can see Swansea in the background. It’s amazing how the colour comes out even in the dark”

Hardwick Hall

“Inside Hardwick Hall ruins late at night, three or four hours undisturbed, this summer. If it’s a dangerous spot you always go as a pair, check it out by day and work out what not to fall over”

Jetty in the Lakes “Up in the Lake District in the ‘blue hour’ at dusk”

Beeston Weir

“This is taken in the middle of the night, pitch black, on the Weir at Beeston. The orange sky you can see is light pollution not the dawn. Great reflections and movement of the water, thankfully we didn’t fall in”

Stanage Edge

“Pitch black, no sun.

Tricky walking around a cliff at night, but you scout them out during the day. I do a lot of research on Google Maps and Flickr as well and lots of driving around to find locations”

Whitburn Arch

“Star trails above Whitburn Arch on the North East coast. We had to scramble down a cliff to get there at low water, it’s usually under water. The cliffs are lit with torches” leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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interview: Alison Emm photo: David Baird

FEEDING TIME AT THE ZOO

White Collar Zoo: Notts-powered Web TV entertainment that aims to introduce local talent to the world. But will the world - and people round here - stop looking at grot and cats long enough to take notice? Lee Thomas and Guy Williams are banking that enough of us will...

We have to ask: why White Collar Zoo? Lee: I wrote a song called White Collar Zoo about six years ago - a guitar number about escaping the rat race. Last year I decided to professionally record the track and look into what could be done with White Collar Zoo as a brand name. So I gave Guy a call - we knew each other from when we both lived in Manchester - and brought him on board, and we got the track recorded by The Money.

You’re originally from Manchester. So why did you pick Nottingham to do this?

Guy: When I first came to Nottingham, I was astounded by the creativity here, it was off the scale. I was amazed at what was going on in a relatively small city. There’s so much fantastic stuff going on that needs to be given to a wider audience.

Lee: We saw very quickly that there were hardly any outlets for musicians, except for your standard websites like SoundCloud and YouTube. White Collar Zoo was born because we saw that we could provide a support mechanism for bands and creative people. We realised with the advent of smart TVs that you’ve got this conversion of terrestrial TV, online capabilities, online apps, and everything else. There’s YouTube, of course, but there’s two million pieces on it - it’s a bit saturated. We wanted to structure it a bit better, have something more user-friendly, and focus on independent and new music, and films and documentaries and anything creative and original.

You’re calling WCZ a ‘revolution in television’. How is it going to be different to standard magazine shows?

Guy: We’re going to change the world. The revolution comes from being able to reach a mainstream audience that you couldn’t reach before. All the barriers to the broadcast TV market have evaporated; we can be in exactly the same place as the BBC and Sky, but without the constraints that they have. So we can be as broad as we like, and provide a platform for all the people out there who are producing quality independent music.

WCZ isn’t just about music - what can viewers expect to see on the channel?

Guy: The creative community know what’s going on, but the wider Nottingham community aren’t necessarily aware of the fantastic things that are happening. We want to have programmes to get that out there and reach those people. We’ve got a weekly live show called The Zoo Lounge; it’s a comedy chat show that’s going to showcase the local creative scene.

The format will include a band, a host, a comedy slot and a comedy news desk. It’s going to be an hour-or-so-long show focussed on what’s happening in Nottingham. It’ll be going out on Sunday late mornings, so it’ll be like hangover TV. We’ll be supplementing our own content with films and animation too. We want people to see the quality work that is found on Vimeo and suchlike, that only have a relatively small following of viewers because of the mass of content on there.

So you’ll be taking away the choice to make it more focussed on what people want.

Lee: Yeah. We’ve set up three of the channels already. We’ve got FreeZoo which is, as the name suggests, a free offering with promos and tasters of the shows that showcase what you get for your subscription. Zoo One will be scheduled, and the rest of the channels will be on demand and you can flick through.

One of my bugbears with YouTube is that there’s so much stuff

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on there that it’s difficult to find what you want, unless you have a link. We want to try and basically provide a really good user experience for people. We’re looking at the terrestrial TV experience and saying, “How can we copy that? How can we replicate that with WCZ?” Will the content be exclusively Nottingham sourced?

Lee: To start with. We want to produce these shows, build up a loyal fanbase, and then expand it out. We’re making connections in the States with universities and film companies. What we want to do is export Notts talent - nationally and internationally and bring that kind of creative content back into Nottingham too.

Guy: JamCafé is our first live venue - we’ve been testing there for a few months now. Our vision is to have hundreds of live venues across the world that stream different live music at different times, so you can flick on at 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon and find something going on in Australia, or 7 o’clock in the evening and find something from Bolivia or England.

How has the local creative community taken to your ideas?

You’re already working with JamCafé, Farmyard Records, I’m Not From London…

Lee: Yeah, they’ve definitely embraced us. They love what we’re doing, they love the fact that we’re providing a platform for these bands, filmmakers, comedians, artists... we’re all about collaboration. ‘Unite and Lead’ is our motto, we don’t see anyone out there as competitors - we’re forging links with lots of different organisations such as NCN and Confetti, we’ve reached out to Broadway and Nottingham Contemporary. We want to embrace them and support them and hopefully we can all come together.

WCZ is subscription based. Have you chosen not to go down the route of advertising, then?

Lee: There will be limited advertising on there, and there’ll be sponsorship and commercial partnerships. It’s not commercials in the normal sense; there won’t be adverts between programmes. We won’t do intros or adverts over the top like a lot of video sites. There might be sections on the website where you can find partner products, but we’re not going to do display advertising at all.

Guy: Working on a subscription basis allows you to be entirely independent and choose the direction you want to go in yourself.

A lot of the content on WCZ will be available for free - on the internet, or at venues. What is it that’s going to make people want to pay?

Lee: We’ve chatted to people within and outside of the creative community, and the main feedback is that if we provide fresh content and live quality broadcast shows plus all the other content, then people are happy to pay. It means people can get some drinks in and stay in and watch a gig, but then if people do want to go to JamCafé or another WCZ venue then they might get to see themselves on TV. We’ve talked about Zoo Lounge to people and they’re excited because it’s Notts focussed and it’s creative. It’s an unproven model, but we’re hoping people will support it: for £4.99 a month, instead of buying a kebab and chips, you can see brilliant content and fantastic talent in Nottingham. You can support them as well, because any content provided for White Collar Zoo is going to get paid.

Guy: We devote 20% of all the subscription money to the Zoo Pot, which is a pot for Nottingham’s creative community. We wouldn’t be able to do this with an advertising model.

How does that get distributed?

Guy: It’s ‘drive and subscribe’. A band can earn 50p per fan per month when their fans subscribe to White Collar Zoo. And that’s forever, so they can earn an ongoing income just from driving their subscribers. So as a band grows, their income does too. This doesn’t just work for bands; this can be filmmakers or artists or anyone who contributes to WCZ. You’ve secured yourself a pretty swanky building in Lace Market Square that you’re calling Zoo Café...

Lee: It’s going to be a great part of WCZ and will help to build a community. We decided we needed some studio space and we needed an HQ. I’ve always loved Lace Market Square - it’s been empty for years, but it just lends itself to WCZ perfectly. Straight away we thought, we can put a café downstairs and have free gallery space for artists, and upstairs we can have a production area. We’re hoping that it will be up and running in the next month or two.

Is the Zoo Café going to be a live venue?

Guy: We will have acoustic music and jamming sessions in the café, and in the Square we’re going to look at getting a screen up in the summer to show independent films and have performing arts too, hopefully. It’ll be a very different vibe. The area is all residential, so it’s going to be a different kind of offering to what you get at JamCafé.

You didn’t put in a bid for Nottingham’s City TV franchise.

How come?

Lee: We reviewed and analysed what was going on with the tender process, and had a chat with the development team, but decided it wasn’t for us. It’s a fantastic win for Craig and his consortium at Confetti and we wish them the best of luck - the licence is going to provide them with the capability to showcase new shows and it will give Confetti students a platform - but we definitely want to focus on web TV. Guy: We’re looking globally. Nottingham is very much our home and we go out here but the rest of the world is open to us – that’s the beauty of the web, you can reach such a large audience.

The website is due to go live at the beginning of December how can people subscribe?

Lee: The beta site will go live in December and we’ll have a lot more content and our first Zoo Lounge show. It’s not going to be a big-bang launch, but we want content to be up there so people have something to watch, and then from there there’ll be the live shows and more content from the hundreds of hours of footage we’ve shot since March plus loads of new stuff.

How can people get in touch to be involved or have their music/art/films broadcast?

Lee: You just need to send us an email to studio@whitecollarzoo. tv or drop us a line on Facebook. whitecollarzoo.tv

Fancy some audience participation, but hate panto? How about being coerced into submitting to a make-believe totalitarian regime, or having aliens decide if you’re worth being enslaved or just got rid of? That’s the kind of thing that Niki Russell, Dan Williamson and their Reactor collective get up to...

What is Reactor?

Dan: We make various types of art projects that often put the audience in a central and interactive role, and as such we build environments that could be thought of as microcosmic worlds. It doesn’t involve theatre or acting a part but everyone involved is taking on a role of themselves in an alternate reality.

Niki: It creates its own artworks that happen to take the form of social situations but these events allow other artists to make art within that.

Does the art change depending on the audience you get in?

Dan: Each project has its own identity and its own backstory. Our Ghaos project in 2005 was based on a totalitarian regime. You were given a job role in that regime and everything in it appeared quite strict and the aim was to move up the hierarchy and get into positions of power so that you could manipulate this world within your own vision.

Dan: We did a peice called The Green Man & Regular Fellows last year at One Thoresby Street with Trade Gallery. We materialised an old country pub in the gallery and it was a private members’ club that you registered for by post.

Niki: And once you were there you could either sit back and enjoy your drink or you could investigate how to get more involved if you wanted to explore things further, going into the back space of the pub for more “experiences”.

Some of this is sounding like some of Stanley Milgram’s social experiments…

Niki: I don’t think we necessarily set up situations to the extreme of Milgram, where you think you’ve killed someone by pressing a button. Sometimes people have referred to our work as social experiments, though.

Dan: If you’re doing a social experiment you’re usually limited by one goal. With Reactor there’s something always happening that turns the thing on its head and asks a new question.

Niki: Some people stick to the rules and others look to break them at every opportunity. You’re constantly reconfiguring your own role in the world and working out how to act against or with the kind of elements that are floating around you.

If it’s the audience that are getting all the yucks, what do you as artists take from it?

Niki: I guess we’re interested in not knowing everything about the work and seeing how these things develop.

Dan: Some of our projects have been out on a busy high street with a portal into the project.

In one called Big Lizard’s Big Idea we had a big mascot character out on the street with his entourage and this “fun bus” and there were people out on the street trained to engage passers-by in this kind of elusive marketing campaign.

Dan: You never know how people are going to behave in certain situations so it’s always exciting when they do things you’d never expect. You can tell everybody they have to shave their heads and then leave some clippers on a table expecting that nobody actually would, but there are a certain amount of people who do it.

So what was the big idea Big Lizard had?

Niki: We were interested in having mascot characters and how this mascot supposedly stood for something. There were games and stories, some of which prepared you for the fact that Big Lizard is a member of this alien race who are about to take over the earth and he’s choosing which humans to save.

Do you have people who try to hijack the whole thing? Do you have to do anything to put a stop to that?

Niki: No, we encourage it to happen - it doesn’t happen often enough. Different things people can do can only really add to the overall experiences. Really, the only rogue element that are slightly detrimental is when people don’t want to be involved.

How do you keep people involved and engaged?

Niki: In some ways we’re not actually doing that much to get people involved. Some people don’t like it when you don’t tell them what’s going on and can either get angry or act bizarrely towards it.

Dan: I think the projects are set up in such a way that they make people feel like they should conform and behave in a certain way and often that makes them less rebellious.

How did Reactor start? It’s great, if a little strange.

Niki: Reactor’s ten years old this month and it all started with an exhibition that, compared to what we do now, was relatively static.

There were things like airbeds that you would lie down on and they were connected to penny whistles and you could play them like instruments. It was interactive but it wasn’t so much that situations were being co-authored by the people coming in.

Dan: Over time we became less interested in the objects as objects and more interested in the environment in which people encounter things.

Niki: I guess it comes through a process of making something and realising that it wasn’t what we’d made that was interesting but what happened around it. We’ve also been affected in a number of ways by members coming and going in either very subtle or very distinct kind of ways.

You’re bringing back Function, one of your earliest projects, this year. Why the hiatus and why did you bring it back?

Niki: We’re interested in what would happen if we were to start doing events that we did seven years ago, and what would they be like now. When we started up the Function events we decided there was only going to be five, but now we like the idea of resurrecting something.

We did our first Function event at Primary recently. Depending on what happens we might have to move from Nottingham but we’re waiting on that one.

What is it that’s kept you in Nottingham in particular over the past ten years?

Dan: It’s great because we’ve got an audience who have followed us over the years and have been to a lot of things in that time. Hopefully we can build on that from having more events in the city.

Niki: We had to move out of our old space near the train station after the building got compulsorily bought for the new tram line. Through moving to this new space at Primary we have found a new community of artists who’ve spurred us on to be a bit more committed and contribute to things that are going on here.

What does working together for ten years mean to you guys?

Dan: I haven’t really spent a lot of time reflecting on it. Every so often you look at the current situation and decide to continue because there’s always projects on the table that you want to realise that are just a little bit out of your grasp.

Niki: A lot of people say that what we should be doing is we should be producing things and then start touring them. Once you start touring these things you create surplus value because you don’t have to spend as much time making things in terms of time and money. But we’re not interested in that.

With your tenth birthday on the horizon, what can people expect?

Niki: The first one is Reactor’s tenth birthday party. It is just a party but it will have a Reactor spin on it to make a little more of it. It’s a fancy dress affair and will be about people regressing and thinking about a costume you’d choose when you were ten. Pil and Galia Kollectiv are curating this music event so there’s three performances happening with bands as part of that. Then Daniel Oliver is curating an event called Live Art Dogging which is a series of one-on-one performances for voyeuristic audiences. We’re also working on a project for a village in North Wales. That’s going to be quite involved.

Dan: We’re looking for people to take a few days with us and take a little break.

Niki: It’s an immersive idea but on a slightly larger scale than we’ve ever done before.

You’ve also just released a DVD...

Niki: This is the second DVD we’ve done and is a more varied package in that it contains six distinct projects that have happened over the last six years. It’s never going to be like you were there but it gives you a flavour.

Dan: It’s edited to be like a journey through the work. Some of them are a little more complicated than others. There’s loads of interviews and some guest commentaries too.

Reactor Halls E02 followed by a performance from Pil and Galia Kollectiv happens on Wednesday 14 December. reactor.org.uk

SOCIAL ARTWORKING interview: Tom Norton

leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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Christmas: a time for ramming your chatty hand into a massive tin o’duddoos. Why not make it even more special with LeftLion’s very own Clumber Street tuffeh tin? Making it couldn’t be simpler...

T’INSTRUCTIONS 1. Cut out panels around outlines.

2. Mount onto card.

3. Laminate cut-out panels - if you work somewhere that lets you get away with that sort of thing.

4. Glue panels onto a deep Quality Street tin, not one of these mingy shallow ones where you only get three fudge ones.

5. Hang on, actually you should have stuck the whole page onto some card and then cut that out, because you’ve got some jagged bits now.

6. No, that looks rammel. You’re right cack-handed, aren’t you? And you’ve not been holding your mouth right while you were cutting out, we noticed.

7. Have a go at us for wasting your time, when in actual fact it’s obviously your fault for cocking it up somehow. Don’t tek it out on us because you’ve spent an hour on it.

Would you put your hand in the fire if LeftLion told you to? Well? Would you?

illustrations: Rikki Marr lettering: James Huyton

Craft Werks Rhea Clements

With Christmasfast approaching we’ve turned the Artworks spotlight onto some of the craftier members of our community

Jo Want

Hannah Sawtell

This is one of my most popular necklaces from my ‘Tweetness & Light’ jewellery collection and it is made from laser cut acrylic and birch plywood. First I doodle my designs on my Macbook, then I have to send off the shapes to be cut elsewhere - mainly for health & safety reasons, I shouldn’t be allowed near a laser, let alone own one. When the pieces return I start a mini production line and put my creations together.

I occasionally work freelance at Wollaton Hall, and have since become more appreciative of the building and the grounds. Driving into the grounds, you are initially aware of the tree lined avenues.

Moments later, you notice the hall surrounded by the stillness of morning set against the context of changing seasons - be that misty leaf-swept autumn or hopeful bright springtime - accompanied by deer and the occasional morning jogger or dog walker.

Samantha Gallagher Photography

My collar scarves are made using 100% cotton yarn on a hand powered knitting machine. Each piece is then finished by hand. I am always designing and making new things but currently my range consists of knitted scarves and knitted jewellery.

I have always loved textiles and began working with yarn by embroidering with it. When I was sixteen a friend taught me to hand knit; she thought it was strange that I loved yarn but couldn’t knit.

Ever since then I’ve been fascinated with how you can transform a strand of yarn into a 3D piece. From hand knitting I moved on to machine knitting and from there I was hooked. My machine and I still have our off days; we have a love/hate relationship.

Rhea Clements Designs began in 2010 but I have been making since I was a little girl and am used to fiddling with wire to make jewellery and thread to make and embellish clothes. I am a very hands-on person and love to learn new things. Function drives the design of each item, creating an easy to use and functional product. I am also inspired by contrasting colours and clean lines. I really like simple pieces that have a little quirk to them, I think it makes them playful yet wearable. I draw a lot of colour inspiration from nature including flowers and marine life. The world is a colourful place.

I got into making scarves and jewellery simple because I love wearing both; I always like to be wrapped up and cosy. The collar scarf was born because I love wearing scarves but found that a standard scarf dangles and gets in the way. I wear mine about the house now and it lets me be stingy with the heating. I love the jewellery because there isn’t much knitted jewellery out there and I feel it’s quirky yet easy to wear.

Nottingham Handmade was set up by myself and Katie Stainer to help give makers opportunities they could not participate in as individuals. We began last year with a chalet on the Nottingham Christmas Market. Six designers shared one space which meant the rent and the manning of the chalet could be easily managed. This year we are back again from Wednesday 21 November, but this time with seven designers. rheaclements.co.uk

My jewellery ranges include necklaces, brooches, earrings and lapel pins. I also design and doodle a range of greetings cards as well as take on commissions for illustrated caricatures, which I call ‘Sunshines’. I have been making and doodling things for a fair few moons now and from being very little I’ve cut, stuck, doodled and made a mess in the name of creating lovely things for friends and family. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I started taking Hello Sunshine and my little business seriously, though.

My inspiration comes from the playful nature of animals, people and everyday life, sprinkled with a bit of humour and positivity. My friends and family are a wonderful source of inspiration and motivation for me too; without them I wouldn’t have nearly as much sunshine to share.

The magic all happens in my spare room/studio in my teeny tiny house in Beeston - Sunshine Towers.

By day I am an Assistant Brand Manager for the Christmas Brand team at Boots HQ where I help design Christmas gifts… you could say I’m a bit of an elf. Night time, though, is when Hello Sunshine comes to life.

Call me soppy but I’m all about making people happy and when I hear that my work helps put a smile on someone’s face it is the best feeling in the world.

Being able to do what I enjoy and actually know that people get something more than just a piece of jewellery or a doodle in their hand at the end is why I love doing this.

You can find stockists of my work on my website and I will be at the following festive fairs so come and say hello: Nottingham Contemporary on 1-2 December and Craft in the City on 8-9 December. hello-sunshine.co.uk

Wollaton Hall is among a series of prints whereby I have striven to document the vibrancy and movement of a location. My initial inspiration for this approach began when driving through Sherwood, noticing the hustle and bustle of busy people using the high street. I wanted to capture the connection between people and place. I have also worked on illustrations that aim to capture everyday moments set against the interior of the home. When working on Watching Telly I wanted to highlight the significance of supposedly everyday banal moments.

I work from a mixture of photographs and life, beginning with a drawing on paper, incorporating digital media to produce a ‘mixed media’ collage effect. This approach has further been developed to also incorporate a 3D approach whereby small objects such as toy cars or dolls-house furniture form a part of the print. My pieces can take anything from a couple of days to a couple of weeks to produce depending on the size and detail involved. I also undertake commissions.

From an early age I have drawn in sketchbooks, documenting school, college and university life as well as early parenthood. But the birth of my two children forced me to address how I aimed to use my time, and ask whether I wanted to turn something that I loved doing into a source of employment. My husband is a self-employed composer and his approach to doing something you love to also pay the bills has encouraged and inspired me to try to do the same.

I will be at Nottingham Contemporary on 1-2 December, at gifted.12 NCCD Christmas market in Sleaford on 15 December and in an exhibition at Sock Gallery in Loughborough from 4 December to 15 January 2013. hannahsawtell.co.uk

Jessica Hayes-Gill The majority of the collection is focused on tools and objects that as a society we dismiss in our hectic lives - it’s functional and practical vs decorative and beautiful. Household Helpers turns a range of kitchen tools from a lemon grinder to a nut cracker into characters to help you dry those dishes.

Each character is individual and has a personal identity. I have had several customers that study the design and relate to who they think each character reminds them of. It makes them laugh which is satisfying for me. 22 utensils were selected, linear handdrawn and individually transferred into hand-cut stencil figurines. Each utensil was then animated using ink drawings for the second layer of the design. Both layers were then separately silk screened onto the tea towel. This design was an ongoing piece.

However once the artwork was produced the printing process doesn’t take long and you can churn a few out at a time.

I studied Graphics Art and Design at university with an adoration of textile design. I love home furnishings and the impact that they have on our lives and so with my knowledge of graphics and interest in textiles I combined the two to create a signature style. I feel that as a society we live in a fast-paced environment but we ought to slow down, spend time with friends and family.

The kitchen table is the place to solve the problem.

I started the business officially after I completed The Hive at NTU in 2011; it mentally and physically prepared me to start selling through trade and retail. Running my own design label, I find it difficult to find time for things that aren’t work. However, when it comes to birthdays and celebrations I can’t help creating machine-sewn stuffed teddies, from monsters to bunnies, for gifts. I have a passion for pottery too, and would love to do ceramics one day.

One of my heroes is the English designer Terence Conran. He once said, “I believe our products are well designed, robustly made and look great in your home and will do for many years to come. I hope I have remained true to my fundamental aim throughout my life – to produce useful things at a price that most people can afford.” That’s my ethos too. jessicahayesgill.com

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Karen Marsh

The Lilly is a fifties inspired pin-up playsuit that’s machine sewed and then finished by hand. It takes about six hours from pattern cutting to completion whereas other more intricate dresses take around ten hours to complete. I make my clothes from 100% cotton imported from the States - I’m like a child in a sweet shop when it comes to choosing. My clothes are available either off the peg or made to order - people love that because they get to pick their own fabric for their chosen garment.

My mum and nan were seamstresses and watching Mum create things for me when I was a little girl made me want to to be able to do it myself. I was put off at school by an impatient teacher who told me that I couldn’t work a sewing machine - being easily influenced at fourteen I never looked back into it or even tried. But after a big life change and a talking to from my sister-in-law a few years ago, I looked into part-time courses and stumbled upon the Textile Workshop in Sherwood. Making a dress was extremely time consuming and a lot harder than I’d imagined; I couldn’t comprehend how people made these items and sold them so cheaply. But as I gained more experience and knowledge I made good time without compromising the quality of the items.

I make a vast assortment of things, from clutch bags to make-up bags, playsuits to prom dresses, pencil to A-line skirts, baby dresses to ties. I also make homeware including aprons and cushion covers. My website has been going for a year now. I created a range a few months before that so I could have a varied stock - it’s terrible going on a website and finding only a couple of things to browse.

Whenever I make new ranges I like to work with different models and photographers to try out new styles of shooting and get a varied look on the website. It’s a lengthy process and as I am a ‘one woman army’ it takes a lot of organising.

Music has been a big influence on me, especially the Seattle scene of the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Pearl Jam and Nirvana were my favourites and taught me to be individual. My love of quirky things that stand out from a crowd, daring to be a little bit different than everyone else and not following what everyone else is doing.

I will be holding a stall at the Four Seasons Shopping Centre in Mansfield on the 1-2 December. as part of a pop-up shop that’ll be between Ann Summers and Orange. rosehandmade.co.uk

Emma Williams

Katrine Brosnan

Matthew Brooks

I was really happy when these bowls came out of the kiln - the deep blue on the base of the one on the right was just as intense as I’d been hoping it would be, and the rough textured ‘crawl’ glaze on the insides had come out really well too. They’re called, quite simply, Small Round Bowls - a straightforward title, but for me the simple vessel-like ceramic forms I create (all of which are purely decorative, apart from a series of new brooches) are really a vehicle for the main focus in my work - the glazes.

This is a pigeon called Pete who has a new scarf.

Oh, and it’s also a brooch for your winter coat or Christmas jumper.

I have always been fascinated by the way in which smells can evoke a time or a place and, in particular, moments in our collective social history. For example, let anyone over fifty smell a piece of carbolic soap and they will instantly relay memories of school and childhood (and perhaps punishments for foul language).

They’re made from a black stoneware clay, which is rolled out and pressed into a plaster mould with a sponge and water. I remove the bowls from the mould when they’ve hardened a little, flatten the base and scrape them with metal, kidney shaped tools to give them a lighter, more delicate feel.

After a first biscuit firing in my electric kiln, I pour and dip my work into a range of vibrantly coloured and highly textured glazes. As the textured ‘crawl’ glaze heats up in a second kiln firing to 1050ºC, it begins to pull or ‘crawl’ away from the surface of the clay - the thickness at which it’s applied determines the size of the ‘flakes’ and the pattern created, which is unique to each piece.

I draw a lot of inspiration for my work from the natural world, but I’m influenced by so many things I see around me from day to day, whether it’s peeling paint on a weathered door, lichen on a stone wall, or the beautiful fly agaric mushrooms I’ve seen in the woods at Rufford Country Park.

I specialised in ceramics in my final year of the Decorative Arts degree course at Nottingham Trent University in 1999, and have since combined teaching ceramics and working with other ceramicists with creating my own work. I set up my studio with the help of a grant and loan from the Prince’s Trust in 2003, but I’m now making and selling my work full-time at galleries and events across the country.

Visitors to my studio at Nottingham Artists’ Group on Carrington Street in the city centre are welcome by appointment. ew-ceramics.co.uk

I designed him by hand and then finished him digitally before sending off for the wood to be cut into the shape of Pete. Next, I screen printed the little details, like Pete’s inquisitive eye and wings, and made sure his scarf was on nice and snug. I have a range of Pete and Petra brooches including, ‘Pete wears his bowler hat’ and ‘Petra wears her heels to avoid stumpy feet.’ They come in their very own screen printed gift boxes.

I’ve loved pigeons for ages now and made a little book about them a few years ago. I watch lots of pigeons roosting near my bus stop on my way to work and I think those sleepy mornings probably inspired the Pete and Petra story. I see them as characters and a lot like people, more and more since the Conservatives got in as they often look down on their luck. I’ve started taking photos of lucky pigeons, the ones that have found a Gregg’s pasty or a twothirds full chip tray. I even saw one queuing in a bakery the other day.

Other designs that I have created I have printed onto wooden decorations, tea towels, cards and mugs.I love the satisfying and tactile nature of printing so most of my illustrative work is screen printed. Screen printing is also very physical and I am very slack with any other exercise, so it serves a dual purpose for me.

I sell some work through folksy and at local fairs. I have always loved drawing which lends itself well to printmaking.

Recently I worked with two friends to produce a craft book called 20 Crafty Makes to raise money for the Stroke Association. I created a cut-out owl, and designed the branding and layout for the book which we had printed locally. We’ve had a brilliant response so far and it was featured in The Guardian. The book makes a stellar christmas gift and it’s the perfect price for a secret santa pressie too at just a fiver. All proceeds go to the charity, you can pick up a copy from one of my stalls or from folksy.

Come and see me at the Nottingham Comtemporary fair 1-2 December and Craft in the City, at Waterstones 14-15 December. katrinebrosnan.co.uk 20craftymakes.folksy.com

The Cedar Embers candle is my favourite within the range of Nota Bene scented candles which I make by hand. It is inspired by the evocative smell of burning wood. The merest wisp of wood smoke evokes everything from someone lighting a wood stove, woodland bonfires or childhood camping to visiting country houses with open fires in deepest midwinter.

Although it’s not a conventionally ‘pretty’ scent, I hope it will allow people to reminisce and reflect.

Nota Bene is the Latin for ‘note well’ - usually shortened to N.B. - because I want my products to be memorable and noteworthy; all are essentially inspired by my love of the past and social history and my belief in the power of scent to transport one, if momentarily, to another time.

I use only natural ingredients: the wax base is vegetable and contains no paraffin wax, and the fragrances are entirely composed from natural botanical extracts and essences. I mix the fragrances by hand (and nose) just before combining with the hot, melted wax and pouring this by hand into clear glass votives.

My packaging is inspired by simpler times - colours are muted and only pared-back materials are used - heavy sugar paper, waxed parchment and gummed tape. I print all my labels on my fifties letterpress using oldfashioned lead type, some of which is over a hundred years old, and linseed-based inks. I wrap each candle by hand, which can be time consuming, but I think it is really important to ensuring the finished article is something interesting and memorable.

Alongside candles I also make a series of hand-cut and bound notebooks, ranging from a watercolour book to work books and even a photograph album. As with the candles, materials are simple, colours are muted, and all printing is done on my letterpress.

I will be at Nottingham Contemporary on 1-2 December and Craft In The City at Waterstones on 8-9 December. folksy.com/shops/notabeneletterpress

leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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LEFTLION featured listing...

LISTINGS THE UNORIGINAL DECEMBER 12 – JANUARY 13

TICKETS ON-LION

Buying tickets for events in Notts? From the latest DJs at Stealth to the latest bands at venues like Spanky Van Dykes and the Rescue Rooms, you can get them all through our website, at no extra cost. Even better, thanks to our partnership with gigantic.com, every time you buy one through us some of the funds will go towards LeftLion and a bit more goes to those nice folks at Oxfam. leftlion.co.uk/tickets

AND BEST

interview: Paul Klotschkow photo: Rusty Sheriff

SCOTT PILGRIM V MARKET STREET Wander down Market Street and you will notice a tastefully filled window dedicated to the fine art of comics and a distinctive speech bubble sign telling you you’re at the one-stop comic shop of Page 45. We’re all aware now that comics are not just for kids, the stigma has long been lifted, and this gem of an independent shop is testament to this having stood firm for nearly twenty years.

Stacked – very neatly - to the rafters with a host of comics and graphic novels, from the more common offerings to some rare finds, it’s a treasure trove for fans of words and pictures alike. Don’t believe us that this shop is pretty damn awesome? Shame on you, we never lie, and neither does one of the high priests of graphic novels, Neil Gaiman. He fancies it as the best graphic novel shop he’s ever set his inventive feet in. Oh, and they won the Diamond Comics Award for Best UK Retailer and the 2012 Best Independent Retailer in Nottingham award. And did I mention Neil Gaiman hearts them?

If you’re new to comics and you can’t tell your Will Eisner from your Frank Miller, are wondering where exactly to start in the gargantuan Marvel back catalogue, or you have an aversion to superheroes and just want something pretty to indulge in, this is the shop to stop at. They are all obsessed and love nothing more than guiding you through their world without ever judging your dubious tastes, in fact they may even encourage them. Page 45 aren’t just about sorting out us aging readers either, they work with local schools and libraries too to encourage literacy in little ones – a bit more exciting than Peter and Jane, you’ll agree.

Page 45 are also rather fond of inviting some of the comic book world’s greatest stars over for a nice cuppa tea and a chat. One such couple who have recently RSVP’d are Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson, and they’ll be bringing their own pens to do some signing. If you haven’t dropped this magazine and started running around the room screaming yet, let me explain: for comic fans, Bryan and Hope coming to Nottingham is like Brad and Angelina popping into Broadway. Respective authors of Scott Pilgrim and Salamander Dream, the couple love our citeh so much that they disrupted their honeymoon to come to Page 45, and to be photographed with the lions. OK, the last bit may have been made up… But who cares, they’re back and if you missed them the first time - or can’t wait to see them again – mark a big X on your calendar.

Bryan Lee O’Malley & Hope Larson will be at Page 45 on Sunday 9 December, 9 Market Street, NG1 6HY page45.com

For even more comprehensive and detailed listings: leftlion.co.uk/listings.

Get your event in this magazine and on our website: leftlion.co.uk/add.

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leftlion.co.uk/issue50

Chris Summerlin and John ‘Simmo’ Simson: they’ve played in some of the top bands in town, but tonight, Matthew (assuming that you’re reading this on Saturday 22 December and your name actually is Matthew) they’re going to be putting on one of the most celebrated events on the Notts gig calendar; the Damn You! Annual Christmas Covers Party...

For the uninitiated, how would you describe the Covers Party?

Chris: It’s the Christmas office party for Nottingham bands - the arse-on-the-photocopier, get-off-with-the-secretary kind of night.

How did the idea come about?

Chris: A band called Seachange started it. We used to do this monthly curated club night called Why Can’t We Just All Get Along at Junktion 7; for the Christmas one they thought they would invite ten bands to play a couple of songs each.

What makes it different from the usual covers nights that you get around town?

Chris: We have all of these rules in place; under no circumstances can you tell anyone outside your band what you’re going to play.

Plus, you can’t cover songs that have already been covered and we check people’s choices. It sounds really heavy, but it means that for people who go every year there’s a continuation and it’s really exciting. We still talk about things that people have done at Christmas Covers that are mind-blowing.

Simmo: There’s something really interesting about seeing people who are passionate and serious about music having fun, pissing about and doing something that they have secretly wanted to do since they were nine. Plus, the bands only have fifteen minutes to play. As a musician there are always songs that you’ve wanted to cover, but somehow you have to whittle it down to three and keep them a secret.

Chris: It’s so stupid, but we take it seriously. I spoke to a band who are playing this year, and they said that they wanted to do something that was in keeping with the type of music that they usually make, because they felt that some of last year’s choices were too cheesy. I said to them that if they do that they are never playing it again as it’s not about that. You have to pick something that makes people go (punches the air); it shouldn’t be “Hmm, Velvet Underground, good choice” (strokes chin).

Simmo: The bands only have fifteen minutes to play. As a musician there are always songs that you’ve wanted to cover, but somehow you have to whittle it down to three.

And it’s all for charity.

Chris: That occurred to us in 2006. The first year we raised money for Cancer Research, then Macmillan. Then we decided to give it to Nottinghamshire Hospice.

Simmo: They have an operational running deficit every year of £12 million. 30% of their running costs are covered by the NHS, but the remaining 70% has to be raised through fundraising, patrons and

donations. So if you give them something like £2,000, it really helps.

It’s pretty much established as a Bodega event, now.

Chris: We don’t even need to ask them to book us in - the last Saturday before Christmas is set aside for us in their diary. They don’t have to do that; they could have some club night on for students, and it would make them much more money. We really appreciate their help; it’d be so much harder without them.

How can bands get involved?

Chris: If you want to play it, come along to the event one year, get a feel for it, then get in touch with us. We’re usually oversubscribed though, we had about thirty bands ask this year but that’s great.

A website has been set up that informs people how they can put on their own Christmas Covers night...

Chris: It’s put together by James Vyner, who used to be the bassist in Seachange, and it gives instructions on how to do it, some of the pitfalls we have had and how you overcome them; like how you can get a venue to give you the last Saturday before Christmas for free. Even if you don’t sell out somewhere you could still make a few hundred quid for charity.

What is the Holy Grail of Christmas Covers songs?

Chris: You can’t talk about these things! It’s the first rule of Christmas Covers: don’t tell anyone what you’re covering. We know what our choices are for this year, but we just can’t tell you…

How does Christmas Covers tie in to the Damn You! ethos?

Chris: It’s the idea of community over the individual. The night is a great leveller. The ethos that Damn You! has is that you could see the greatest band that you have ever seen opening up at 8pm for a few quid - it’s not about the size of the band and that really shows at the Covers Party.

What would you say to someone who has never been?

Chris: It’s the best gig of the year. Even if you don’t know the bands, it doesn’t matter - you will hear some music that you really love. If someone does an amazing unexpected song and everyone’s drunk enough you will see people going absolutely mental. And if you are single, you will definitely pull.

Damn You Presents: The 11th Annual Christmas Covers Party, The Bodega, Saturday 22 December 2012. nottshospice.org

music event listings...

Saturday 01/12

Sunday 02/12

Nine Below Zero The Rescue Rooms £15, 7pm

An Evening With Oh Susanna (Can) The Maze £10, 7.30pm

Rancid Rock City 6.30pm Poizon Stealth £8.50, 7pm Sounddhism The Bodega Nosh n Splosh The White Lion Public House £12, 9pm Broken Mandarins The Running Horse Shiva & Entice Xmas Ball Hidden Nightclub £12 adv, 10pm - 6am Joe Strange The Approach Free, 7:30pm Pesky Alligators The Lion Inn Shefford Smith The Malt Cross Batronic The Maze Mas Y Mas Nottingham Contemporary Free, 7:30pm Good Times DJ The Southbank Bar The Small Disco Spanky Van Dykes Free, 9pm Shake & Bake Jam Café Free, 7:30pm Free & Live Music Cafe Bar Contemporary Free, 7:30pm

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

Take 4 with Mellow The Lion Free, 1:30pm - 3:30pm Gemma Hayes The Glee Club £8, 7.30pm Open Mic Night Hotel Deux Live Music with Gemma Hayes The Glee Club £8 / £10, 7:30pm Pete The Feet The Hand and Heart Take 4 with Mellow The Lion Inn Roasts Records & The Big Quiz Spanky Van Dykes Music Quiz Jam Café Free, 7pm Farmyard Presents : Damon Downs The Golden Fleece

Monday 03/12 Rizzle Kicks Rock City Band of Skulls The Rescue Rooms Dirty Mondays The Forum Freakbeat The Bodega Open Mic The Golden Fleece Tequila The Rescue Rooms Freakbeat The Bodega Free, 9pm

NEW YEARS GLEEVE

Four top comedians see in 2013 with a bang If you want to laugh off 2012, the Glee Club - that rather good music and comedy venue by the Waterfront - has pulled out all the stops for their New Years Eve do, having convinced four - four! - of the UK circuit’s top performers to spend Hogmanay in a hotel for our entertainment. Mint.

After a slap-up meal and a few drinks in Cafe Glee, you’ll be left in the capable hands of Joe Bor (observational character comedian, actor, writer and one of the country’s most promising comperes), Adam Bloom (one of Ricky Gervais’ favourite stand-ups and a Chortle Award 2012 nominee), Sara Pascoe (voted one of Time Out’s Rising Stars Of Comedy and a regular in Twenty Twelve, The Thick of It and Being Human), and Michael Fabbri (another Chortle Award nominee and one of the brightest new performers on the circuit). And then, the clock will strike twelve and the party will kick off big style.

New Years Eve at Glee, Monday 31 December, 7pm-late The Glee Club, British Waterways Building, Castle Wharf, Canal Street NG1 7EH. Tickets: £24.50 glee.co.uk/nottingham

Monday 03/12

Monday 03/12

Thursday 06/12

Brett Wells Bonington Theatre £4 - £6, 7:30pm

Escapists The Bodega £6, 7pm

Little Angels – One More for the Road Tour Rock City £18.50, 6.30pm

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Fuck Hip Hop The Market Bar £5, 9.30pm

Acoustic Night Spanky Van Dykes

Tuesday 04/12 Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of The Worlds: Nottingham Arena The Damned Rock City £18, 7.30pm Aspire: Creative Music Workshop The New Art Exchange

‘48 THRILLS Beeston Library, meet mad genius poet

A joint venture between Nottinghamshire Library Services, Nottingham Poetry Society and Five Leaves Publications, Beeston Poets brings some of the country’s best wordsmiths to Beeston Library.

Rounding out a year where the likes of Jackie Kay and Neil Astley have already appeared will be Andy Croft. The author of five novels and forty-two books for teenagers, mostly about football, Croft is best known as the brains behind the unconventional and radical poetry publisher Smokestack Books.

His own collections include two novels entirely written in Pushkin sonnets, Ghost Writer and 1948 (and when we say ‘entirely’ we mean everything, including the foreword, contents and acknowledgements).

Andy will be reading primarily from 1948, recently Nicholas Lezard’s Paperback of the Week in The Guardian. It’s a comic novel straight out of an Ealing comedy set during the postWar London Olympics, and includes Russian spies, London gangsters and useless poets. We guarantee it will be the best poetry reading you’ll ever go to, so do not hang about.

Andy Croft,Saturday 8 December, Beeston Library, Foster Avenue, NG9 1AE. Tickets £7 (£5 concessions) beestonpoets.wordpress.com

Baauer Dogma £3, 9:30pm The Slow Show The Malt Cross The Manfreds 50th Anniversary Tour Royal Centre

Wednesday 05/12

Shared Christmas Party Nottingham Contemporary £15, 7pm Tim Lapthorn Trio featuring Bobby Wellins Bonington Theatre £5 - £12 (kids go free), 8pm 10:30pm Lust For Life Spanky Van Dykes Wire & Wool The Alley Cafe

Miss May I The Rescue Rooms £10, 6pm

Best Of British The Approach Free, 7:30pm

Leftlion Pub Quiz The Golden Fleece

The Snake Davis Band Bonington Theatre £15/10, 7:30pm

Ultrasound The Bodega £8, 7pm

This Song Is For You Broadway Cafe Bar

Richie Muir The Approach 7:30pm

Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn

Squeeze Royal Centre

Madness Nottingham Arena £35 / £45, 7:30pm

Funhouse Live Spanky Van Dykes

Roger Davies Nottingham Playhouse

Open Mic Night Jam Café

Jools Holland and his Rhythmn and Blues Orchestra Royal Centre

Thursday 06/12 Beth Orton The Rescue Rooms Admiral Fallow The Bodega £9, 7pm

Legion Spanky Van Dykes Ambience : Joe Strange Band Jam Café Farmyard Presents : Band Of Jackals The Golden Fleece leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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music event listings...

Friday 07/12

Saturday 08/12

Ben Ottewell The Bodega £12.50, 7pm

The Small Disco Spanky Van Dykes

InMe Rock City £12, 6.30pm Dollop Stealth £10, 10pm Wildwood The Approach Free, 7:30pm - 7:30pm Free Fridays Bunkers Hill Inn Free, 7:30pm Transmission The Cookie Club £2 - £5, 9pm Derrin Nauendorf Hotel Deux Highness Soundsystem Marcus Garvey Ballroom £12 min, 10pm - 5am

Stiff Kittens The Bodega Sounds Of The Unexpected Jam Café Free & Live Music Cafe Bar Contemporary

Sunday 09/12 Thin Lizzy Rock City £25, 7.30pm Ben Martin The Lion Records : Out To Christmas Lunch Spanky Van Dykes Farmyard Presents The Golden Fleece

Monday 10/12

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

JTT + NYE = TEE HEE HEE

The Cornerhouse’s pure jokes venue sees in 2013 properly Just the Tonic’s New Year’s Eve shows have been selling our every year since 1996 (except the millennium, when everything went pear-shaped for everyone but that’s a story for another day). Why so popular, you ask? Because they cough-up a generous amount of early bird tickets, they guarantee a seat for everyone, they get things started by 7pm, they lay out a devastating array of talent until 10.45pm, and then they turn the joint into a nightclub to cater to your dancing/drinking/snogging-related requirements. Rather sensibly, they’re doing exactly the same this year.

The line-up includes Hospital Radio DJ (and Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee) Ivan Brackenbury, mentalist Canadian (and Edinburgh Comedy Award winner) and outstanding newcomer Romesh Ranganathan, who is taking a night out from touring with Seann Walsh.

Your compere for the night: big-gummed JTT regular Eric Lampaert. Those early bird tickets are available at a mere £15 until December 10th, then prices go up slightly. So get weaving.

And if you can’t wait for 2013 to roll along, we’ve been asked to let you know that the likes of Henning Wehn, The Boy With Tape On His Face, Gary Delaney, Terry Alderton have already been confirmed. And it goes without saying that their highly regarded Saturday night comedy club will be showcasing Phil Kay, Lucy Porter, Jeff Innocent, Imran Yusuf, Rob Rouse, Josh Widdicombe, and even Mark Little - Joe Mangel from Neighbours. And if you book in advance online, you can get in for as little as a tenner.

Just The Tonic, The Forum, Burton Street NG1 4DB

Kelly’s Heroes The Lion Inn

Dirty Mondays The Forum

Mellow Baku Nottingham Contemporary

Freakbeat The Bodega

Wednesday 12/12

Friday 14/12

Saturday 15/12

Nottingham Classics : Sinfonia VIVA Royal Centre

Open Mic The Golden Fleece

Peter Andre Royal Centre

Aspire: Choir Performance The New Art Exchange 6:30pm - 7:30pm

KOLD Chillin The Old Angel

Tequila The Rescue Rooms

Funhouse Spanky Van Dykes

Freakbeat The Bodega

Open Mic Night Jam Café Free, 7:30pm

Native / Bayone / Dead Sailors JT Soar

Thursday 13/12

Joe Strange Band and Good Times DJ The Southbank Bar Whip It Spanky Van Dykes Free, 9pm Assault Spanky Van Dykes £2 / £3, 9:30pm Farmyard Records Presents Jam Café

Tuesday 11/12 Epica The Rescue Rooms £16, 6.30pm

Saturday 08/12

Aspire: Creative Music Workshop The New Art Exchange

Iron on Maiden Rock City £10, 6.30pm

Kiss Kiss Oceana £5/£4

The Petebox The Rescue Rooms £7, 7pm

Ellie Goulding Rock City £22.50, 7.30pm

Prepostorous Monkeez The Running Horse

Fuck Hip Hop The Market Bar £5, 9.30pm

The Crimson Ghosts The Doghouse £4 / £5, 7pm - 1am Joe Strange The Approach Sticky Moralis The Lion Inn Kerblammo The Maze X-Rays The Navigation Live Jake and Elwoods Christmas Party Royal Centre Good Times DJ The Southbank Bar

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Detour Presents : D&B Soc Dogma £3, 10pm - 3am The Overtones Royal Centre

Wednesday 12/12 Enter Shikari Rock City £18, 6pm Leftlion Pub Quiz The Golden Fleece The Famous Class The Rescue Rooms £6, 6pm Richie Muir The Approach

justthetonic.com/nottingham-comedy

Shared Christmas Party Nottingham Contemporary £15, 7pm Sector7 Bonington Theatre £5 - £12 (kids go Free), 8pm TRC Rock City £7, 6.30pm Lust For Life Spanky Van Dykes Best Of British The Approach Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn The Magic of Christmas Royal Centre Legion Spanky Van Dykes Open Mic The Lion Inn Farmyard Presents : Muha The Golden Fleece

Friday 14/12 Dappy Rock City £15, 6.30pm Shared Christmas Party Nottingham Contemporary £15, 7pm

Jagerbomb Party The White Lion Public House £12, 9pm Wildwood The Approach Skarabouche The Lion Inn Perdition V’s Violated The Maze

Seasfire Stealth £5, 10pm Joe Strange The Approach Fatal Charm The Navigation Live Good Times DJ The Southbank Bar

Bootleg Beatles Royal Centre

Hemulen Soundz Birthday Carnival Jam Café

Joe Strange Band The Southbank Bar

Free and Live Music Café Bar Contemporary

Whip It Spanky Van Dykes

Sunday 16/12

Joanna Hudson’s Album Launch Jam Café Mick Rutherford The Running Horse

Saturday 15/12 The Rasmus Rock City £12, 6.30pm 3 Chord Malone The Lion Lionel Richie Nottingham Arena £50, 6.30pm The Crash Factory Christmas Party #4 The Chameleon Cafe Bar Bad Axe The Running Horse Indiana Nottingham Contemporary £5, 7.30pm

Shipston Street Jazz Orchestra The Lion The Lion Music Quiz The Lion Johnny and the Raindrops BIG Xmas show!

Polish Club £4, 2:30pm - 4:30pm Sunday Jazz Cafe Bar Contemporary Kate Rusby Nottingham Contemporary Quofestive Royal Centre Farmyard Presents : Big Mono The Golden Fleece

Monday 17/12 Dirty Mondays The Forum Freakbeat The Bodega

Malt Cross

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music listings...

Monday 17/12

Thursday 20/12

Tequila The Rescue Rooms

Best Of British The Approach

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Under The Christmas Tree The Bodega

Beer and Carols The Malt Cross

Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn

Tuesday 18/12

A West End Christmas Royal Centre

Katatonia The Rescue Rooms £14, 6.30pm

Legion Spanky Van Dykes

Aspire: Creative Music Workshop The New Art Exchange

Infinity Spanky Van Dykes

Molotov Jukebox The Bodega £10, 7pm

Christmas Open Mic and Alt Nativity Play The Lion Inn

The Halle Christmas Concert Royal Centre

Farmyard Records Christmas Long Weekend Jam Café

Wednesday 19/12 Leftlion Pub Quiz The Golden Fleece Richie Muir The Approach Funhouse Spanky Van Dykes Open Mic Night Jam Café

Thursday 20/12 Shared Christmas Party Nottingham Contemporary £15, 7pm Lust For Life Spanky Van Dykes Acoustickle - Christmas Special The Maze Acoustickle vs. Electrickle ‘END OF THE WORLD’ The Maze £3, 7:30pm - 2am

Farmyard Presents : Lawrence Libor The Golden Fleece

Friday 21/12 Shared Christmas Party Nottingham Contemporary £15, 7pm

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

NYE STATE OF MIND

The Summer’s best music fest returns - on ice As anyone who knows the gig calendar back to front will tell you, one of the absolute highlights of the year was June’s Waterfront Festival. Now in its fourth year, it gathers together some of the hottest local talent, herds them into the deceptively massive Canalhouse bar on said Waterfront, and makes them do their thing all night long in order to raise as much dollar as possible for some extremely worthy causes.

But why are we rattling on about it in December - those halcyon summer days are gone. We’re not getting unnecessarily nostalgic, it’s been decided to introduce Nottingham’s best summer party to the biggest party night of the year: New Years Eve itself.

Like the original event, it’ll be rammeth with the cream of the NottsMusic crop with The Smears, Royal Gala, Pilgrim Fathers, and Long Dead Signal already on board and more to follow. Brought to you by The Maze, Audacious Face and I’m Not From London and sponsored

by Castle Rock Brewery and LeftLion (and you know we don’t put our names to any old toss), it’ll raise money for the Nottingham Hospitals Charity (who are trying to raise £2.1m for a new Cystic Fibrosis unit) and SCOPE. At a mere £10 a ticket, you can’t fanny about on this one; if you’re coming, get on it now before it sells out.

New Years Eve Waterfront Festival, Monday 31 December, 8 til late, The Canalhouse, 48-52 Canal Street, NG1 7EH waterfrontnotts.com

Saturday 22/12

Saturday 22/12

Friday 28/12

Discharge Rock City £10, 6.30pm

Ordinary Hero’s The Running Horse

Good Times DJ The Southbank Bar

Wildwood The Approach

Basslayerz - The Christmas Bash Stealth £10, 10pm

Ferocious Dog Rock City £3, 10pm

Maniere Des Bohemiens Cafe Bar Contemporary

Harry andThe Last Pedestrians The Lion Inn

Wildwood The Approach

Joe Strange The Approach

Farmyard Records Christmas Long Weekend Jam Café

Christmas with the Rat Pack Royal Centre

Buzzard The Lion Inn

Rise & Shine The Cookie Club £6/2, 9pm

Joe Strange Band The Southbank Bar Farmyard Records Christmas Long Weekend Jam Café

The Score The Lion Inn Family Carol Concert Royal Centre

WE’RE BUGGIN’ THE ANGEL INSTEAD Massive disco throwdown on Stoney Street for NYE

Celebrating the end of what has been a most excellent eighth year at the Bodega Social - its new home since the closure of it’s original base, Moog - Soul Buggin’ continues to fly the flag for all things disco and boogie in Nottingham. And let us pause a moment to feel the silky, smooth quality of what they’ve laid out in 2012; they’ve seen some stellar sets from the likes of Recloose, Ashley Beadle, Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson, Faze Action, Leftside Wobble, Cosmic Boogie, Luke Unabomber and Crazy P. To round off the year, they’ve decided to team up with local boogie boys (and occasional pamphleteers) Wild Honey for a monstrous one-off party upstairs at The Old Angel. The Wild Honey trio - Matthew Clarke, Mark Raynor and Fran Green - have been plying their trade around the Shire for many a year; their afternoon sunshine sessions consist of several deep boxes of musical delights, a sound system and a pile of their brilliant disco fanzine which offers banter, charts and soul-fuelled flavours a-plenty for the all night party goer - and with its dark, intimate confines, the upstairs of the Angel is going to be the perfect spot for one hell of a party to see in the new year. And only a fiver to get in? Gerraway.

Soul Buggin’ / Wild Honey NYE Party, Monday December 31, 9pm - 4am, The Old Angel, 7 Stoney Street, The Lace Market, NG1 1LG. Tickets: £5 soulbuggin.blogspot.co.uk

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Sunday 23/12

Joe Strange Band The Southbank Bar

Pete Johnson Band The Lion

Rock & Roll Jam Café

Open Mic Night Jam Café

Saturday 29/12

Monday 24/12

The Khan Band The Lion Inn

Freakbeat The Bodega

Hemulen Soundz Wax Cafe

Tequila The Rescue Rooms

Funk Jam Café

Shades Of Blue The Lion

Sunday 30/12

Wednesday 26/12 Leftlion Pub Quiz The Golden Fleece

Thursday 27/12 Lust For Life Spanky Van Dykes Best Of British The Approach Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn Open Mic The Lion Inn Funk Jam Café Ben Haynes The Golden Fleece

Ben Martin Quartet The Lion Farmyard and I’m Not From London Get Silly!

The Golden Fleece

Monday 31/12 New Year’s Eve - Mas Y Mas Nottingham Contemporary £15, 8pm Tequila The Rescue Rooms Fargo New Years eve The Running Horse Black Cherry Burlesque The Black Cherry Lounge £16, 8pm The Waterfront NYE Party Canal House £10, 7:30pm

music event listings...

Monday 31/12

Thursday 10/01

NYE Party Night Nottingham Contemporary £20, 7:30pm

Paul Carrack Royal Centre £27.50, 7pm

NYE Classical Gala Royal Centre

Best of British The Approach

NYE Party The Malt Cross £8, 8pm

Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn

DJ Del Castro The Orange Tree Shamus O’Blivion & The Megadeth Morrismen The Lion Inn

Ambience “Turned Up” Jam Café Live Music The Golden Fleece

Friday 11/01

Dollop New Years Eve Rock City, Rescue Rooms and Stealth £25 adv,8.30pm

Wildwood The Approach

Wednesday 02/01

Joe Strange Band The Southbank Bar

Richie Muir The Approach Richard Bower Bonington Theatre

Thursday 03/01 Wire and Wool The Alley Cafe Best of British The Approach Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn Live Music The Golden Fleece

Friday 04/01

Transmission The Cookie Club

Dick Venom Presents Jam Café

Saturday 12/01 Stiff Kittens The Bodega Motown Greatest Hits Royal Centre Shake & Bake Jam Café

Monday 14/01 Freakbeat The Bodega

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

MAZE ATTACKS!

Aliens and zombies invade Mansfield Road in a huge year-end binge Another year, another twelve months of non-stop gig-related frenzy by those nice people at The Maze - and they’re going to end it in collaboration with Nottingham’s top alt-rock night Von Spook Promotions, in an apocalyptic mashup of rock n’ roll, goth, rockabilly bands and DJs. With DJs from Batronic, DirtyFilthySexy, Darkedge, Nightmare and Ghoul Garden providing a dark-edged pop twist to the evening with a melange of eighties cheese underground punk, goth and rock anthems, the stage of the main room will be set for three of the darkest bands in the area. Vince Ripper and The Rodent Show is an insane combo of styles - goth-surf-apunkabilly n’ roll, if you will. Dick Venom and the Terrortones will deliver a barrage of energy-charged ramalama, while Notts goths fuse traditional positive punk attitudes to a doomladen sensibility with sublime effect.

There’s no escape elsewhere in the venue; upstairs in the Bendigo Lounge will be handled by Iridal, Rainbow Down and The Distancing, who will provide an electronic soundscape of ambient and upbeat synth pop to the upstairs room, which will be transformed in to a futuristic wonderland, while the Forest Tavern itself will be hosted by Perdition’s Duke Lavarge, playing the biggest anthems the hair rock world has to offer.

After all, if this really is the end of the world, you might as well go out singing and dancing unashamed to Toto. Fancy Dress is advisable: aliens, spaceperson, zombies and mutant rig-outs recommended.

End Of The World/Year Party, Monday 31 December, The Maze, 257 Mansfield Road, NG1 3FT. Tickets: £6 adv, £8 before 10pm, £10 after 10pm themazerocks.com

Friday 18/01

Thursday 24/01

Saturday 26/01

Wildwood The Approach

Stan Collymore and Bryan Roy The Approach £15, 6pm

Nottingham Philharmonic Orchestra Royal Centre

Best of British The Approach

Hemulen Sounds Wax Cafe

Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn

Funk and Soul Jam Café

Flossie Malavialle Nottingham Contemporary

Live Music Cafe Bar Contemporary

Ambience Jam Café

Sunday 27/01

Live Music The Golden Fleece

Donny and Marie Nottingham Arena £40 - £79, 7:30pm

I’m Not From London Presents Jam Café

Saturday 19/01 Joe Strange The Approach

Wildwood The Approach

Live Music with Danny Bowes The Glee Club £18.50, 7:30pm

Joe Strange Band The Southbank Bar

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Sunday 20/01

Saturday 05/01

Tuesday 15/01

Sunday Jazz Nottingham Contemporary

Joe Strange The Approach

Dan Davenport The Malt Cross

Live Music The Golden Fleece

Live Music The Lion Inn

Wednesday 16/01

Monday 21/01

Richie Muir The Approach

Freakbeat The Bodega

Funhouse Spanky Van Dykes

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Good Times DJ The Southbank Bar

Monday 07/01

Live Music Cafe Bar Contemporary

Freakbeat The Bodega

Open Mic Night Jam Café

Tuesday 22/01

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Thursday 17/01

Steve Cropper and The Animals Rock City £20, 7.30pm

Tuesday 08/01 Aspire: Creative Music Workshop The New Art Exchange

Wednesday 09/01 Anberlin The Rescue Rooms £10, 6.30pm Funhouse Spanky Van Dykes Open Mic Night Jam Café

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Dropkick Murphys Rock City £18.50, 6.30pm Best Of British The Approach Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn Shut Up and Listen Jam Café Live Music The Golden Fleece

Aaron Smith The Malt Cross Ronan Keating Royal Centre £32.50, 7:30pm Runs until: 23/01

Wednesday 23/01 Richie Muir The Approach Funhouse Spanky Van Dykes

Friday 25/01 Passenger The Rescue Rooms Wildwood The Approach

Louise Bessette Royal Centre Live Music The Golden Fleece

Monday 28/01

Paloma Faith Royal Centre

Freakbeat The Bodega

Farmyard Records Presents Jam Café

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Saturday 26/01

Little Mix Royal Centre £19.50 / £29.50, 7:30pm

999 The Rescue Rooms £8, 7pm

Tuesday 29/01

Black Light Burns Rock City £10, 6.30pm

Two Door Cinema Club Rock City

Flirting with Corpses The Running Horse

Anberlin The Rescue Rooms £10, 6.30pm

Joe Strange The Approach

Tuesday’s Live The Malt Cross

Jazz Steps Bonington Theatre £5 - £12, 8pm

Wednesday 30/01

Live Music The Lion Inn

Richie Muir The Approach

theatre and exhibition event listings...

Wednesday 30/01

Saturday 08/12

Funhouse Spanky Van Dykes

Cinderella Royal Centre Runs until: 16/12

Farmyard Records Presents : Shut Up & Listen Jam Café

Thursday 31/01 Cave Painting The Bodega £6, 7pm Open Mic Bunkers Hill Inn Live Music The Golden Fleece

THEATRE Saturday 01/12 Charles Dickens Feast Of Festive Frighteners Nottingham Castle £10/8, 7pm

Friday 14/12 Indoor Theatre : A Very Marie Theatre Nottingham Castle £8 / £10, 7pm

Monday 17/12 Wryd Sisters Lace Market Theatre £7 - £11, Various times Runs until: 22/12 Vampires Rock Christmas Royal Centre

Tuesday 18/12 Cinderella Royal Centre Runs until: 20/12

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS LOCATION One of the first big events to hit Notts in 2013 will be the inaugural Nottingham Festival of Words between 9 and 23 February. Taking place all over the city and beyond, it’s a long-overdue celebration of the city’s literature community, will feature the likes of A.L.Kennedy, Bali Rai, David Almond and Alison Moore, and should be a huge event. To whet the appetite, on 8 December at various venues in the city, local artist and poet Alison Knox will be sharing her beautiful poem I Let My Love Fly Free and will be accompanied by a flash mob.

At the listing we’re not allowed to list, audiences will be invited to Post a Poem to a loved one, so save yoursen a few bob on a Christmas card and send the relatives something different this year. And while you’re at it, why not get them a ticket for the Festival of Words? Full details of everything that’s on at the festival - as well as the location of the not-so-secret flash mob - by visiting the festival website.

Post A Poem, Saturday 8 December, somewhere

The Messiah Royal Centre Various, 7pm

Tuesday 04/12 Young People’s Panel New Art Exchange 5pm - 7pm Jeff Wayne’s World Of The Worlds: The New Generation Nottingham Arena £42.50 / £62.50, 8pm

Wednesday 05/12 Christmas Crackers Nottingham Playhouse Free , 7pm - 9pm

Saturday 08/12 Yard Theatre: Island Stories New Art Exchange 6:30pm - 7pm Yard Young Actors Company: Macbeth New Art Exchange 7:30pm

nottwords.org.uk

Wednesday 19/12 Family Carol Concert Royal Centre

Friday 21/12

Wednesday 02/01

Monday 14/01

Saturday 01/12

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians Bonington Theatre Runs until: 22/12

Cinderella Royal Centre Runs until: 06/01

Arabian Nights Lace Market Theatre £7 - £11, Various times Runs until: 19/01

Kafou Nottingham Contemporary Runs until: 06/01

Celebrating Christmas with Cantamus Royal Centre

Saturday 22/12 Cinderella Royal Centre Runs until: 24/12

Wednesday 26/12 Cinderella Royal Centre Runs until: 31/12

Saturday 05/01 One Night In Vienna Royal Centre £21 - £28.50, 3pm

Tuesday 08/01 Cinderella Royal Centre Runs until: 13/01

Sunday 13/01 Jack and The Beanstalk Bonington Theatre £7, Various times Runs until: 15/01

RALEIGH GRAFTERS

Saturday 19/01 Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom Royal Centre £11.50 / £13.50, Various times Runs until: 20/01

Monday 21/01 Abigail’s Party Royal Centre Runs until: 26/01

One Man Two Guvnors Royal Centre Runs until: 02/02

A major photographic exhibition inspired by Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is currently bringing Nottingham’s past sharply into focus at the Lakeside Arts Centre. Taking seminal moments from the book and film, the exhibition explores social changes in contemporary photography while concentrating on fifties and sixties working class culture.

EXHIBITIONS Saturday 01/12 Runners and Riders Harley Gallery Runs until: 01/02

The photographers featured in this free exhibition - who range from photojournalists of the day to industrial photographers - have captured the city’s industrial heart at its peak, when England was still seen as the workshop of the world, as opposed to the pound shop, and is supplemented by clips from a fascinating 1961 BBC documentary, The Factory, which went behind the scenes of Radford’s Raleigh plant, focusing on the workers, their jobs and lifestyles. If you need reminding of what Nottingham used to be like, this is an absolute must-see.

Lace:here:now The Bonington Gallery Runs until: 24/02 Kathak Dance New Art Exchange 1:30pm - 4pm Runs until: 15/12

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The ‘Authentic Moment’ In British Photography, until Sunday 10 February 2013, Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, NG7 2RD lakesidearts.org.uk

I is another New Art Exchange Runs until: 08/12

photo: © Shirley Baker

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Jack and The Beanstalk Bonington Theatre £7, Various times Runs until: 21/01

Tuesday 29/01

New exhibition at Lakeside captures post-war Notts

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Friday 18/01

Marcia Michael: Study of Kin New Art Exchange Runs until: 05/01

Wendy Ramshaw: Rooms of Dreams Harley Gallery Free, 10am Runs until: 13/01 The work of jeweller and designer Wendy Ramshaw.

Simon Withers: The Rashleigh Collection Nottingham Contemporary Free, Various times Runs until: 06/01 The collection contains both mundane and bizarre ephemera, offering reflections on 1960s and 1970s pop culture, Cold War paranoia and regional industry.

The Small Collections Room - Dr Lakra Nottingham Contemporary Free, Various times Runs until: 06/01 Contemporary Craft Fair Nottingham Contemporary Free, Various times Runs until: 02/12 Kathak Dance New Art Exchange 1:30pm - 4pm Craft In The City at Waterstones Waterstones Free admission, 10am - 5:30pm Runs until: 02/12 Lace Angels Nottingham Castle

Wednesday 05/12 Kafou: Walkthrough Programme Nottingham Contemporary Free, 1pm - 1:45pm

Thursday 06/12 Golden Prospects Nottingham Castle

exhibition and comedy event listings...

Friday 07/12 International Conference: 1804 and Its Afterlives Nottingham Contemporary Free, 10:30am - 5:30pm Runs until: 08/12

Saturday 08/12 Walk and talk, Sophia Ramcharan New Art Exchange 12pm - 1pm

Wednesday 12/12 Kafou: Walkthrough Programme Nottingham Contemporary Free, 1pm - 1:45pm Urban Angel Programme Nottingham Contemporary

Friday 14/12 Craft in the City Waterstones Runs until: 16/12

Saturday 15/12

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

ARTY UP TOP, HEARTY DOWN BELOW Cafe.Bar.Contemporary steps it up in December

You already know about Nottingham Contemporary - and if you don’t, what’s up with you? - but if you’re not topping or tailing your cultural excursion with a visit to their basement cafe, you’re not really getting the full experience.

Specialising in delicious, freshly prepared, locally sourced, British food with a twist, Cafe.Bar.Contemporary’s team of chefs turn out an monthly array of seasonal menus that hit the spot with a satisfying thud. Right about now for example, you can catch the winter warmer of the day, ranging from hearty stews to Lincolnshire sausage and mash in a rich onion gravy to smoked haddock kedgeree. The one thing that doesn’t change are the house specialities - a hugely popular homemade burger menu and Castle Rock beer-battered fish and chips.

As LeftLion knows only too well, having hosted a few nights there, Caffeh Tempreh is also a blinding gig venue, and it’ll be in almost constant use over the next month. Cafe.Bar.Live takes place every Saturday from 9pm until midnight and is rammed out with some outstanding talent - Mas Y Mas, Manière des Bohémiens, Me and Mr Jones, World Service Project, Gaffa and Charles Washington, to name but a few - and it’s always free. If you’re feeling a bit delicate on Sundays but want to do something more than sink into the sofa, the monthly jazz sessions will smooth you out a treat - especially if you partake in the £20 Sunday dinner for two deal. The next one’s on the 23 December.

Naturally, there are special events afoot in December. If you’re still looking for somewhere to throw a Xmas party with minimal mither, C.B.C are opening their doors to revellers on Friday 14, Tuesday 20 and Wednesday 21 December. These are shared affairs, fifteen quid per head gets you a drink on arrival, a festive finger buffet, a live band and DJs, a cash bar until 1am, and a huge weight off your shoulders. Meanwhile, Mas Y Mas will be mashing down the venue on New Years Eve, with Early Bird tickets for the first eighty people available for £15, and £20 for the remaining tickets - which gets you a glass of summat fizzy, a hot dog or veggie dog, nibbles ahoy and an opportunity to see in 2013 with millions of pounds of art over your head.

Cafe.Bar.Contemporary, Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, NG1 2GB nottinghamcontemporary.org/cafe-bar

Nottinghamshire On Film Nottingham Castle

Friday 07/12

Saturday 15/12

Thursday 27/12

Saturday 12/01

Ian Cognito, John Robins, Romesh Ranganathan.

Just The Tonic, The Forum £10 - £15, 6.30pm Runs until: 08/12

Christmas Party Night Glee Club £9.50 / £22.50, 7pm Sean Collins, Mark Olver and Jim Tavare.

The Real Deal Comedy Jam Jongleurs £17.50, 7pm Kane Brown and Slim.

John Ryan Jongleurs

Christmas Party Night Glee Club £13 / £26, 7pm Andy Robinson and Brendan Dempsey.

Mandy Knight Jongleurs £20, 9pm Plus Tony Hendriks and Andy Wilkinson.

Saturday 29/12

Geoff Norcott Jongleurs

Kafou : Walkthrough Programme Nottingham Contemporary Free, 1pm - 1:45pm

Mikey D Jongleurs £20, 9pm Mikey D, Adam Crow and Junior Simpson.

Jimmy Carr Royal Centre Various, 7:30pm

Sunday 13/01

Saturday 08/12

International Postcard Show ‘12 Surface Gallery Runs until: 02/02

Saturday 26/01

Best In Live Comedy Glee Club £14.50, 7pm Andy Robinson, Brendan Dempsey and Dave Hill.

Piero Gilardi Collaborative Effects Nottingham Contemporary Free, Various times Runs until: 07/04

Mikey D Jongleurs £20, 9pm Mikey D, Adam Crow and Junior Simpson.

COMEDY Saturday 01/12

Thursday 13/12

Wednesday 19/12 Kafou : Walkthrough Programme Nottingham Contemporary Free, 1pm - 1:45pm

Friday 21/12 Craft In the City Waterstones Free, 10am - 5:30pm

Wednesday 02/01

Best In Live Comedy Glee Club £14.50, 7pm Gavin Webster Barbara Nice, Stuart Goldsmith and more.

Just The Tonic, The Forum £10 - £15, 6.30pm

Jason Paterson Jongleurs £20, 9pm Jason Paterson, Colin Cole and Richard Morten.

Thursday 06/12 Mikey D Jongleurs £20, 9pm

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Mandy Knight Jongleurs £20, 9pm Mandy Knight, Tony Hendriks and Andy Wilkinson.

Friday 14/12 Christmas Party Night Glee Club £13 / 26.50, 7pm Sean Collins, Mark Olver and Jim Tavare.

Mandy Knight Jongleurs £20, 9pm Mandy Knight, Tony Hendriks and Andy Wilkinson.

Thursday 20/12 Christmas Party Night Glee Club £12 / £24.50, 7pm Carl Donnelly, Charlie Barker and Jason Cook.

Jim Smallman Jongleurs £20, 9pm Plus Wayne Deakin and Will E-Robo.

Friday 21/12 Christmas Party Night Glee Club £12.50 / £26.50, 7pm Carl Donnelly and Charlie Baker.

Jim Smallman Jongleurs £20, 9pm Wayne Deakin and Will E-Rob.

Saturday 22/12 Best In Live Comedy Glee Club £15, 7pm Carl Donnelly and Charlie Barker.

Wayne Deakin and Will E-Robo Jongleurs £20, 9pm

Best In Live Comedy Glee Club £12.50, 7pm Alex Boardman and Junior Simpson.

Rudi Lickwood Jongleurs £20, 8:30pm

Monday 31/12 NYE Comedy Club Glee Club £24.50, 7pm Adam Bloom and Sara Pascoe.

New Years Eve Comedy Just The Tonic, The Forum £15 adv, 6.45pm Ivan Brackenbury, Phil Nichol, Romesh Ranganathan and Eric Lampaert.

Bryan Lacey Jongleurs £20 min, 8pm

Saturday 05/01 Best In Live Comedy Glee Club £4 / £14, 7pm

Friday 18/01

Saturday 19/01 Laughing Horse New Acts Competition Bunkers Hill Inn £4 adv, 7:30pm Best In Live Comedy Glee Club £4 / £14, 7pm Geoff Norcott Jongleurs

Sunday 20/01 Laughing Horse New Acts Competition Bunkers Hill Inn £4adv, 7:30pm

Monday 21/01 Laughing Horse New Acts Competition Bunkers Hill Inn £4adv, 7:30pm

Friday 25/01

Rob Collins Jongleurs

Best In Live Comedy Glee Club £4 / £11, 7pm Paul Tonkinson, Lucy Porter and Owen O’Neill.

Friday 11/01

Saturday 26/01

John Ryan Jongleurs

Best in Live Comedy Glee Club £4 / £14, 7pm

Saturday 12/01 Roger Monkhouse, Benny Boot and Junior Simpson Just The Tonic, The Forum £6 / £10, 6.45pm

Janey Godley Jongleurs Joking Apart Nottingham Contemporary Runs until: 16/02

THE NUSIC BOX Your new Notts music tip sheet, compiled by Nusic’s Tom Hadfield.

Ady Suleiman

It might be pretty miserable out there weatherwise, but whack this guy’s smooth, smooth tunes on and the hot sun of the reggae gods shines down. The son of a Newark DJ, now based in Liverpool and constantly touring the country, Ady’s combination of slicker-than-a-lubed-up-grapefruit lyricism, soulful voice and sweet-ass acoustic magic has resulted in Why You Runnin’ Away?, a chilled masterclass of a demo with a dangerously memorable chorus and a swelling climax that will stick in your head for hours. It has already reached its download limit on SoundCloud. Hopefully, you saw him smash it at the Branch Out Festival; if you didn’t, sit tight for the Future Session we’ve set up with him, go check him out live at Sounddhism at the Bodega on 1 December. facebook.com/adysuleimanmusic

Metske

From the Wigflex stable, this experimental cocktail of acid house and East Euro techno obviously has a large family of influences but they all come together in one pulsating, grinding electronica space monster of a sound. Other genres seem to be always lurking somewhere in the shadows of each tune - a lick of the blues here, a shaft of hip-hop there. Cosmic trance over a concrete drumbeat occupies most of current Nusic favourite track Spin States - and the bit-mashed bleeps that pepper the tune sounds like Mario has melted a few acid tabs before hopping in his kart and driving to a rave. XFM have been creaming over this guy recently, with Mary Ann Hobbs showcasing him with a Metske Mix on their website - but if you want to catch the haunted trip-house of a song that is Matter Planes, you need to check the Nusic podcast. soundcloud.com/metaphimetske

Alaskan Faction

The self-described “Four skinny white guys who want to make you dance” mine the same vein of indie as Two Door Cinema Club and Bombay Bicycle Club - in their words again, “we write music to tear the dancefloor apart, and for the sheer joy of songs that are accessible, interesting and alternative.” Direct from the campuses of Posh Uni, they specialise in summer festival-tinged indie magic, shot through with rueful vocals and playful string work. The result: hugely danceable good-time music with an infectiously nostalgic teenage feel to it. It’s not all jingly-jangly, though; although they’re part of a very modern wave of indie dance, there’s odd throwbacks to the likes of The Cure, most notably in the spookily intense intro to the track Strangers. Go listen to Luna on our podcast; a child-hyped-on-Sunny D of a song. facebook.com/alaskanfaction

Check leftlion.co.uk/nusic for Nusic’s fortnightly podcasts, and head over to nusic.org for the complete picture

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Rather listen to the tunes on this page than read about ‘em? Better wrap your tabs round Sound Of The Lion, our dedicated music podcast, available at leftlion.co.uk/sotl.

If you want your own tunes reviewed and you’re from Notts, hit up leftlion.co.uk/sendusmusic Crushing Blows

Drops

Duke01

The psychedelic-pop duo return with a newfound sense of vigour and ways of combining their melodic hooks to dreamy musical nuggets. The People You Will Never Meet sounds like Prince kidnapping post-rockers Explosion In The Sky and forcing them to get down and dirty in his purple pixie land, with falsetto vocals over emotional cascading guitars that flow from the speakers like warm honey. What’s immediately obvious is that they’ve hit the next level in terms of their songwriting; I Dream Of Becoming A Girl is a breezy slab of tropical pop, whilst Love Is Dangerous sounds like an in-joke that eventually morphs into a fist pumping barnstormer with the title lyric sung over a cavalcade of organs and driving guitars. It all ends with No Halcyon, the most direct offering here, that hits home like a spiky punch of fuzzy guitars and anthemic vocals.

Paul Klotschkow crushingblows.bandcamp.com

Listening to Liam Hennessy’s debut EP (under the guise of Drops) is like being caught in a daydream with an infectious guitar melody.

Beginning with the mellow optimism of You Have My Word, the four tracks consist of layer upon layer of instrumental bliss activated by a loop pedal and recorded in his bedroom. With a sound as wandering as the human mind, Autumn Walks starts with rhythmic, footstep-like beats before drifting into a gentle ramble of chimes, in perfect resemblance of its title. The echoing, barely-there vocals on closing track Return Stones To Sea bring a reflective, sincere tone to the EP, while its looping beats maintain the playfulness that is evident throughout. Liam may be leaving Notts soon, but this record is guaranteed to leave you tapping your feet and drumming your fingers with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside - and you can’t ask for much more than that.

Katy Lewis Hood drops1.bandcamp.com

One half of Non Thespian and part of hardrocking cover band Def Goldblum, the Notts rapper returns with another blast of hard-hitting hip-hop. Kill The Robots is a menacing opener, essentially a piece of music that loops the name of the EP against a threatening wall of static. Things don’t really get going until Ellington Binary, which sees Duke01 doing his thing over broken funk jams and wailing sirens that sound as furious as his rhymes. The rest of the EP follows in a similar vein; Eat Your Mistakes tips its Pittsburgh Pirates cap to Public Enemy, with Chuck D’s ire perfectly channeled. A tip of the hat to DJ Johnny Crump too, who provides most of the beats here - his mix of classic soul sounds and eardrum-piercing samples amplify Duke’s lyrics to stratospheric levels, especially on the sevenminute jam Countdown To Armour Gettin’. Paul Klotschkow duke01.bandcamp.com

Frazer Lowrie

Geiom

Things Have Changed EP (Self-released)

Black Screen LP (Frijsfo Beats)

Injured Birds

The twenty-year-old truth-teller and selftaught musician delivers a strong, slightly angsty, EP. Musically, the festival friendly indie-pop-folk shines a light to the likes of Mumford & Sons and Ed Sheeran, and it’d be rude not to mention the route-one anthemics; City of Lights recalls Friendly Fires with its stomp and shouty sing-a-long chorus. Lend Me Your Love turns the lights down on the party and proclaims “Lend me your courage, so I can scream at the world for making me feel so damn useless.” and God’s Truth returns us to the indie barn dance, despite the moody lyrics.

Things Have Changed is not going to break any new ground and was never supposed to - but it actually manages to come across as incredibly authentic. Probably best enjoyed outdoors with a pint in hand, whilst wearing that straw trilby hat you found on the floor. Ashley Clivery frazerlowrie.com

Geiom’s third long-player sees him cement his reputation as one of the UK’s leading underground electronic music producers.

With a title inspired by the dying moments of a mobile phone, Black Screen touches on all of the genres Geiom has dabbled in in his decade-long career. If you took apart your iPhone and fed its microchips every electronic music genre of recent memory, this is the album that it would eventually spew out from its circuit board. That’s not to say it’s a mess, however; this is a coherent mix of sounds and styles.

Tracks such as Rhode Rage offer up re-booted funky house with an injection of UK garage into its DNA, whilst the more cerebral moments (such as the ghostly White Screen), offer respite from the clattering circuit-bending sonics. It’s good to see an artist still making forward-thinking music after over ten years in the game.

Paul Klotschkow residentadvisor.net/dj/geiom

Call the authorities – I reckon there’s something in the water around these parts.

As Jake Bugg sends the world a-swooning with his chart-dominating awesomeness, just scratch slightly beneath the surface to find a whole world of talent in Notts. Scratch a little deeper and the beautiful Injured Birds come soaring out. Silver Birches is one of the most solid and consistent LPs that you could hope to hear this year. It’s that kind of excellently Mumford-free folk that’s compelling but never contrived, touching but never twee. I’d call them ‘nu-folk’, but there’s no such thing and I’m not a nobhead, but you get the idea. Opener K is a slow-burning fireside ditty that perfectly showcases the band’s cinematic qualities, while Hey Now is a right little firecracker of a tune that you can’t help but lose your mind to. Ten tracks of power and poetry that understatedly scream #NottinghamRocks. Andrew Trendell facebook.com/injuredbirdsofficial

The Madeline Rust

Opie Deino

Rob Green

With a name taken from a dream, album art inspired by a surreal Mexican western and a sound influenced by the nineties grunge scene, The Madeline Rust are Lucy Morrow on bass and vocals, Aly McNab on guitar and Martin Syvret on drums. Back Home kicks us off with a Black Sabbath-sized riff and a Cobain-esque throat-stripping chorus. It quickly becomes clear that this is quite a feature of Morrow’s singing style, with songs like How Would You Move Me? and Now starting off with delicate, melodic verses before blasting off into rasping choruses. Nirvana are a reference point, but there’s also notes of classic rock, as well as bands like The Runaways, Belly and even – on I Will Not Hide - Iron Maiden. You can never have too many great three-piece rock bands; it looks like Nottingham has got another exciting one. Tim Sorrell themadelinerust.bandcamp.com

After making it to the finals of 2011’s Future Sound of Nottingham competition, Sian Fawcett (AKA Ms Deino) has kept the momentum going by becoming a firm fixture on the gig scene, indulging in a spot of city centre busking, and just in time for her debut release - putting a band together. Facing Up is a folk-pop EP that rolls from acoustic lightness (Richard Parker) to jangly light power-rock (Macc), while Sian’s American style vocals sound eerily like Hayley Williams from Paramore at her sweetest. Uptempo to the last, here are five songs about love, friendship and, well, not being in love and not being friends anymore. So if you like a bit of balls to your girl-fronted pop and aren’t afraid to sneak a peak in a young lady’s diary, then Opie Deino may well twang your G-string. Ali Emm opiedeino.bandcamp.com

Rosie Abbott

Sinners Highway

We Are Avengers

Rosie Abbott’s eponymous debut release comes following many acoustic gigs in Notts and nearby, and radio plays as far afield as Washington D.C. She writes, plays, records and produces all her own music and the result is a style reminiscent of a bygone age before auto-tune, drum loops and over-dubbing that’s almost been forgotten but really should make a comeback. Telling relatable stories about everyday life in a raw, confident way with a voice full of character, it’s the perfect remedy to processed pop. Rosie has in her canon such a selection of styles, ranging from cheery ragtime piano in If You’re Happy and You Don’t Know It to dirty, bluesy guitar rock in Victim of My Imagination, not to mention a duet with a woodpigeon in Woodpigeon Translation, a drinker’s singalong in One More Glass, and so much more. There’s something for everyone here. Quirky, original and always loveable.

Graeme Smith rosieabbott.co.uk

This is an explosive four-track fury of rock n’ roll dynamite. Opening track Sinners Highway is a death trip joy ride around hell with the initial scorching riffs building and building until Simon Ross lets out an almost primal roar “Her beauty will drive you crazy. She’s on a Sinners Highway.” Reaper, possibly the highlight of the EP is a Satanic tsunami that builds and falls violently throughout, Simon’s voice pure rock n’ roll. The eighties metal tinge is evident with the odd riff of Metallica here, the occasional Slash solo there. It peaks with the monumentally epic ballad of Can’t Stand The Fate; Ross’ deathly shrieks are replaced by softer vocals but still with every element of power. The heartbreak, lighters-to-the-air tale, is on the same level of epicness as Aerosmith’s I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing and is teeming with raw emotion. Tom Hadfield sinnershighway.co.uk

For their second single this year, the Avengers – now expanded from a trio to an elegantly turned-out six-piece – have dipped their toes into funkier waters without surrendering any of the tight songwriting and arranging skills that flavoured their debut release, Trouble. You can hear this most clearly on Revolution, which pits a loping backbeat against choppy, bluesy guitar and a discreetly swelling Hammond organ in a way that bears comparison with nineties trip-hoppers and acid-jazzers such as Young Disciples. The slinky, spacious and deftly restrained arrangement makes a neat counterpoint to Midbrow Lover, the lead track. Here, a brooding bassline ushers in stately, rippling piano, funk-rock guitar, and ambient strings, forming a suitably cinematic backdrop for Emily Martin’s smouldering, torch-song vocals. “Can we make an agreement?” she pleads, while a ghostly chorus coos in the background.

Natalie Duncan’s already a fan; there’ll soon be plenty more.

Mike Atkinson soundcloud.com/weareavengers

Crushing Blows EP (Self-released)

The Madeline Rust EP (Self-released)

Rosie Abbott LP (Self-released)

Believe You Me EP (Self-released)

Facing Up EP (Self-released)

Sinners Highway EP (Self-released)

Steroid Stereo EP (Team Chameleon)

Silver Birches LP (Denizen Recordings)

Parlour Tricks EP (Outlaw Label) Do not settle for less. Do not accept lame imitations. Ladies and gentlemen, go listen to Rob Green. Opening track Straight And Narrow demonstrates his remarkable dynamic perfectly; a brilliant balance where classic and timeless sounds of soul and R n’ B are given a fierce makeover. “I wanna drink every drop of you to satisfy my gluttony,” he croons on Cardinal, smoother than a milkshake made of clouds and dreams. While the current scene is cluttered with lots of beige X Factor music-lite types having a crack at this acoustic soul rap malarkey, this lad hasn’t half got a set of lungs on him. As he sings on Underdog: “They’re convinced it’s a game, but I don’t feel the same, they work me to the grave to be saved – I’m the underdog.” Make room for Rob Green – he’s the real thing. Andrew Trendell robgreenmusic.com

Midbrow Lover/Revolution Single (Farmyard Records)

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Write Lion

Jon McGregor takes the Impac Award, Alison Moore shortlisted for the Booker, Sillitoe Trail nominated for top content on The Space, Sarah Jackson nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and Ian Douglas commissioned for the V&A exhibition 26 Treasures of Childhood. Not a bad 2012 for the local contingent, then...

The Nottslit blog (nottslit.blogspot.co.uk) is passionate about literature with a Nottinghamshire connection, so we asked them to review three titles from Pewter Rose Press. If you’ve got anything you’d like covering, lob ‘em our way - books@leftlion.co.uk.

Standing Water

Amelia and the Virgin

Brushstrokes

Winner of the 2010 Yeovil Literary Prize, this is a captivating tale of loss, the nature of relationships and the struggle to change. Dom has spent eight years distancing himself, geographically and emotionally, from his family’s farm in the Western Australian outback. After the death of his mother, he returns to find his once-thriving hometown in serious decline and the farm’s existence under threat. Custodian of the farm is Dom’s brother, Neal, a man as hostile as the harsh rural setting. Told from the perspective of three compelling characters, Armstrong skillfully handles the narrative as secrets are revealed and unresolved tensions resurface. This is an accomplished first novel from the Australian-born author. pewter-rose-press.com

It is 1981 in the city of Liverpool; a perfect setting for a novel that embraces both comedy and tragedy.

A large Catholic family of oddballs - think the Boswells of Bread meet Mrs Brown’s Boys - are introduced through the eyes of Amelia, a regular thirteen-year-old girl. Well, regular apart from her visions of the Goddess Irena. An unexpected pregnancy has Amelia convinced that she is destined to give birth to a girl, the new Messiah no less, a belief that gains support after a series of assumed miracles. The male characters are, to a man, unlikable and Amelia's mix of innocence and intelligence have the reader rooting for her throughout. This is a well-paced, poignant story; the constant presence of humour helps to counter the bleak mood but this is a novel shrouded in blackness and should be avoided by those on suicide watch. pewter-rose-press.com

Cultural aspirations are thwarted by the everyday frivolity of modern Britain in the eighteen slices of life that comprise Shaw’s first collection of short stories. Humour and pathos collide as we meet characters at different stages of life. Many of these recognisable situations elicit an immediate emotion and there are more rewards to be had as the reader fills in the gaps. From the superb Brushstrokes and snappy dialogue of One Small Regret to the cliché ridden Snapshots and bizarre A Disturbance Of Dirt, this Derbyshire author displays a lightness of touch throughout. Given their brevity, many of the stories could be coined flash fiction, making this an ideal collection to dip in and out of. The ragged right alignment of text is a distraction, but this is a hugely enjoyable collection. pewter-rose-press.com

The Open Door

Write Short Stories and Get them Published

Terri Armstrong Pewter Rose Press, £10.99

Nicky Harlow Pewter Rose Press, £11.99

Some Kind of Fairy Tale Graham Joyce Gollancz, £9.99

Alan Sillitoe Five Leaves, £12.99

Do you believe in fairies? No, not little Tinkerbells fluttering at the bottom of the garden, but strapping, adultsized strangers with an appetite for abduction, unfettered sex and fighting? When fifteen-year-old Tara goes missing she is presumed dead.

Then, twenty years later, she turns up - not a jot older than the day she vanished - to confess a tale beyond belief, and a tale that is far from over.

While reinventing the faerie world for a modern audience, Joyce also captures compelling insights into youth, middle-age and failed ambition. Yet really this is a love letter to Leicestershire; Charnwood Forest is transformed from an ancient woodland on a bed of dormant volcanoes into a portal to an enchanted land, where bluebells are always in season and lakes shimmer with life. The storytelling is stoked up with a suspense that makes for a real page-turner. One of the best reads this year. Ian Douglas gollancz.co.uk

Meet Arthur Seaton’s brother, Brian; older, wiser and back from a stint as a wireless operator in Malaya, and looking forward to going home - or at least down the pub. Brian has a wife who doesn’t want him, a son who doesn’t know him and a shadow on his lung. Demob on hold, he’s sent to a sanatorium; the diagnosis is TB. Alan Sillitoe’s semi-autobiographical novel’s narrative traces Brian’s intellectual education, his affair with a sympathetic nurse and his literary ambitions. But the past is never far away and his return to Nottingham is inevitable. The Open Door is compassionate and unflinchingly honest, showing us Arthur at fifteen on the cusp of his belligerent adulthood and Brian already there, aware of the fragility of life but burning with the possibilities of the future. Neil Fulwood fiveleaves.co.uk

Heather Shaw Pewter Rose Press, £7.99

Zoe Fairbairns Teach Yourself, £9.99

In your head it’s a great story: now it’s time to tell it. This how-to, penned by a member of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio, is designed to help you turn your thoughts into words on the page.

Her chapter-by-chapter approach to gradually developing your writing works well, with relevant anecdotes, references to short story collections and exercises (yes, you do have to work) in each section. Techniques to encourage motivation and maintain stamina should ensure you are able to fully develop an idea and take advantage of every writer’s favourite chapter: how to get published. If you’ve got some experience of writing, it’s worth a look at the exercises a good way to help you get your stories ‘match fit’, or moving again if you’re stuck mid-draft. Andrew Kells teachyourself.co.uk

Katie Half-Price AYUP! LOL! I do hope them Mayonnaise’ans wor right abaht the end of the world on 21 December, as I dun’t know how many more o’ these rammel books I can bear ter read...

Vagina: A New Biography

The Card

This ‘un here has written a ton of academical books that are always morngin’ on abaht somethin’ or other, which is why they dun’t stock her for £3.99 in Tescos. Her most famous book is probleh The Beauty Myth, in which she got a right mard-on cuz she’s never appeared on the cover of Nuts and so meks out it’s oppressive. Jealous bitch.

Now she reckons that if someone calls yer fanneh a silly name like spam alleh, fish-froth fountain, or even bearded clam it can stop yer creativity! Honestleh, the only thing that stops a woman bein’ creative is the price on childcare, yer get meh? I do admire girl power and all that but all this thinkin’ all on the time dun’t do yer no good - and when she got a cob-on at some poor lad just because he had some pasta shaped like fannehs, she lost meh. I hope they don’t ave Spaghetti Hoops in America, as she’d reckon they were homophobist, or summat.

Verdict: Spit virago.co.uk

In this novel a biddy drops a playin’ card on a deserted alleh and this fella called Riley picks it up. The card in’t one on them dotteh ones yer get on holiday in Greece as I was hopin’ but the Queen of Hearts. Then he finds loads more scattered arahnd tahn which turns him inta a mentalist. He only thinks they’re secret signs for some kinda propheseh.

The only mistreh here is why one on them do-gooder community wardens didn’t try and slap a £75 fine on his arse, like they did ter me when I lobbed me Greggs wrapper at our Darren for eyeing up some dirteh cow outside Osheernar.

Although the moral of this story is probleh that we’d like to believe life in’t a pointless fluke that’s over before we know it’s begun. Personaleh, I think the real hidden meaning is that there’s too many selfish ode bags clogging up the planet, and we need to ship ‘em all off to Dignitas.

Verdict: Swallow atlantic-books.co.uk

Naomi Wolf £12.99, Virago

50 Shades of Grey

E. L. James £7.99 (or £1 at Cancer Research by the time this comes aht), Arrow Christian Grey is minted and well sexeh and has got everythin’ gooin’ fer him - the only dahnside is that he plays classical piano. He treats Anastasia Steele like shite, but she dunt mind cuz he goes dahn on her when she’s on the blob, proving there’s nowt more attractive than a man who’ll gerris hands dotteh. Christian is a violent, narcissistic bulleh (so a realistic portrayal of all men, lol!), but Ana dunt mind cuz he’s gorra bell-end the size o’ Jay Leno’s head. Consequentleh, Ana ends up ayyin fifteen orgasms a day, which leaves her flaps wetter than Flipper’s arsehole.

Verdict: Gargle randomhouse.co.uk

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Graham Rawle £16.99 HB, Atlantic

‘Tis the season to share some poetry - be it as gifts or evenings at home reading when you’re too skint to go out in January. So splash out, grab a hot water bottle, pour a glass of your Aunt Beryl’s no-frills Christmas port, don your smoking jacket (aka M&S dressing gown) - and enjoy.

Moon At The Park And Ride Sue Dymoke Shoestring Press, £9

Expressing life’s experiences through variety, poems are held up to the light for our consideration like snapshots. Dymoke’s poetic magnifying glass investigates the natural world, relationships, art and meaning, probing beneath the surface of familiar pleasantries: ‘Keep in touch we say when we mean/don’t keep too close, don’t cling’. Intermingling serious themes with satirical humour, poetic punch-lines are used to best effect when describing a rule-bound inhospitable hotel in Unwelcome, and in her dismissal of George Eliot’s classic in Flossing away the Mill: ‘Thank the Lord the river took them’.

Her conversational delivery juxtaposes with semi-mystical utterances. In the title poem, her meditation on photographing the moon also comments on the contrast between our electrically-lit digital world and the sense of otherness the real and uncontrollable moon still inspires. This is a compelling second collection from a widely published Nottingham-based poet. Aly Stoneman shoestringpress.co.uk

Taking Flight

Variations On Painting A Room: Poems 2000-2010

Kathryn Daszkiewicz Shoestring Press, £9 From the opening sequence, Palaeontology, which explores the strata of dementia, to the determined remembrance of the closing poem, All the Birds Have Flown, this collection doesn’t shy away from the difficult things in life. It’s about how connections between people are made, altered and broken, and about how we understand and deal with those changes... or how we don’t.

Daszkiewicz encompasses a huge chunk of history in her poems, and makes surprising yet believable connections to her theme. Ancient fossils represent the discoveries that can be made when losing one’s mind. Gods and myths wander through the book, prompting poems like Don’t Die in Egypt, and the sequence Mews, which draws on the art of falconry and ties it to the Greek Muses. The natural world is always present. These are beautifully written, tough poems that are well worth reading for pleasure and then re-reading to uncover more of the ideas they contain. Pippa Hennessy shoestringpress.co.uk

Alan Baker Skysill Press, £10.95

Besides being co-editor of Leafe Press and editor of the webzine Litter, Alan Baker has been published in pamphlet form (Not Bondi Beach, The Strange City, Hotel February, The World Seen From The Air) and in various literary magazines.

This collection brings together previously published work with two uncollected sequences The Book of Random Access (a series of prose poems) and Everyday Songs. The author is Nottingham-based so perhaps inevitably - and enjoyably - Nottinghamshire places make appearances too, but never spuriously. The poem Chilwell, ‘where the Trent/ spreads over meadows’, gains an added poignancy when we are told in the notes section that most of the shell cases used by the British Artillery in the Battle of the Somme were produced in Chilwell, with smaller shell cases sometimes used by local people as vases for flowers. Baker’s stream-of-consciousness descriptions and pin-sharp capture of transitory experience seem to continuously explore with great beauty and precision the ageold problem, how shall we live? Aly Stoneman skysillpress.blogspot.com

The Necessity of Ice

Down to the Washlands

Alan Baker

Matthew Spence

One frosted time Orion rising roughshod in a clenched & closing year

Down to the washlands where the library is a mess of glass, where the last of the kids leave the playground.

Breweries beam their smog, distant hills are charcoal; I sit on a bench and the ground is fat with water.

left us living meagerly by coffee cigarettes by bread alone & wanting nothing more than the slow tread of ice too thin for any argument from icecaps that are yesterday’s news that will soon have no mysteries to conceal or reveal dwindling to the thinness of a concave lens focusing all our contraries to a diamond point of need for the rigour & dispassion of ice its clarity & clouded mystery its thermal equilibrium

Down to the washlands after college with Jess, a horizon of flooded fields.

The low sun’s reflection forms a golden sea.

She taps a joint in the silence and the smoke joins the breeze.

Down to the washlands while engines shunt carriages and did you know this was 60 miles from the coast?

Battered willows lull at the stream a seamless expanse. A squirrel drags some litter tangled in a branch.

Down to the washlands to stare at my legs, the talk of little birds wading in the shallows.

Trucks climb the hill, a barge churns water.

It’s summer but the sun rises so late I hardly know my own reflection.

We need its night-time crack & groan of shifting darknesses floe and crevasse berg & glacier & structures that are given to us to name We need so much light so many cool rooms & music we need icebergs to see the tip of ice to pack against pain to cut with others to put our plans on or to crush with lemon & vodka & melt in warm young mouths.

Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010 skysillpress.blogspot.com

Walking Home With My Eyes Closed Simon McMurdo

A simple map from houses one to fifty two, scrawled on the blankness coating my mind; A blueprint of what I thought I knew of this street.

It's another world in the chalkboard black of closing your eyes and trusting only memory.

In just one step my confidence chips away until there is a single white dot; the one and only thing I’m certain of and that’s where my feet are standing.

illustration: Steve Larder leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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For more Nottingham foodie goodness check out noshingham.co.uk

Delilah

Desi Downtown

Turtle Bay

Previously perched on the corner of Weekday Cross, the original Delilah was a little deli with a big reputation, with BBC Good Food awards and everything. It was also the kind of place where you were terrified to turn around too quickly lest you brought down a couple of hundred quid’s worth of locally-sourced hams.

That’s all changed.

Nottingham boasts some gorgeous, high-end curry restaurants, but sometimes you just want no-frills authenticity at a price that doesn’t make you choke on your samosa. That’s the deal behind Desi Downtown - the slightly classier younger brother of Hyson Green’s monumental Desi Express, but with a larger menu, table service, over ten times more seating and beer.

Created by one of the people who brought you Latino nosh-chain Las Iguanas, ensconced where the likes of Sausage and Strada have failed before it, Turtle Bay offers a street-style open kitchen and an island beach bar with a feel-good vibe straight from the West Indies (via Southampton and Milton Keynes, where the original branches are).

To enter the new premises - the old HSBC building next to the tram lines on Victoria Street - is to instantly fall in love with its high ceilings, wooden floors and grand architecture. While all the top-grade deli fare is present and correct, you can grab a seat at the counter, be seen at one of the large windows, or - like us dine in a mezzanine, away from the hustle and bustle.

To describe Desi as a mere curry restaurant would be a massive understatement. For starters, there’s a 20ft charcoal grilling area in the open plan kitchen which specialises in the drycooked options which comprise half of the menu. As with all proper curry houses, the ordering process involves some friendly bartering with your dining partner to ensure you get to sample as much of the menu as possible.

First stop, the bar. It’s quite a feat to miss the 2-4-1 Happy Hour at Turtle Bay (which runs from 12-7pm and 10pm ‘til close) but we did, so a mai tai and Jamaican mule were £6.65 each. No matter; with the colourful décor, upbeat music and photos of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, I could almost feel the sun on my back.

My, my, my.

Where all the lights are bright

While my friend had a raspberry lemonade (£2.29), I couldn’t resist the Delilah organic lager (£3.25), a locally-brewed draft which lived up to its description of being refreshing and light.

The menu boasts a selection of tapas-style dishes; we ordered a selection of four artisan breads with dukkah (an Egyptian spice blend of cumin, coriander seeds, sesame seeds, salt, pepper and nuts all ground up) and olive oil with balsamic vinegar for dipping to start (£3.50). The dukkah smelt divine and tasted even better, especially accompanied by the sweet tang of the vinegar.

The mains are divided into salads and hot dishes, with a number of Connoisseurs Experience platters which are comprised of the top end of the cheese and meat selection; My Inverawe smoked salmon, herb crème fraîche and rocket frittata with toasted ciabatta (£7.50) overflowed with filling, with crème fraiche oozing throughout. My friend’s sweet and spicy halloumi salad (£8.95) was mercifully un-stingy on the main ingredient, and came drizzled with a sweet chilli sauce and sat upon a bed of mixed leaves, coriander, and red peppers, with a splash of lime.

Although we’d considered sharing, the glass cabinets full of gorgeous looking cakes and treats quickly changed our minds. We went for the billionaire’s shortbread (£1.95) and the raspberry stack slice (£3.95). Wondering why the shortbread had been promoted a few pay grades, we soon found out on the first bite; along with the standard caramel, chocolate and shortbread there were chunks of honeycomb. The raspberry stack was a deep slice of sponge, fruit and cream icing that positively jumped with flavour.

Feeling full but happy, we left Delilah’s grateful that - for once - an old bank had been turned into such a gem of an eaterie-cumdeli and not another insipid bar. This is a must-visit place; I’ll certainly be back for seconds, thirds and fourths. Alison Emm 12 Victoria Street, NG1 2EX. Tel: 0115 9484461 delilahfinefoods.co.uk

While Desi’s menu descriptions aren’t the most comprehensive, the staff are very willing to help and recommend choices for you. We settled on starters of onion bhajis (£2.25) and marinated lamb chops (£3.95). The bhajis were huge; a perfect combination of crisp outside and moist centre which doesn’t blow your head off before the main attraction. The lamb chops came straight from the mighty charcoal grill, charred to perfection, after being marinated in yoghurt and a blend of aromatic spices.

When the main courses arrived, the typical fight for space on the table ensued. The malia chicken (£6.00) - tender marinated chunks of chicken breast given the charcoal treatment and served with a smooth almond sauce - sizzled away on a hot plate, and was a great choice if you prefer creamy curries over hot ones. The Punjabi special (£4.95) was essentially a lamb curry with a tomato-based sauce, and had a really fresh, light flavour to it without being thick and gloopy, with a good background heat to it; a perfect companion of the sweeter chicken dish. Because our eyes were bigger than our bellies, we also ordered begare bangon (£4.25), juicy baby aubergines cooked with almonds in a creamy sauce with mild spices.

Everything was mopped up with a shared brown rice (£1.50) and fluffy pashwari nann (£1.95) drizzled in honey and crushed pistachios.

The value for money at Desi - like the food - is incredible.

With all the variety of dishes, sides, accompaniments and three humongous bottles of Cobra beer (£5 each) the total bill just touched the £40 mark for two people. After a recent refurbishment, there’s also a Sheesha Bar out the back where you can kick back and smoke a traditional Hookah pipe with a variety of flavoured tobaccos. Be warned, though - Desi is packed to the hilt on most evenings, making this place one of Nottingham dining’s worst-kept secrets. Ash Dilks 7 Hockley, NG1 1FH. Tel: 0115 950 2666

Ital-ian cuisine

Once seated, a waiter took our order for cutters (which double as bar snacks or starters) immediately. My companion opted for trini doubles (£4.95) - puffed-up bara roti stuffed with spiced chickpeas and served with cucumber chutney and shredded coconut, while I chose Caribbean sweetcorn fritters with spring onion, coriander and a hint of chilli (£4.95). The harmless-looking dipping sauce that accompanied the dish delivered a sweet fiery kick - a sharp complement to the crunchy fritters. Perfect as late night snacks to soak up the booze, the fritters were a bit oily for my taste but the trini doubles went down a treat.

When I lifted the lid on my pot of Blue Mountain goat (£9.50) I inhaled a mouthwatering waft of steam carrying the scent of succulent chunky mouthfuls of goat and a blend of curry spices, tomatoes and sweet potato, served with rice and peas, sweet onion chutney and grilled flatbread. My companion chose the Rastafari run down (£9.50), allegedly Bob Marley’s favourite, which combines butter beans, corn on the cob, greens, glazed carrots, sweet potato, bell peppers, spring onions and herbs simmered in coconut milk, served with rice’n’peas and dumplings. Drier than expected, this vegetarian one-pot was creamy and sweet, with dumplings like savoury doughnuts.

For dessert, my companion had rum and raisin bread pudding (£4.75) with coconut ice cream, while I kidded myself I was being healthy with BBQ pineapple (£4.75) grilled with muscovado sugar and accompanied by rum caramel sauce.

Like the rest of the meal, both combined interesting flavours of smoke, sweetness and spicy warmth.

Theme bars and chain restaurants aren’t really my bag, but I’ll make an exception here; the atmosphere and food are excellent with good vegetarian options, the prices are reasonable, the staff are friendly and the 2-4-1 cocktails should attract plenty of customers in off the street to enjoy drinks and bar snacks. I’ll definitely be back for more. Aly Stoneman 12 Trinity Square, NG1 4DB. Tel: 0115 9475600

desidowntown.co.uk

turtlebay.co.uk

Our resident fast food expert Beane Noodler resumes his quest to eat at every takeaway in Nottingham…

CHUNKY CHICKEN As Nottingham’s fried chicken wars rage on with ever greater ferocity, you’d think it would be outright suicide to open up yet another shrine to the breadcrumbed crispy bird - but you’d be as wrong as a Jimmy Savile tribute night. With a new Maryland Chicken set to open in town it seems we’re only getting started in this late-night poultry Game of Death, so when this place - a northern franchise chain - flung open its doors a few metres from the Orange Tree I raised an eyebrow, like Miss Marple with the munchies. While its gleaming interior and bright American-style booths set it apart from other, sticky-floored scum-encrusted establishments, menuwise it’s the usual fare of boxes and buckets varying in size, depending on how battered you are. On my first visit I was given more chips than I knew what to do with (seriously; my portion could have fed one of them families of 25 kids you see knocking about the Broadmarsh), while on the second expedition I was supersized to a huge meal without even asking - simply because the massive woman in front of me had ordered a small chicken coop, and it was compensation for my wait. Result. Sitting just down from a decent boozer means everyone wins here - well, apart from Trent Kebabs, who are sandwiched in the middle.

24-30 Shakespeare Street, NG1 4FQ chunkychicken.com

Pietanze Unless you’re happy to bury your face in jacket potatoes on a daily basis, or happen to be lucky enough to know just what flippin’ week the Farmers’ Market rolls onto Slab Square unannounced, you can’t deny that Nottingham is pretty much buggered when it comes to quality street nosh. Well fret no more, take-away warriors: out of nowhere, a tiny little trailer has popped up near to Wilkos, and this time it ain’t offering to unblock your nicked phone or flog you a bong gas mask. Supported by the HIVE Business Unit at Trent Uni, Pietanze specialises in the true flavours of Sicilian traditional munch, and on my first visit I opted for the mozzarella, tomato and ham, which was lightly grilled and gorgeous. Obviously, I had to return the next day to sample one of the massive scotch-egg type creatures that had been eyeing me up on the counter. I was reliably informed these are known as arancini, and one bite through the crispy breadcrumbed outer layer into the creamy risotto, cheese and ham filling had me almost down on one knee proposing to it. Were I in a disco I’d have ripped my top off and done a 360° twist, but it was lunchtime near the Old Dog and Partridge, so I didn’t. As they say in Sicily; “Up yours, Greggs.”

Clinton Street, NG1 2BN pietanze.co.uk leftlion.co.uk/issue50

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Sagittarius (Nov 23 - Dec 22)

No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are still 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this does not rule out the possibility of a breed of flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

Capricorn (Dec 23 - Jan 19)

You’ve always hated it when a show or film ends with a big musical number. Therefore you’re likely to be somewhat disappointed with what happens to your life when you try to cross the road on Wednesday morning.

Aquarius (Jan 20 - Feb 19)

The good news this week is that the bible you always keep on your person will stop the bullet from penetrating your body. But the reasons why you choose to keep a bible fastened to your genitals remains a mystery to all of us.

Pisces (Feb 20 - Mar 20)

Question: Why will Santa only be wearing one of his red and white wellington boots this Christmas? Answer: Because there’s only going to be one foot of snow.

Aries (Mar 21 - Apr 20)

The old public-speaking trick of imagining the audience naked has served you well in the past.

However, this was before you had to give a talk to a room full of serious burns survivors.

LEFTLION ABROAD Grimaud, France

Taurus (Apr 21 - May 21)

It’s not really any of the zodiac’s business, but most people would take the dead goldfish out of the tank before adding new ones. The same goes for the drowned dogs.

Gemini (May 22 - June 22)

You’ll be punished for playing God this week, which isn’t surprising, considering the Geordie accent, exaggerated lisp and thick head of curly ginger hair that you gave Him.

Cancer (June 23 - July 23)

Nottingham Police officials will once again select you for a very important mission. You’ll soon realise, though, that going out and getting them all coffee and cake isn’t quite as exciting as it used to be.

Leo (July 24 - Aug 23)

You’ve always thought of yourself as a creative, left-half-of-the-brain type person. But the time you’ll spend in hospital this week after the stroke will change all that.

Virgo (Aug 24 - Sept 23)

Santa might not be able to make it to you this year. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong (for once). He’s just been delayed as there’s lots of paperwork he needs to sort out after a visit from the Elf and Safety officer.

Libra (Sept 24 - Oct 23)

Your fear of heights worsens this Thursday when a large vertical drop telephones you at home, shouts loudly into the receiver, and threatens to attack you and your loved ones in their sleep.

Scorpio (Oct 24 - Nov 22)

In theory your attempts at self-improvement show a noble character and are to be applauded.

However, the stars aren’t so sure that the leg rests, dual cup-holders, padded seating and crazy paving are what most people would have in mind. leftlion.co.uk/horroscopes

LEFTLION WOULD LIKE TO WISH ITS READERS A

MERRY XMAS AND A

HAPPY SU YEAR ISSUE #51: FEB 1 2013

They say it’s grim up north, but Grimaud is actually in the south of France, next door to wealthy Saint-Tropez. A perched village, dominated by its partially restored eleventh century castle, it’s a nice spot to get away to - as testified by Trent Sound radio presenter Jason Loftus (pictured) and his friend Carolyn Hall who was on camera duties. Catch Jason’s Nottingham LACE show on trentsound.com every Saturday. And no, it’s not three hours about a famous Nottingham fabric.

Want to see more photos like this? Then check out leftlion.co.uk/abroad. Want us to publish your holiday snap too? Well, take this copy of the mag with you, get clicking away and then email us the product of your labour to abroad@leftlion.co.uk

LeftLion #501

LeftLion #1 Issue One/Autumn 2004

www.leftlion.co.uk

Nottingham For Reel!s

Shane Meadow Chris Cooke Miles Hunt C-mone + more

Published: September

2004

newsprint Pagination: 24 pages of : C-Mone

Main Music Interview

y o u r s t y l e i s l eg e n d a r Trumps: That Issue’s Nottsado Viccy v Bro

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leftlion.co.uk/issue50

Published: Sutober 204

6

Pagination: A pill with the Fish Man’s face on it Main Music Interview : Mass Band of the Cloned Xylophone Man Army That Issue’s Notts Tru mps: Wilkotron v The Bla ck Hole of Primark