I WROTE THIS BOOK & GUARDIAN STORY: RED GALLERY

I was first approached about writing the book which became MAKING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING in 2011. It was published in December 2014.

We had a party. I escaped before dawn. RED gave away 2000 copies. If you weren’t there, you can read the book here. It’s designed by Tomato, art directed by Jason McGlade.

Here’s the related article in The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/18/cultural-revolution-red-gallery-east-london-shoreditch-regeneration

Grateful to the Red Gallery’s Ernesto Leal for awakening many of the thoughts that made the final cut. Also for he and Yarda Krampol’s trust in my exploration of the Shoreditch I’d recently returned to. I approached it like a documentary, an archive. Left some interviews entirely unedited.

The essay explores the cultural legacy and necessity of Red – plus 30 interviews with people involved with the building of this unparalleled contemporary hacienda. Thanks to all contributors/interviewees and those that supported the creation of the book.

Pics below by Urte Janus, more here, the cover pic is thanks to Fiona Cartledge.

The Guardian / one man bands

‘I get to keep all the cash’

Collaboration be damned – why bother with clashing egos and split royalties when it’s easier than ever to make music single-handedly these days? By Kirsty Allison

Kirsty Allison

The Guardian, Friday 19 June 200

“It’s cheaper to tour,” says Ben Nicholls, matter-of-factly. “The scheduling’s not a nightmare and I get to keep all the cash.” He’s explaining why he does what he does: perform and record dark and intense garage rock as a one-man band, under the name Dennis Hopper Choppers. Not a solo artist – one man with an acoustic guitar, a line in heartfelt melancholia and, possibly, a beard – but a one-man band.

Being a one-man band no longer means having cymbals strapped between your knees, a bass drum on your back, a mouth organ suspended around your neck and sleigh bells tied to your ankles. These days, one-man bands are using technology to realise their musical vision, and to take control of what they do. These new one-man bands are not novelty entertainments.

But how do we define the one-man band? Adam Clitheroe, director of the documentary One Man in the Band, puts it this way: “For me, it’s someone willing to go and try to make the noise of a band. If you’re a one-man band in your head, you’re big enough to do it.”

The godfather of the modern one-man bands is probably Hasil Adkins, a rock’n’roller who claimed to have written 7,000 songs, was a forefather of the punk-rockabilly hybrid known as psychobilly, and who died in 2005. “I saw Hasil Adkins, the founding father of the contemporary one-man band scene, and his rockabilly surf twang made me realise it was time to stop arsing around with other people,” says Nicholls. As a child, Adkins assumed that the records he heard on the radio in rural West Virginia were all the work of one-man bands, and he never relinquished his individual approach to music – he once recorded an album of songs about chickens, entitled Poultry in Motion. But Adkins, obviously, was far from the first. There are records of multi-instrumentalists in England and France going back to the 13th century. By the 19th century, the social historian Henry Mayhew noted blind one-man bands busking on London’s streets. In the following century, the one-man band was often part of a clown act, as well as being common among hillbilly communities of the sort that produced Adkins.

What Adkins had that his successors share was a desire to be the centre of attention, even if there’s also an element of necessity, given that few of these artists would be able to pay backing musicians. Bands just don’t allow individual expression, says Johnny Halifax, who performs on his own as Honkeyfinger. “The very nature of having a democratic songwriting process dilutes any ideas from individuals, and unless the warring egos create something as significant as Jagger/Richards or Lennon/McCartney, the concept has to come from the mind of one person.”

Where the Roland 303 gave acid house its sound, and the Roland 808 gave hip-hop its beats, the piece of technology that has done most to liberate a new army of one-man bands is the Boss Loop Station sampler. Combine that with a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection, and you’ve got everything you need to make music as a band, without the hassle of bandmates, A&R men, or distributors. “It’s amazing and revolutionary,” says the Tokyo-based one-man band Merce Death. “Since the Boss Loop Station sampler came on to the market seven years ago, it’s opened up the scene. Before, there was only a delay pedal; this sampler allows us to create and control our own layers to play against.” His setup means his improvised space-metal-jazz sets ricochet across the internet from his suburban home as he broadcasts online.

Johnny Halifax chose to become the one-man band Honkeyfinger four and a half years ago, fed up of the “control-freak behaviour” in bands. He, too, uses technology, but in his case it’s to create new music from the roots of rock: the blues. He loops and layers lap-steel guitar, kick drum and harmonica, with his voice processed through a vocoder, while playing guitar solos on top – and it all goes through a single bass amp. Having the ability to sample and loop enables him to recreate the sound of a 60s power trio, like Cream or the Jimi Hendrix experience, without the hassles of Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker spitting blood at each other, or Noel Redding wondering why he isn’t the lead guitarist.

But if technology has liberated some, others have chosen to remain resolutely lo-fi and insist on a purist approach to being a one-man band. Dennis Hopper Choppers, for example. “I lug all the gear on and off stage and do not use any form of technology,” says Nicholls. “That’s got to be part of the challenge, playing everything at once, all by yourself. That’s what people want to see. I am a whole band – I do it without cheating. I make that much sound and it becomes part of the whole live experience watching someone create that. I think the sampler is a compromise: it lacks the true ingenuity which I deliver. It’s the sound-defying logic of watching a one-man band struggle to deliver that’s got to be a large part of the attraction.”

Thomas Truax, too, rejects electronics, preferring to invent his own instruments to provide the sounds he wants. The hornicator, for example, is made from the horn from an old gramophone, a kazoo, strings and a microphone. Something he calls Mary Poppins features two arms that fly out to provide a train-like rhythm. He travels from gig to gig by public transport, a wandering minstrel. And when he performs, it is a spectacle – the originality and seeming impossibility of what he does is much of the appeal.

There’s even a case to be made for human beatboxers being urban music’s version of the one-man band. “In another life, I would have been in a band,” says Killa Kela. “When I started I was going into drum’n’bass or a jungle clubs, and the DJ just stopped, it would go silent, and I’d have to fill that – it was a bit of a circus act. Now I can deconstruct what I’m doing, record it, and on my new album the song has to outweigh the concept.” Kela, though, has moved on – he tours with live musicians and has just announced a new live band, but, he says, “I still turn up at clubs and wait for that silence. The one-man band element is nostalgic, and the performance is intimate because it’s so physical – it’s come a long way from doing the Lambeth Walk with a kick drum on the back. I’m still a one-man band, I like to collaborate, but there’s a saying that with restriction comes creativity.”

Kela’s journey is echoed by Amy Turnidge, whose debut album as Theoretical Girl is coming out soon on Memphis Industries. Theoretical Girl started as a one-woman project, but has expanded. “I am a one-lady band, yes,” she says, “but I’ve lately started to get a band because there’s only so far you can go on your own, and outside input is good. It’s a romantic feeling being on a train, alone on the road. It’s freeing, but then it gets to a point when you want your friends with you and someone to share it with.”

Even the most committed one-man bands feel that sense of loneliness sometimes. After all, it’s hard to be a rock’n’roller if there’s no one else to indulge in rock’n’roll behaviour with you. As Johnny Halifax puts it, somewhat wistfully: “The problem I now have is not being able to blame anyone else for smashing up the dressing room.”

The Guardian

‘If you set out to get rich, you’re doomed’

The veteran producer of movies such as Atonement looks forward, in his new role as head of film for Shine Pictures, to ‘climbing the populist ladder’ with quality ‘arthouse crossover’ films. He speaks to Kirsty Allison

Kirsty Allison

The Guardian, Monday 15 December 2008

Article history

Paul Webster’s office at Shine Pictures drips with movie executive success despite being in the unlikely location of Clerkenwell, in central London, not Hollywood. Promotional posters and award glitz for producing films such as Atonement ($128m gross), The Motorcycle Diaries ($58m), Pride & Prejudice ($121m) and Sexy Beast ($10m) sit alongside reminders of his early days distributing cult classics such as The Evil Dead.

Webster joined Kudos in 2004 and was responsible for introducing the company to his “old friend” Elisabeth Murdoch two years later. Her company, Shine, paid £22.89m for the producers of Spooks and Hustle, with a further £1.97m contingent on future performance. Webster was made head of film for Shine Pictures in July and now runs a company with an annual turnover of £30m. The company is a joint venture with distributor New Regency, giving Webster access to funding from Fox, part of the News Corp empire.

He met Murdoch in 2003 through mutual friends in the film business but refuses to elaborate on their friendship. “She’s a muncher!” is all he says, referring to her PacMan-esque ability to pick up media commodities. As part of Shine’s acquisition spree, she went on to acquire Reveille which makes Ugly Betty and had an ancillary movie production wing.

“Nobody knew about it, so Lis said why don’t you handle that as well, which meant we were gifted a heap of American projects,” Webster says.

Kudos’s next film will be a western – The Staked Plain. The film, financed by Focus Features, the specialist film wing of Universal Pictures, has “entirely been born out of television people” from Reveille. Webster says this supports his belief and that of Stephen Garrett – executive chairman of Kudos – that “writing and directorial talent can migrate back and forth between TV and film in the UK”.

FilmFour failure

Yet Webster’s career – more illustrious than the careers of most in the UK film business – hit a road block of sorts when he previously tried to unite a film unit with a TV broadcaster.

He was chief executive of FilmFour in 2002 when it folded after just four years, with losses of £3m in 2000 and £5.4m in 2001. These may have been small sums in Hollywood terms but they were enough for the board of Channel 4 to close it down.

Webster claims that FilmFour was not a failure financially; he blamed the “overall situation” – by which he means a failure of the parent company to understand film financing – coupled with the advertising downturn. He claims it cost more to close down FilmFour than it did to run it. The business reopened with Tessa Ross at the helm three months later with smaller budgets and strategy. Webster worked for Ross as a producer on The Motorcycle Diaries and Touching the Void.

“What we originally tried at FilmFour was to turn it into a standalone business that was not subsidised in effect by the television channel,” he says. It proved too difficult. “Not least because the relationship between a broadcaster and a film company is always going to be fraught because the broadcaster will always want your product/programming immediately.” He hopes Shine’s distribution deal with New Regency will circumvent that problem.

“It’s kind of an adage of the film business that all the films that get made after departure end up working,” he adds.

Webster now sees television as supporting the film industry in the UK, with film existing “on the rump”. This co-dependence is what he and Garrett – who founded Kudos along with Jane Featherstone – envisaged before they teamed up at Kudos. Webster says that Featherstone reads film scripts, and they talk about talent, “but she’s got a day job, Stephen kind of straddles both”.

He adds: “It’s hard to make cold economic judgments as a film producer. If you set out to get rich you’re 99% doomed to failure, you’ve got to be driven by a passion that supersedes paying the rent.”

Webster’s position is a far cry from his start in the business – as a dispatch clerk in the basement of the Gate cinema in Notting Hill. He was 23 and the explosion of German New Wave cinema was beginning. “I got the bug,” he says, “I was going down to the Electric to watch double bills every night.”

He started distributing cult films in the UK with Osiris before producing at Palace Pictures in the 1980s. He went on to independently produce films such as The Tall Guy, before setting up Working Title’s LA office and being made head of production for Miramax on films including Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love. When FilmFour was disbanded in 1998, he briefly returned to Working Title, producing Pride & Prejudice and Atonement with the director Joe Wright. Recent projects include David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day and the forthcoming flamingo documentary The Crimson Wing (a collaboration between Kudos and Disney).

“It’s important to make films that travel,” Webster says. “You can’t make films that just appeal to the UK market, because you’re forced into making films of such a small budget that the demands are too rigorous of an audience – and then you’re driven into an arthouse ghetto. There are, of course, exceptions like Mike Leigh but I think there’s a greater consciousness of making a film connect to an audience.”

Webster is, unsurprisingly, very supportive of state-funded subsidies for independent films such as the Film Council’s New Cinema Fund. “It’s like the pebble you throw in the pond – eventually the ripples do hit the shore and it’s essential to have avant-garde and audacious work being done because the periphery always informs the mainstream,” he says.

Populist ambition

“I’m not in the business of art films, I work in a much more commercial arena but I benefit from it. I’m really interested in how far we can climb the populist ladder here at Kudos, my ambition is to reach broad worldwide audiences with an arthouse crossover working with talented directors,” he says, citing Wright as an example.

He is scathing about some digital filmmaking, which he sees as encouraging poor-quality movies. “It has resulted in a lot of very cheap movies which look very cheap, and unless you’re someone like Michael Winterbottom, who has an innate understanding of visual storytelling and like the freedom of being able to continually direct, rather than spending years of putting together the money required for film budgets, ultimately you gotta have the welly; you make your film cheap, you gotta have the money to sell it, you still need that, I mean Michael [Winterbottom] works with Angelina Jolie and has Ben Affleck – he follows the same course as all of us. We all doff our hats to the power of the actor, the power of the movie star, it’s very, very real. The reason we got Atonement greenlit was because Keira was it in, y’know.”

The currency of talent aside, what about the very real threats to cinema – piracy and the recession? He actually manages a giggle before pointing out that this is not the first time the death toll has rung for cinema – it has survived television, video and DVD.

Regarding piracy, he believes it is the responsibility of distributors to adopt more progressive ideas. These could include releasing movies online, on DVD and in the cinema at the same time. The huge marketing spend of studios – the average is $250m for each big release – tends to make such big gambles unattractive. Staged releases – ie in different countries at different times – allow for mistakes to be rectified.

With plenty of companies in dire financial straits, the fear is that many downturn-hit parent groups will downsize their film arms. Webster shrieks “hold on to your hats!” when asked about this year’s financial collapse. From Hollywood there are currently widespread reports of studios reducing production and development slates – Viacom/Vantage, Lionsgate and the Weinstein company recently cut back staff, and distribution companies in the UK have been dropping like flies.

Webster believes the deal with New Regency (and the access it provides to News Corp funds) gives his business enough support to withstand the current turmoil. “I think when you’re in the middle of the maelstrom you just have to stick to your principles,” Webster says.

“It’s a time not to be afraid and not to go back to the kitchen sink of storytelling … I have a crude and unshakeable belief in the power of long-form storytelling and there will always be audiences for that, we just have to find new ways of telling those same stories.”

Curriculum vitae
Age 56
Education Left Burnt Mill comprehensive in Harlow, Essex at 17
Career
1975-79 dispatch clerk, Gate Cinemas and Cinegate Ltd
1979-81 joint MD, Osiris Films
1982-88 head of theatrical distribution, Palace Pictures
1988-1995 independent producer. Set up Working Title’s LA office
1995-97 head of production, Miramax
1998-2002 chief executive, FilmFour
2004-present head of film, Kudos Pictures/Shine Pictures

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/15/television-channel4