LeftLion Magazine - August 2012 - Issue 48

#48 AuG / SEP 2012

The Afterdark Movement WEYA Sleaford Mods Alan Moore Raleigh The Gramophones Forest and County Season Preview Nottingham Events Listings Big London Sports Day Rammel

contents

LeftLion Magazine Issue 48 Aug - Sept 2012

editorial Ducks and Youths,

This issue we make no apologies for going on about the Olympics. Yes, any corporate brand-police tossers who might be reading this; I said it. Shall I say it again?

OLYMPICS OLYMPICS OLYMPICS OLYMPICS. And if you don’t like it, I’ve got a nice pink ring you can kiss to go with your other five ones.

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Contain Notts 04 May 16 Raleigh The news diary that forgot its PE kit Tales from behind the bike shed

again and now has to run round the field in vest and pants

06 LeftEyeOn

More photographic proof that loads

of stuff happens in town

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A Canadian In New Basford Our Rob is - gasp - massively excited about the Olympics

Kuwait is Over 10 The

Your 12/13 Forest/County preview,

and a long-overdue big-up for some of the non-leaguers in Notts

You Were Here, Here, Here, 12 Wish

Here and Here

The Gramophones make a right performance out of travelling the length of the UK

Dark 13 Lincoln

Sleaford Mods: Rant and vex Afterdark Movement 14 The

The reigning Future Sound of

Extraordinary Gentleman 19 An

Alan Moore: gifted to the core Village People 20 Olympic Our five-ringed circus coverage kicks

off with two local athletes

‘72 22 Munich A witness to the Israeli massacre

speaks for the first time Team NG When to see our local heroes on the telly

In The Membrane 24 Usain

World track and field records,

Nottsed up

Works 27 Art Louisa Jane Irvine and

James Michie

Forest Thump 28

The Caribbean Carnival gets

a revamp

Nottingham champions

credits Editor-in-chief Jared Wilson (jared@leftlion.co.uk) Editor Al Needham (nishlord@leftlion.co.uk) Prince of Peace Alan Gilby (alan@leftlion.co.uk) Marketing and Sales Manager Ben Hacking (ben@leftlion.co.uk) Designer Becca Hibberd (becca@leftlion.co.uk) Art Editor Tom Norton (tom@leftlion.co.uk) Community Editor Penny Reeve (penny@leftlion.co.uk) Literature Editor James Walker (books@leftlion.co.uk) Music Editor Paul Klotschkow (paulk@leftlion.co.uk) Photography Editor Dominic Henry (dom@leftlion.co.uk) facebook.com/leftlion

Nottingham Event Listings 29

Too much enjoying yoursen-related

Screen Editor Alison Emm (ali@leftlion.co.uk) Sport Editor Scott Oliver (scott@leftlion.co.uk) Stage Editor Adrian Bhagat (adrian@leftlion.co.uk) Cover Scott Wilson (flickr.com/photos/ wilsonaxpe) Photographers Ralph Barklam Trish Evans Paul Fillingham Lamar Francoise D. Godliman Carla Mundy David Sillitoe Illustrators Thomas Goodwin Steve Larder Adam Poole Rob White twitter.com/leftlion

look interesting, Nottingham

Cans Festival 39 The A new graff celebration hits town

To See Here 40 Nothing

Blackout: gigs and listening parties with the lights off

41 Reviews Natalie Duncan, Felix, WSUOR,

Moscow Youth Cult, Tribute to Nordberg, You Slut and more

Lion 42 Write Reviews, poetry, Katie Half-Price

45 Noshingham

Japanese cuisine, alfresco dining in

Sherwood, and our Kebab reviewer meets his match

Abroad 46 LeftLion Plus Rocky Horrorscopes, Notts

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

activity, as always

WEYA 32

1,000 artists descend upon town:

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Trumps and The Arthole

Writers Sally Anderson Mike Atkinson Stuart Brothers Wayne Burrows Katie Carrington Rich Crouch Rob Cutforth Pete Davis Christy Fearn Rebecca Gove-Humphries Andrew Graves Tom Hadfield Katie Half-Price Amy Helliwell Pippa Hennessy Matt Hurst Dori Kirchmair Beane Noodler Bee Patience Tom Quickfall Joe Sharratt Tim Sorrell Leo Swarvett Andrew Trendell Anthony Whitton

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.

Anyroad, yeah; loads of sporty coverage this issue. And justifiably so, because - when you put aside the fact that it’s held in London - the spoilt child of the United Kingdom that gets everything it wants and appreciates nothing - and that our already rammel capital city has bent over backwards to transform itself into an enormous trough for beak-wetting corporate mingebags, and the entire world is looking at us and thinking; “Jesus, what happened to them?” and it’s cost an absolute fortune - it’s still going to be mint when the actual sport kicks in.

There’s sixteen of our Notts brothers and sisters repping the Motherland - we tell you when you can see them. More importantly, when you see our centrespread and realise just how fast and strong some of these athletes are, you’ll be knocked bandy.

Nothing else to report, really; we’re all still battered from an outstanding day at Splendour when we hosted the Courtyard Stage, and we’ve been flat out on making this magazine so bleddy outstanding, it’s worthy of your Nottingham eyes. Hope you still, y’know, fancy us and find us a bit sexeh.

Word to your Nana, Al Needham nishlord@leftlion.co.uk

Adam Poole

The Shirt King of LeftLion Originally from the charming Cotswolds, Adam moved Up North six years ago, until he realised - with the help of Leftlion - that Nottingham is in no way the North at all, thank you very much. The producer of them beeyootiful shirts in our footy season preview, Adam runs an online t-shirt store which doubles up as an outlet for his strange obsession for rodents, goats and sayings made up with his mates. He also designs and builds websites; if you want your wheezy old one to look proper nice, maybe you should hit him up. apt-shirts.co.uk

Wayne Burrows Ad Sectioner

Wayne started collecting the adverts from extinct Nottingham magazines while being writer-in-residence at the Contemporary last year and has since scanned hundreds of them. He’s also written a book called The Apple Sequence to mark the reopening of Sneinton Market, is currently following every move made by Hatch - Nottingham’s favourite “theatre without a building” - on their blog at hatchnottingham. wordpress.com, and has just cobbled together a short film imagining the last half century as an extended advert of the sort that used to get shown at the Savoy Cinema when you could still smoke in there and they stopped the films halfway through to flog choc ices. He is now based at Primary - which isn’t far from the Savoy, as it happens. wayneburrows.wordpress.com leftlion.co.uk/issue48

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MAY CONTAIN NOTTS June - July 2012

with Nottingham’s ‘Mr. Sex’ Al Needham

8 June

13 July

A friend goes to Download. The first thing he sees when he gets on site is a greb wazzing over his greb mates, who are laughing and rolling about in it. He also points out that ‘Download’ is easily the most dated name for an event on the entire festival circuit, and wonders if they’re going to update it at any point.

Probably to ‘Furby’ or ‘Cybercafe’.

13 June

The Queen stands at a balcony and waves at people. Her dress was the exact same colour as the front of the 24-hour Greggs on the other side of the Square; I bet she was sucking her teet’ that no one had warned her.

16 June

I go round me Mam’s for Sunday dinner. She’s looking after me sister’s dog, who has a benign lump of fat on his chest. As I’m watching Challenge on her telly, I get fascinated by this lump; it’s the size of a fist. Half an hour later, it dawns upon me that I have spent the entire duration of an episode of Bullseye copping a feel of a husky’s breast implant.

18 June

Someone at the Council thinks it’s a good idea to put up banners for the Olympics that read ‘ACHIEVE’, ‘PERFORM’, ‘ASPIRE’ and ‘CELEBRATE’, a move that the ruling classes of North Korea would look at and think; “Bleddy hell, they’ve gone a bit too far there, an’t they?” I wouldn’t mind, but this is directly opposite the Wetherspoons and its target audience is people who aspire to somebody inventing mobility scooter with a built-in chip pan.

A male hairdresser from Newark is reunited with his long-lost dad after the former saw the latter lobbing his man-breasts out on Embarrassing Bodies on Channel 4. How did the penny drop on that one? “Hey Derek, look at this lad on telleh - he’s got your sausage-tits”?

16 July

Some rat-boy parks a car outside my bedroom window and torches it. BLAAOOWWW! The flames shoot all the way up a twenty foot-tall Leylandii tree, until it looks like the party scene in Rollerball. FOOOOMPH! Three minutes after this happened, a fire crew handled it, and an hour later, the charred hunk of metal was lobbed onto a wagon and carried off. Sometimes, it’s nice to live in a high Council Tax band.

17 July

Dunno if the Olympics brand police have been though Nottingham yet, but if they haven’t, they need to know that a certain sports shop in town is selling shockingly inferior t-shirts with an appalling logo on them, at a quarter of the usual price of a branded shirt. Oh, hang on - these are actually the official ones.

No one gives a toss.

19 July

carry one out of someone’s house, and they also had to deal with being encumbered with beige flares that weighed a ton when it rained, unlike the light and comfortable sportswear donned by our modern-day scum.

20 July

American gun mentalists: the next time you want to go on a multi-weapon rampage in a cinema, but don’t want to hurt anyone, wait until they show something with subtitles at the Ilkeston Scala.

21 July

The Beach comes back to the Square. Part of me wonders if somewhere in Mauritius or Hawaii the local council is dropping a massive concrete slab and clustering mini-Primarks around it. This year’s main attraction appears to be a recreation of the Titanic, from which the kiddies can slide off. Maybe, after we’ve all gone, their grandchildren will be spending the summer holidays gleefully jumping off an inflatable World Trade Center.

23 July

Police issue warnings to horse owners in Blidworth that someone is going round plaiting horses’ manes at night, leading to fears that before too long, they’ll move on to spray-tanning the poor boggers, and affixing sparkles to their hooves.

Government figures announce that the crime rate in Nottingham is the lowest it’s ever been since 1977. An impressive stat, especially when you consider that there were only four video recorders in Nottingham 35 years ago and it took six criminals to

leftlion.co.uk/mcn

Advertising Sectioned

24 June

Don’t you hate it when England get knocked out of summat, and the newspapers all go; “At least there’s Wimbledon”? That’s like saying “Yeah, your partner’s dumped you, but now you can stop at home and pleasure yourself with a handful of broken glass.”

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

28 June

The Olympic Torch comes into town. You stand there, wondering if anything is actually going to happen, and then three vans come along and throw corporate rammel at you, like a Happy Shopper Tour de France, and you wonder if that’s it. Then some marketing manager comes huffing along holding a stick with a bit of fire on the end, and you say; ‘Is that it?’

30 June

The Olympic torch goes to Derby. Hey Sebastian Coe, thanks for teaching them the secret of Man’s red fire, you irresponsible bastard.

5 July

There’s a milkshake and cookie shop on Parliament Street that’s started serving alcohol at night to idiot student girls who want to get mashed out of their skulls without the tedious process of drinking something that tastes of alcohol, and people wonder why town is dying on its arse. Every time I stand at the bus stop outside - something I avoid doing whenever possible, because I start to feel like Gary Glitter wondering why it’s taking PC World so long to fetch his laptop out the storeroom - I swear down I can hear The Childcatcher out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang behind the bar, doing his skippy walk and shouting “HERE WE ARE, MY LITTLE ONES! COME AND GET YOUR SHOOTERS! FREE JAEGERBOMBS TODAY!”

12 July

Nottingham Forest get new owners. Let us all hope that their supporters spend the summer exuding the quiet, downplayed, dignified attitude their County brethen displayed when they thought Munto was going to buy them a time machine that would bring Pele, Maradona and Jesus to Meadow Lane a few summers ago.

Roxy Threads (1988)

The twenty-first century’s obsession with the eighties has gone further than any revival known before. To anybody who can remember the era it’s all a bit odd; beyond the synthpop, big hair and neon leggings, we’re also reprising mass unemployment and a Tory government. Let’s never forget that the first half of the decade that gave us Prince and Grandmaster Flash also saddled us with the destruction of manufacturing industry, YTS schemes and Stars on 45.

The advert here - lifted from a Nottingham University ‘Rag Mag’ made up almost entirely of dubious jokes about cannibals, the Irish, and dim-witted, top-heavy secretaries – showcases a late phase of the Carlton Street boutique determined to keep up with the cutting edge of eighties style.

Which by 1988 meant staying a couple of issues of The Face

The Jubilee!

It was fantastic, wasn’t it? Yes, we still have the bunting up, and it will stay for another 18 months, as she was made Queen in 1952 but became Queen in 1953. And we’d like take the opportunity to point out to our customers that we didn’t mean any harm when we suggested that if Prince Philip should die next year we’d have another day off; it’s the Editor’s fault entirely for keeping that in”

The Olympics!

NotTs most opinionated grocers on...

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We’re going. We have tickets for the rowing at Eton. We used to row for a local team, it’s the only sport we’re interested in, and we don’t care about any other sports. But wasn’t the Olympic torch rubbish? If you were looking the other way at the time you would have missed it - some woman stuck between two lorries.

And why were all the police on BMWs when they should have been on Triumphs?

in front of the Burton’s on Market Square. The shop’s actual clothes might have paid homage to Bryan Ferry and David Bowie, but the drawing here is more reminiscent a Shakin’ Stevens too scared to put his Ray-Bans on in case he gets called a ponce by the white-shirts outside Yates’s.

Just as you can’t blame yourself for having thought white chinos and a burgundy polo-neck were probably a good idea half a lifetime ago, you can’t hold it against Roxy’s that they sold the clothes Nottingham folk wanted to wear. But that was the 1980s all over: a decade obsessed with appearance that seemed incapable of leaving its house without a mullet, a snood, a rolled-up suit-sleeve or two and a pair of oversized Su Pollard specs perched on its nose. Before this revival gets any more out of hand, we beg our youth to do what Nancy Reagan and the cast of Grange Hill advised at the time: ‘Just Say No’.

The Beach returns!

We went last year, for a drink in the evening. We thought it was terrible at first, but it’s got much better. For some people its their holiday, isn’t it? Not everyone can afford to get away. We love the new Square, but we object where the stone comes from. We can’t have a Council who bitch about where things come from with you buy your stone from China. We like the fact that there’s a nice steady incline, so old people can walk across it and not break their necks. We think they should change the water every day, though.

The rancid summer!

We don’t mind the rain at all. All it’s done for us is put up the price of broccoli and cauliflower. We don’t care for hot weather; the worst was in 1976, when the potatoes were like pebbles.

The Thompson Brothers, 83 Haydn Road, Sherwood, NG5 2LA

Francis Upritchard Alfred Kubin 21 July – 30 September www.nottinghamcontemporary.org Open Tue – Sun. Free.

LeftEyeOn

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

Look, Kate, another Greggs

Sadly, the Queen left it too late to rent a pink stretch Humvee for her day out to Nottingham, and had to make do with a boring convoy of limos instead.

Lamar Francoise / lamarfrancoisphoto.co.uk

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Fire and Ice

The Olympic torch, being looked after by Torvill and Dean when it passed through the National Ice Arena last June.

Dom Henry / facebook.com/nationalicecentre

Complete Washout

The National Water Sports Centre: not a venue for the Games of the XXX Olympiad.

Trish Evans / road-work.org.uk

Nation of Inflation

No, not a giant space cat; it’s Nottsbased inflatable gurus Architects of Air, at the Lakeside with their new work Exxopolis in June.

D.Godliman / dgphotos.co.uk

Her Name Is Rio And She Dances In The Square

Brazilian Samba dancers take over Slab Square on Friday 22 June, as part of Night of Festivals 2012.

Lamar Francois / lamarfrancoisphoto.co.uk

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Rob Cutforth: he’s got tickets for a rendezvous with his past, and he’s kicking off our five ring-related coverage...

When you lived in a small town in the middle of the Canadian prairie, your senior year in high school was pretty much the best year of your life. Behind you lay the ruins of your bullied adolescence; ahead, seductive visions of escape. Yet to know any of life’s real pain, so you stupidly looked to the future with optimism and hope. It wouldn’t be long until all your dreams were crushed and you settled into a life of chopping hay or having your fingers lopped off in an oil rig’s anchor chain, but for that one year, life was good.

Being a high school senior in Brooks, Alberta came with certain privileges. Your curfews became a thing of the past, you had a 50/50 shot at getting served at the Newell Hotel and you could legally buy hollow point bullets from Canadian Tire. And if you were a farm kid, the years of getting your ears flicked from behind on the county school bus were over because, at long last, the coveted back seat belonged to you.

So imagine my surprise when I walked onto the bus on my first day of my senior year to see the back seat taken up by a kid one year my junior, whilst my fellow Grade 12 bus riding pal, Chris, occupied the seat second from back. What was this all about? I asked myself. Don’t these people know the rules? The back seat was my prerogative - nay, my god-given right! Who was this interloper to deny me the back seat?

I searched Chris’ face for an answer as to why he hadn’t exerted his authority and received a deflated shrug in reply. The bus started moving and the driver barked at me to take my seat. I was at a crossroads. In one

direction lay shame and humiliation; in the other, confrontation.

Being a four-foot dork, confrontation was easily my least favourite thing (followed closely by talking to girls) but if I didn’t say something, I would be treated like a sucker for the whole year - maybe for the rest of my life. I couldn’t stand for that insult. I wouldn’t stand for that insult. I was going to march right up to this pony-tailed trespasser and put her straight.

I twisted my face into a scowl and charged the back of the bus, like Eric Pickles after a pork pie. That day, I would not be the pimply dwarf who buckled under a feather’s weight. That day, I was fierce, I was mighty; that day, I was to be a man. A real man, like ones in deodorant adverts. In my mind, I had the grit of a wounded wolverine and the law on my side.

Oddly, she didn’t seem scared at all. Just the opposite in fact.

She sat defiantly, with her chin up and a face as cold and unmoving as an Easter Island statue. I opened my mouth to speak, met her hard stare full-on and promptly bottled it.

Defeated, I sat down beside Chris, leaned over and whispered; “Why didn’t you kick her out of the back seat?” Chris said

nothing, but that didn’t mean my question went unanswered.

The riposte was firm and direct and it came from the girl behind: “Rob, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

As it turned out, I had nothing to say to her face. Nothing at all. Suddenly, the underside of the bus seemed like a perfectly welcoming place to be.

That snippy disposition and hardened glare didn’t do much for her secondary school bus decorum, but it did help her to win the World Cup fencing title in 2006 and secure a place at this summer’s Olympics. Her fourth. So when I decided to try for Olympics tickets this year, Women’s Fencing was high on my list. Twenty years had passed since my run in with Sherraine Schalm, so I supposed it was time to put that terrible day on the bus behind me. I would do whatever it took to see that spiky girl from my tiny hometown of 12,000 compete on the world’s biggest stage.

Now, I know where you think this is going. This column was initially going to be about the idiotic way the organisers doled out tickets. I had this whole big whinge prepared lamenting the fact that some lazy, Johnny-come-lately got a ticket for the 100m final at the 11th hour while a dedicated person (like me) who got up early on Day One and spent three hours clicking refresh got the shaft. After coming away ticketless in the first round, my column was half-written, bursting with vitriol and seething hatred. I had at least three jokes comparing David Beckham to a gardening implement but then, boom, I got tickets in the second round and lost interest.

From what I’ve gathered on the ground, you people didn’t really give a toss about the Olympics anyway. If Big Ben was a giant limey Moan-O-Meter instead of a clock, it would be currently bonging its head off. It’s so corporate, mate! The IOC are crooks!

It’s too expensive! The logo looks like Lisa Simpson giving head!

Seb Coe looks like Face from the A-Team! Believe me, I’ve heard them all and I was right there with you. Until I got tickets. Now all I can say is: nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah.

Now that I am actually going to be there, I really want to enjoy these Olympics. I want to lose myself in the joyous atmosphere of the world’s middle class getting together to cheer on its fastest and best at throwing heavy objects. I want to hug that weird mascot until its eye pops out. I want to help load a surface-to-air missile launcher in Notting Hill. I even want to be around other Canadians. Every time I hear a story about an Adidas exec pilfering a coveted torch-bearer slot or of another juiced-up sprinter being allowed to compete or, most infuriatingly, “London 2012 is proud to only accept VISA”, I just cover my ears and eyes and hum the Super Mario 3 theme song in my head until an advert of Jessica Ennis’s midriff comes on TV and I can again allow myself to get pumped about the whole ridiculous neon abomination.

I will be hoping Sherraine has a better outing this time around; the Beijing Olympics was one to forget. She went into the Games as a hot medal favourite and was knocked out in the first round by her former Hungarian training partner. She then removed her mask and launched into a sweary tirade at her opponent’s coaching team and (weirdly) apologised to the “Canadian taxpayer” for her failure. To say she “lost it a bit” would be an understatement. As a result of her so-called “un-Canadian” outburst we’re all supposed to be uber-polite little darlings, dontcha know - there will be less press fanfare and public support for her this time. If there is one thing I know about that girl from the bus, it’s that I will be happy to be watching the match from the stands and not directly opposite her, staring down the business end of her rapier. leftlion.co.uk/cinb

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THE KUWAIT IS OVER Nottingham Forest

wine in the cellar for £3 a bottle whilst forcing £7 bottles of watered-down Miller down the necks of its punters.

Which turned out to he non-alcoholic.

As bankruptcy loomed, the brewery looked for a new manager - also called Steve, to save on signage and posters.

All he’d do is try to stock the jukebox with LPs, and wonder why they didn’t fit.

Rich Crouch, Lost That Lovin' Feeling

If last season was a blind date in town, what would it be like?

It would be a date where you’ve already seen a tightly-cropped photo taken from a high angle, so you think you’re about to meet a stunner, only to discover that she has a friend who’s good with Photoshop. However, you persevere, thinking that things have to get better. After a few treble voddies down BZR you get yourself to second base, only to find out that she is actually a he. Who then mugs you. However, as the night draws to a close, you find a fiver on the floor, which pays for a kebab and a bus, which you sit on, feeling a bit lucky and wiser.

Who’s new at the club this season?

Everything! The Doughty estate finally completed the sale of the club to the Al-Hasawi family, who have made some big promises. At the time of writing the only acquisition has been O’Driscoll, but I’m confident we’ll be seeing at least eight new faces, hopefully more…

What was the absolute highpoint of last season?

Beating Leeds 7-3. Not only for the scoreline, but the wonderful ‘Beating Leeds United, 7-3’ song, to the tune of Let It Be. Majewski’s hat-trick at Crystal Palace would come second, and being the only team to beat Birmingham at their place would also rank up there. The League Cup tie with County at the start of the season was a decent game - but with hindsight, given how laboured the eventual win was, it should have been taken as a severe warning.

And the lowpoint?

Pretty much everything else. Not the results per se, just the football. Dire, unimaginative hoofball.

Low points of note: selling our future (Bamford) to Chelsea, which enabled Cotterill to loan in some overpriced journeymen; Matt Derbyshire somehow convincing someone that he’s a footballer; Ishmael Miller telling the fans to “F*** Off” on Twitter; Chris Cohen getting injured at the start of the season. None of this holds a candle to the death of Nigel Doughty, though.

Last year’s star player…

Joel Lynch. Solid at the back, finally given a chance to shine, duly does, and then now gone off to join another team – pretty much the pattern for any player who showed glimpses of ability last season. Honourable mentions also go to Adlene Guediora, Raddi Majewski, and Garath McCleary, who all outshone the rest of the squad.

Last year’s donkey…

Honestly, the City Ground was like Blackpool beach. Ishmael Miller, Marlon Harewood and Matt Derbyshire led the donkey derby (the only one they led all season), although the latter needs to drop out as he’s injured himself on the beach. Other players who seemed to forget their talent for the season include Luke Chambers, Jonathan Greening, Paul Anderson, Lewis McGugan and Lee Camp.

If your manager ran a bar in town, what would it be like?

We’ve only just appointed Sean O’Driscoll as the gaffer, so I’ll take the easy route and talk about the former managers. The bar would be called ‘Steve’s Place’; where the manager offloaded all the fine

And who’s been lobbed?

Everyone! Cotterill has gone, Gunter, McCleary, Chambers, Lynch and Harewood too. And hopefully all of the back room staff will get their marching orders in the next few days. Ultimately only Gunter leaving will register as a loss to any of us.

Any other pre-season goings-on worth noting?

Nope, not really. There was supposed to be a trip to the USA, but that’s been canned. We’ve got some ‘glamorous’ friendlies with some low-end Premier League teams from the West Midlands, but to be honest I’d sooner watch the Olympics. Pre-season started with too few players to get a decent game of five-a-side going – I think the remaining few weeks will have to be about bringing in players and hoping they gel.

What are your kits like this season?

The away kit is excellent; electric blue with hypno-socks, I look forward to seeing us play in it. Our home kit is plain red with the weird multi-shaded stripyness around the collar, like Umbro did for the England shirt. A little disappointing, personally; I’d hoped for pinstripes. The best thing was that local hero Carl Froch models them.

If you nick one thing from the other club in Nottingham, what would it be?

The sense of scepticism that can only come from being burned by ‘investment’ in the past. I wish we wouldn’t fall so quickly for Greeks - or Kuwaitis - bearing gifts, and swallow every word someone says simply because we hope they will spend money on our passion. Unfortunately, the “once bitten, twice shy” rule means you first have to be bitten.

Who will be the more successful club in Nottingham by the year 2020, and why?

County, obviously. Nah, only yanking your chain; Forest by a long way. We’ll both be in the Premier League, only theirs will have the words ‘Blue Square’ in front of it.

Call your shot: what will your club do in 2012-13?

Play-offs if the owners are genuine in what they’ve said. Threatened by relegation again if not.

OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE

nottinghamforest.co.uk

Tired of plastic seats, muted atmosphere, Chelsea bleeding Dagger every time someone

MANSFIELD TOWN Established: 1897

EASTWOOD TOWN Established: 1953

CARLTON TOWN Established: 2002

Potted history: Mansfield was on the football case almost as early as Nottingham was - in actual fact, home ground Field Mill is the second oldest football ground in the world. The actual club started life as church side Mansfield Wesleyans, who eventually aced out local rivals Mansfield Mechanics as the main team in town.

The Stags were a mainstay of the lower end of league football for nearly eight decades.

Potted history: A pretty recent club

by Nottinghamshire standards, but one that can claimed direct lineage with DH Lawrence’s dad’s works team, Eastwood Colleries (DH himself wasn’t that arsed about football, apparently; legend has it that he was once chinned in a Jacksdale pub for not supporting any of the local teams). It took the Badgers eighteen years before they turned semi-pro, but have hardly looked back, capping a long stay in the Northern Premier League with a championship season in 2008/9.

Potted history: The result of an arranged marriage between Sneinton FC and Porchester Lions (hence the ‘1904’ on the badge, when the former first started). The former club happily bumbled around assorted local leagues for much of the twentieth century; the new Millers, on the other hand, are the hothouse flowers of Notts football, both on the pitch and off. Maybe being handily positioned near the Stoke Bardolph sewage works has something to do with it.

The best of times: Take your pick from being in Division Two as recently as 1978, winning the Freight Rover Trophy at Wembley in 1987, pulling in nearly 25,000 people for a FA Cup tie with Forest in 1953, or battering West Ham 3-0 in the Cup in 1969, who had three members of the world champion England squad on the pitch.

The worst of times: Recent years have not been kind; they’re still getting over the nightmare season of 2007/08, when not only did they get relegated out of the Football League, but a prospective new owner announced that he would change their name to Harchester United, after the club in the TV series Dream Team.

Where are they now? In the Conference, and banging on the door of the League; they finished third in the table, losing to eventual winners York City in the playoffs. mansfieldtown.net

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The best of times: On the pitch, making it to the third round of the FA Cup in 2004. Off the pitch, getting £72,500 from Middlesbrough for defender Richard Liburd (who went on to play at Notts County for five seasons) in 1993.

The worst of times: Getting relegated from the Conference North last season, after finishing in the playoff zone the season before (but not being allowed to participate due to the ground not meeting Conference-level standards) Where are they now? Back in the Evo-Stik Northern Premier League, preparing to do the necessary work on their ground to take themselves to the next level. eastwoodtownfc.co.uk

The best of times: Midlands League Supreme DIvision champions in their first season, tearing through and out of the North Counties East Football League in the noughties, and a nice new all-seater stand.

The worst of times: Having a bypass from Gedling go right through the middle of their pitch, forcing a relocation of said nice new stand next to said sewage works.

Where are they now? Nicely placed in the Northern Premier League Division One South, two ridiculously good seasons away from the League. They actually finished second last season, falling away in the playoffs. carltontownfc.co.uk

For a few bizarre weeks in spring, it looked as if Forest and County - one battlling relegation, one knocking on the door of the playoffs - could spend the upcoming season in the same division, or even change places. Then the alHasawis came a-calling, and the two clubs seem further apart than ever. Or are they? illustrations: Adam Poole

Notts County

question. Between the sticks comes Bartosz Bialkowski, who many Southampton fans were surprised to see drop so low - hopefully that’s an indication of his quality. Jamal CampbellRyce looks to be the ideal replacement for Lloyd Sam, plus Joss Labadie and Yoann Arquin have signed up: great potential, questionable temperament.

Stuart Brothers, The Black and White fanzine If last season was a blind date in town, what would it be like?

At first, you think it’s going to be a nightmare, but there’s definitely an attraction there. Actually, the more time you spend with her the more you think the night’s going to end on a happy note. Then, just as you’re on her doorstep, she looks down at you, shakes her head, says, “Sorry duck, but your goal difference isn’t big enough” and slams the door in your face.

What was the absolute highpoint of last season?

Alan Judge’s last minute winner at Wycombe in our last away game stands out for me. Having spent most of the match losing, scoring two goals in the final minutes – the second particularly brilliant – were moments you just never saw coming.

Our season was as good as over until Dele Adebola got us back to 3-3. But when Judgey hit the top corner from the edge of the box…scenes.

And the lowpoint?

The moments leading to that Judge goal were pretty bleak, but when the news broke of Martin Allen’s sacking after a 3-0 defeat at Hartlepool we all feared the worst. As downright mental as he was, his impact was huge at Meadow Lane - he’d worked wonders in restoring many Magpies’ pride in the club again. Mind you, I don’t think we can give Keith Curle enough credit now. A bold possibly insane - appointment that certainly paid off.

Last year’s star player…

I’d be deservedly lynched if I went for anyone other than Judgey. The man’s a star. His season basically built up towards the last two months or so where he was just unstoppable. If we’re to be successful this season, holding on to him is vital.

Last year’s donkey…

Having left many a barn door untested during his time at Notts, Karl Hawley won’t be missed by anyone having been released in the summer. He’s spent part of his off-season in New York – I can only assume the Jets are in the market for a new field goal kicker.

If your manager ran a pub in town, what would it be like?

You wouldn’t have the best expectations as you walk through the door, but it’d be a classy joint, welcoming of everyone, and more often than not you’d leave pleasantly surprised with what you’ve experienced. Last orders is always a riot, too.

Who’s new at the club this season?

Gary Liddle from Hartlepool brings bags of experience, even though he’s still only 25. Up front there’s Enoch Showunmi from Tranmere Rovers - a bulky upgrade on our previous cumbersome striker, Ben Burgess. Defensively, Dean Leacock and Manny Smith have strengthened us without

And who’s been lobbed?

Everyone that we’d have expected (or wanted). Goalkeeper Stuart Nelson is perhaps unlucky not to have been offered a contract having been an ever-present last season. But no one will bat an eyelid at the likes of Burgess, Hawley, John Spicer, Charlie Allen or Jude Stirling being shown the door. Sadly, Mike Edwards also chose not to stay at Meadow Lane, opting for a two-year contract at Carlisle United instead.

Any other pre-season goings-on worth noting?

Notts have gone about their business fairly quietly, actually. There were hopes we’d get Juventus to Meadow Lane in the summer, but their schedule wouldn’t allow for it. The club held its 150th Year Gala Dinner early in pre-season which seemed to go down a treat. We even got a toe-curlingly bad message from Sepp Blatter out of it. Lucky us.

What are your kits like this season?

Black and white. Having sacked off the Derby kit after one year, we’ve gone back to a really smart traditional look. The away shirt - a hoopy black-and-amber hoopy affair - is a daring fusion of cat burglar and angry wasp, and there’s a hot pink third strip with black trim, rather like Elvis’ first Cadillac.

If you nick one thing from the other club in Nottingham, what would it be?

A couple of quid wouldn’t go amiss. Or Kieron Freeman. Yeah, Kieron Freeman.

Who will be the more successful club in Nottingham by the year 2020, and why?

Ignoring for a second that there is, strictly speaking, only one club in Nottingham, unfortunately it will be the other lot. We’ve got a lot of hard work to put in to have any chance of overhauling our newly-minted Kuwaiti-enabled friends over the river, some of whom I seem to remember chanting, “You used to be English, you’re not anymore” to Leicester fans last season. Funny how things turn out. Pole position is still theirs for the foreseeable future, sadly, but the community work Notts are doing really should start making inroads into strengthening the fan base for future generations.

Call your shot: what will your club do in 2012-13?

The summer signings look more promising on paper than they did last year, and we’ve a promising young manager looking to build on last year’s late failure to reach the play-offs, and there’s every reason to be optimistic. So, mid-table obscurity beckons. nottscountyfc.co.uk

£30 tickets, teams' fortunes being decided upon who can chuck the most money up the wall and the sound of words: Al Needham scores? There's more than two teams in Notts, y'know, and you ought to adopt one...

HUCKNALL TOWN Established: 1945

RETFORD UNITED Established: 1987

WORKSOP TOWN Established: 1861

Potted history: A longtime favourite of hardcore Football Manager players in the Notts area (as for a long time, they were the only local non-league team that you could actually manage if you couldn’t face getting your beloved Trees or ‘Pies relegated), The ‘Yellers’ used to play at the gloriously-named Wigwam Park and were - for a long time - your common-or-garden small-town club, content to pick up local trophies here and there.

Potted history: Another relatively new side (and another one called the Badgers), United have succumbed to an ailment common in fledgling non-league sides; they’ve done too much, much too young. After finding their feet in the Nottinghamshire Alliance - a league that either sounds like a building society or a local anti-Taliban force, depending on how old you are - they rapidly climbed up the pyramid until they got a bit light in the head, and the wallet.

Potted history: Yep, whisper it quietly, but the Magpies aren’t the oldest club in Notts. There are only three clubs in the world older than the Tigers, and in the early days they had to mix it with the clubs in the Sheffield Association League before becoming mainstays of the Midland League for much of their existence.

The best of times: Winning six championships in nine seasons last decade, vaulting four divisions and hoovering up local knockout cups along the way.

The worst of times: Getting taken over by the son of Soho grot baron Paul Raymond in 2001, only to be booted out of their own ground seven years later and having to crash round Hucknall Town and Retford United’s gaffs for a few seasons.

The best of times: Propelling themselves out of the Central Midlands League in the early nineties. Winning the NPL Division One in 1999, and its Premier Division five years later.

The worst of times: For the first 42 years of its life they were known as Hucknall Colliery Welfare, until the name became obsolete for obvious reasons in the eighties. Being denied entry to the Conference due to ground regulations, and getting relegated from the Conference North in 2009.

Where are they now? Holding their own in the Northern Premier League Division One South. Luckily, ‘South’ in this case only means as far as Sutton Coldfield. hucknalltownfc.com

The worst of times: Dropping out of the Northern Premier League due to financial constraints.

Where are they now? In the Northern Counties East Premier League. Even though they won it last year, they’re not ready to move up. The fact that they’re one of the few non-leaguers in Notts to have a proper youth system - with kids as young as ten turning out for them - means they’re a club to watch. pitchero.com/clubs/retfordunited

The best of times: Getting to the last 64 of the FA four times, including playing Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in 1908 in front of 70,184 - a figure that Forest or County have ever got near to.

Where are they now? In the NPL Premier League, and back in their old stadium again. worksoptown.co.uk And not forgetting...Arnold Town, Dunkirk FC, Gedling Miners Welfare, Gedling Town, Greenwood Meadows, Radford FC, Rainworth Miners Welfare, Teversal FC, and everyone in the Central Midlands Football League and the Nottinghamshire Senior League.

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WISH YOU WERE HERE...

interview: Alison Emm photo: Ralph Barklam

HERE HERE

HERE

AND HERE The Gramophones: they’ve been from Lands End to John O’Groats by London Bus, microlight and even DeLoreans.

Now they want to show you their holiday snaps in their brand new show, End To End, before they go back up North to Edinburgh for the Fringe. We spoke to Hannah Stone about what it’s like to live a road movie with your mates...

Tell us a bit about The Gramophones...

We’re an all-female theatre company - myself, Kristy Guest, Ria Ashcroft, Kath Akers and Tilly Branson. We try to create playful, interactive work that makes people who wouldn’t normally go to the theatre enjoy themselves and see it in a different light.

How did you come together?

I met Kristy on a clown course, and we both felt there was a lack of opportunity for women in comedy. We put some flyers around Nottingham cafés saying “Looking for female performers for theatre project”, which is how we met Ria and Kath. We just clicked. And then Hatch asked us to make a show for their Hatch:Abroad event.

It went really well; the audience was really receptive to it and we thought; “Oh...this is the start of something”.

Do you see yourselves as comediennes, or is it broader than that?

I’d say we’re performers; actresses that like to do comedy. I think our latest show is less comedic and more honest than our other two shows.

A lot of your works involve travel. Are you all a bit nomadic at heart?

Yeah. I think life’s about journeys. I suppose we’ve all been attracted to shows about travelling; we did one about holidays, and then one set on a canal boat, and now this one, about an actual physical journey. I love being able to cast everything off and be a new person, meet people you’d never normally meet, and notice things you’d never normally notice.

You see with different eyes when you travel.

You also get a fresh perspective on what ‘home’ is.

Definitely. We all went through personal journeys, which are explored in the show.

But I think we all came back and definitely re-evaluated what home means to us, and whether it’s possible to feel at home when you’re away. There were quite a few times in our journey where we felt really at home, even though we weren’t. We were sat in a tractor trailer having cups of tea and picnics with mums and babies and we just thought we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. It was a lovely place.

You basically travelled from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

Yes, but we did a bit of a zig-zag and ended up doing about 1,000 miles.

How did it come about?

There was a company called the Theatre Writing Partnership which sadly lost its funding and their final farewell was to give bursaries to seven writers or theatre companies to go on a journey and create a show around it.

We thought about Europe or America, but then thought, no, it would be actually really interesting to explore Britain as it is now.

Did you at any point think, “Oh my God, what are we doing?”

Yeah. Quite early on there were all the floods in Cornwall, and we were stuck on a train for a couple of hours. I know a couple of hours in the grand scheme of things isn’t that much but you did feel “are we ever going to get out of here?”

And towards the end, we were in Aviemore in Scotland, staying in a log cabin, and when we left we accidentally walked in a complete circle and ended up back at the entrance of the same log cabin. When we finally got to the station to leave we got on a steam train that went round in another circle and took us back there. We thought we were going to go round in circles forever.

Three women on their own across the UK; did that help or hinder the journey?

We did quite a lot of hitchhiking, so I think we looked less threatening, but then again there were three of us so the person picking us up was outnumbered. It took trust on their part and trust on our part. I think it probably helped - if we’d have been big men we might have scared people off. Everyone we met was lovely and we never felt we were being picked up because we were women, that would have made us uncomfortable.

You deliberately went off the radar for a day: what happened?

Day twelve we chose to have no mobile phones, no internet, and to avoid all CCTV cameras. It was a bit off an interesting day but we don’t really talk about it... The only way to find out about day twelve is to come see us.

Did people back home try to deter you, or were they all pretty supportive?

I think they know us well enough not to try and talk us out of it, but they did have concerns.

There were quite a few people on the journey

saying, “Do your mums know you’re doing this?” We spoke to a guy from the BBC every night, who was keeping up to date with our journey and he kept saying, “I just want to make sure you’re alright! I’m just worried about you!”

Were you surprised by the reaction you were getting?

We were absolutely overwhelmed by how much people wanted to help and be involved.

As soon as they heard about the project and what we were trying to do, they wanted to be part of it. I started to feel really, really positive about Britain; we’d get picked up by people who would take us miles and miles away from where they were supposed to be going.

What was your favourite mode of transport?

One of my favourites was a limousine ride we managed to blag through Birmingham. It was great fun listening to music and drinking cola from champagne glasses, just really surreal and hilarious. We all had our wish lists: Ria’s was a hot air balloon but no one had one to take us in. Kristy’s was a Delorean because she’s a massive Back To The Future fan, she got her wish but that’s all I can tell you outside the show.

Who was the oddest person you met on your trip?

Probably, Dan who took us to John O’Groats. He was an Elvis obsessive in his seventies with a really broad Celtic accent. We can’t say much more though, it’s in the show...

What do you like most about meeting these people?

Everybody you meet has a story to tell, and has something interesting to say. We were trying to ask people about their greatest journeys, and about what home means to them. We did it by asking them to take a postcard and write back to Kath in Nottingham, so some of the things we got back were beautiful - people open up more when they’ve got a pen and paper in front of them. We’re thinking about writing a book, actually. We’ve got so much material.

Did it change your perspective on Britain as a country?

I wasn’t the kind of person who’d choose a holiday here, but I would now. We saw so many places and thought, “Why haven’t I come here?” Places like the Lake District, even

Yorkshire - it was really beautiful, and wild, and natural. And it’s just on your doorstep.

Quite a lot of people said to us, “I live here but I haven’t explored.” You get so used to your own roots and your own routines in life, you forget sometimes to just stray from the path and think oh, what’s down here? I wasn’t ready to come home, I kind of wanted to carry on.

How hard was it to compact all those experiences into a fifty-minute show?

Really hard. Having Tilly Branson as director is absolutely fantastic, she didn’t go on the journey, so having that outside eye to help edit is amazing. There are several ideas we’ve had to accompany the show; one’s like an installation of all the different things we collected - hitching signs, tickets, leaflets, postcards and addresses - mapped out on the floor. The audience can come and choose something, and we tell them about it.

You’re taking it to Edinburgh. Excited?

I can’t wait. We’re doing two weeks this time.

Hopefully we’ll get some good feedback, get reviewed, and try and tour the show off the back of it next year.

The local theatre scene appears to be really healthy at the moment...

I think it’s happened really recently; it’s amazing. If you’d have talked to me a couple of years ago I would have been frustrated by the lack of opportunities, but it seems really up and coming now, especially with NETwork as well.

Things are definitely improving but there’s still some way to go.

Anything else you like to say?

Come and see us at Lakeside. If you don’t normally go to the theatre, give it a chance; it’s for everybody, not just your regular theatregoer. Our show is all about risk; we took so many chances on our journey, and they turned into brilliant moments. It’d be nice if people would take a risk on us.

End to End is at Lakeside Arts Centre on Saturday 4 August at 8pm. Tickets £7/£5.50 gramophonestheatre.wordpress.com

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interview: Al Needham photo: David Sillitoe

LINCOLN DARK Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn: two small-town Lincolnshire lads who fuse blistering lyrics to brutalist loops, bolt on an uncompromising stage presence, and call it Sleaford Mods.

The most obvious question: the name...

Jason: I’ve always been into the mod thing. And ‘Sleaford’ sounded better than ‘Grantham’, which is where I’m from.

Sleaford’s near Grantham; I used to go there a lot as a kid because it was the nearest place with a cinema.

Grantham was renowned for being the most boring town in the UK in the mid-80s. Was it?

Jason: Oh yeah, it was awful. You can’t expect to stay there and try to do anything or meet anyone. There were a couple of nightclubs where you took loads of beer and speed, a dodgy glam rock night, your indie disco in a jumble sale hall and your usual meat markets, but no music venues.

trendy, that you’re so cool that you need someone to be angry on your behalf.

Jason: I was very hateful, angry and bitter at the time, and I felt it was important to document that. I was on a death wish, really.

Drink-driving, falling around, getting sacked from jobs, upsetting a lot of people...doing stupid things. What I was recording was me just being honest. It was almost like therapy.

Andrew: There’s two reactions; people laughing because what he’s saying is so spot-on, and people who can’t believe he’s

Andrew: I was brought up nine miles from Lincoln, in a remote farm area with no public transport. I was so into music that I couldn’t wait to get out. Growing up in Lincolnshire, you felt that there was nothing going on.

Even places like Wolverhampton seemed to have a scene and a history, whereas in Lincoln every music venue seemed to burn down after two years for the insurance.

Do you think your attitude has held you back in any way?

Jason: I think it means we don’t get approached by certain people, yeah. My girlfriend feels that’s why it’s probably taken seven years to get an interview with your lot.

So what brought you to Nottingham?

Jason: I used to go to Venus a lot, when that was on - a load of people from Grantham used to come for that, and some of them ended up living here. While I was in London hardly seeing anyone and cramped up on the Tube, they were up here having the time of their lives, so I thought sod it, it’s cheaper.

There’s a definite surge of positivity in the local scene these days. What’s your take on it?

Jason: Well, there’s a lot of people getting interest from record labels - doesn’t mean what they’re doing is any good. For some people the whole point is getting signed and doing bland pop songs, but that’s not my definition of a ‘scene’.

Andrew: I just gravitated to the nearest city.

I moved to Newark with friends, but they all ended up going to uni. I thought, “Christ, if I don’t do something I’m going to be stuck here for the rest of my life”. So I moved to Nottingham.

Andrew: I first saw him playing at Jamcafé. I was stood outside because it’s always rammed out, and at the end of the last track he threw the mic down and walked out and up the street and away. I thought, who was that?

You’ve renowned for ‘having a word’ about certain people on your tunes. Have you ever had any comeback?

Jason: Never. I did a tune called My Music, which was about a couple of people who were well-known round here who I’d done a session with and things got a bit frosty and I felt I wasn’t getting straight answers from them. My way of reacting to that was knocking them in a tune. At the time I didn’t care. I wanted to offend. I found that there was a lot of back-slapping in Nottingham, a lot of yespeople. Nobody seemed to be honest with each other. It was, be nice to everybody just in case they can do something for you. What I was doing was a reaction towards that, more than anything.

We’ve been told that Showboat, off your new album, is about our cover shoot at Rock City.

Jason: Partly. I saw the usual people sucking up to the big boys, which is rife in any industry, and I’ve always seen that as something to stand up against. I didn’t like the way certain people conducted themselves at that do, either; they were rubbing people up the wrong way. Nah. Not having it.

So you both moved on...

Jason: Yeah, I lived in San Francisco for nine months, with the plan to join a band, but ended up working as a security guard at night and bumming round drinking in the day. Then I ended up in London. I got involved with a couple of bands, but a lot of them were doing brown and weren’t getting anywhere, then Britpop came in, which I was never into. London’s nasty for trends, and it’s so industry-oriented; everyone’s chasing the deal, everyones on a treadmill.

It was crap.

How did Sleaford Mods come about? It was practically a solo concern until about eighteen months ago...

I was in rock bands in Nottingham, but got sick of the same old guitar rubbish. It was refreshing to be away from London, but I found the local scene a bit backwardthinking, to be honest. There weren’t many people with a vision; they seemed happy to be something that had already been. And I was just as much a victim of that attitude, too. So I stopped for a while, went off me nut, and started singing over other people’s electronica stuff. Then one day out of sheer frustration I started ranting over a thrash metal track, which the engineer I was working with turned into a loop. And it sounded good. I felt I’d found my voice and there was a freedom to not being in a band anymore; no more lugging equipment about, no arguing with other people.

believe it’s not about going round thinking you’re something you’re not - your music should do something different, have integrity, and say something.

Andrew: There are bands in Nottingham that are really good, but I’ve heard it before.

dared to say what he does. A lot of people were comparing him to MC Pitman at first.

We were going to bring that up...

Jason: I’ve not heard that much of his stuff, but what I have heard is very funny as it has that deadpan venom behind it. It’s hard to do hip-hop as an English person and make it as slick whilst retaining your own personality. Especially with an East Midlands accent.

When your live performance boils down to you and a laptop, isn’t that as constrictive as being in a band?

Jason: To an extent; what you hear on CD is what you’re gonna hear at a gig. If MF Doom can turn up at the Roundhouse and do everything off a laptop, why can’t I?

What were the first gigs like?

Jason: People found it...funny. People would ask if I was homophobic, a misogynist, a hard nut...I’d often be described as an ‘angry Manc’, which made me laugh.

Andrew: It’s no more constrictive than being in a regular band.

The thing I like about playing in Sleaford Mods is knowing that whether you like us or not, you can’t ignore us.

Andrew: Someone come up to me at a gig recently and said; “Oh, Jason’s not as angry as he used to be, is he? Is it because he’s had a baby?” And I thought, who are you? Some art chick that wants to watch someone being really angry? That is so

When we told certain people that we were going to talk to you, Jason, they all said; “You think he’s a right arrogant bastard, but then you find he’s actually a really decent bloke” Jason: I get that all the time. Why? I care about music, and

The new generation of bands and artists they’re not very political, are they?

Jason: The whole country’s dying on its arse, and people are singing about why don’t we all come together, when they ought to be pissed off. The drug culture that’s been around since the late eighties - that didn’t help. Neither did Britpop - that Liam and Noel mentality where you take what you want, get whatever you can, walk around telling everybody else that they’re nothing and do loads of coke. Bragging that you’ve never read a book.

Stupid.

The new LP, Wank - a bit of a departure from your Northern Soul loops...

Jason: It’s a bit more accessible - the sound is a little more home-grown, with a verse-chorus-verse structure instead of a straight rant. It’s more of a collaboration with Ferney now - he gets what I’m on about and it’s a partnership. The Wage Don’t Fit is my favourite tune at the minute - that frustration of going to work every day, get paid very little for doing very little. People have said it’s a bit post-punk, and I sort of get that - the rumbly bass and the jagged synths.

What are the future plans for Sleaford Mods?

Jason: Keep going. Keep recording. I kinda like the fact that we’re not some big industry thing and can do things on our own terms.

Sleaford Mods play The Chameleon on 2 August and the Red Rooms on 17 August. The new LP Wank, and the full catalogue of previous releases, is available at deadlybeefburger.com. sleafordmods.bandcamp.com leftlion.co.uk/issue48

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interview: Paul Klotschkow photo: Carla Mundy

DOING IT IN THE PARK, DOING IT AFTERDARK Your brand-new Future Sound of Nottingham winners and Splendour-openers spit bars, bend notes, chop beats, defy pigeonholing and kick arse. They’re the Afterdark Movement, and we managed to get two of them - Bru-C and Trekkah - to stand still long enough to hear their story...

Congratulations on winning FSN. Bru-C: It’s been amazing. We just couldn’t believe that we had won. Unbelievably happy. I wanted to put my all in, to make sure that people were watching us. Try to get a reaction from the crowd, engage with them, and it seemed to work.

Trekkah: We went in with a confident set - we proper worked it. We also re-worked some of the tunes to make it fresh for ourselves.

What was it like to play the Wireless festival at Hyde Park?

Trekkah: We finished our EP launch on the Saturday night/ Sunday morning at 3am. Then we had to be up at 7am on the Sunday to go down to London in the minibus.

Bru-C: I had been to London that day for a rap battle and had been on my feet all day. I had three hours sleep on Ben’s sofa and then it was straight back to London.

And you got to play the Market Square in the FSN semi-final...

We did it more easy-listening for the Square. People were walking past and nodding their heads. We didn’t try to play the bangers to get the crowd going, because you are never going to.

Trekkah: I was a bit pessimistic by the time we got there; it was raining, everyone was inside the big tent, and it wasn’t looking good. Then the sound guy told us that they were staggering the stages, so when Stooshe finished the whole audience came over to us, and we all just thought we’d make the most of it. We only expected some passing trade like when we played in the Market Square; someone will listen to us for five minutes then go and watch Jessie J.

Trekkah: People were just walking past with their shopping.

No one wants to dance when they are carrying carrier bags, do they? Saying that, we did have a few people dancing...

Bru-C: But they didn’t. The sun came out just as we came on, no word of a lie. And as people were passing, they stayed and they cheered.

Bru-C: They were all of our friends, though.

Why did you all decide to get together and form a band?

We didn’t decide. Trekkeh was making some electronic music, and was good friends with my sister, and I was already doing my solo rap stuff. He saw my videos on Facebook and inboxed me, asking to hang out and have a beer. Then I saw a video of Devlin and Ed Sheeran doing an acoustic thing and liked the idea of rapping against acoustic guitar.

Bru-C: We entered last year, but we didn’t take it seriously and didn’t push ourselves to get votes.

Trekkah: But there was one guy with rollerblades who was having a dance on his skates. That was crazy.

What’s your opinion of ‘battle of the band’ type competitions in general? Don’t they usually boil down to whoever has the most Facebook friends?

Bru-C: There are loads of different ones. Some are an absolute rip-off where you have to pay for loads of tickets, and you have to bring this and that. But Nusic make sure it isn’t like that.

Trekkah: At first I didn’t like the Facebook voting, but I don’t think there’s any other way to do it.

Has the reaction to the band changed since you won the competition?

A hundred percent. It also tied in nicely with the recent EP launch, so everyone in the band has had to switch up, start taking it a bit more seriously, and start planning our route. The EP that we have done - ADM - has been made off our own backs, paid for by gigs. Guy at Random Recordings did a brilliant job.

Bru-C: We actually scrapped the original recording - the whole thing. We worked for days on that, and I was fuming when they said that they didn’t want to use any of it. But listening back I could hear that it wasn’t as strong as it could be.

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What are you trying to do with the band?

We don’t know yet.

Bru-C: That’s the best thing about The Afterdark Movement, everyone has come from different backgrounds and genres. We don’t fit any formula - anything goes.

What support has the band had from Nottingham?

Trekkah: We’ve had a lot of support; people have been cool with us, and the people that aren’t cool are pretending that they’re cool. When you do start playing as a new band, people are going to hate. Bands are bitchy; when I worked at Junktion 7 as an engineer I used to watch bands being bitchy, but no one says it directly.

Bru-C: Coming from rap music, everything is internet-based now and it’s so negative with people disliking and leaving hateful comments. In this band there are no negatives. Keep quiet, haters.

What’s the local grime/hip-hop scene like at the moment?

Hectic. It’s just come back to life. You need to check out an MC called Sparks; he’s only seventeen and he’s strong. There is a collective of MCs called Non-Stop Bars. A guy called Marvin who’s from Sneinton. They are all good at what they do in the grime scene, definitely.

Trekkah: We did a few electronic tracks, then we tried a song on guitar and we got one idea down. Then we wondered, what would that sound like with drums, and then guitar, and then another vocal? Before we knew it there was six of them.

How would you say the local rap scene compares to ten years ago?

I have an uncle who is a hip-hop DJ and it sounds like the scene was a lot stronger and had more of a foundation back then.

In the grime scene there is no one that wants to get together.

I struggle. There is a lot of ego, but I think rap battling has brought the scene back.

What was it like starting out getting your first gigs?

Me and Martin used to play in a metal band called Zenith so we had links at places like The Maze, and a lot of the Junktion 7 staff went off to different places and I knew them from when I worked there. We never struggled for gigs.

Any final words?

Massive thanks to Nusic, LeftLion...everyone who was involved in the Future Sound of Nottingham final. Big thank you. We are so grateful to be able to do what we are doing. It feels like we’re living the dream.

Any nightmares?

We played at a skate park. Middle of the day, open skate park, people skating. The town Mayor came out halfway through our set, stopped me mid-way through a verse, and said; “Can you tell these kids to pick the litter up?” I just looked at him and couldn’t believe that he did that like it was urgent. I thought he was going to say someone had broken their leg on the skate park and stop playing. It was bizarre. I hope that doesn’t happen at Splendour.

Trekkah: Did you practice that? It touched me, man.

The ADM EP is available from tadm.bigcartel.com. See them at The Maze on Friday 14 August facebook.com/theafterdarkmovement

WORLD EVENT YOUNG ARTISTS 2012 1000 ARTISTS, 100 NATIONS, 10 DAYS 7–16 SEPTEMBER 2012, NOTTINGHAM, UK WWW.WORLDEVENTYOUNGARTISTS.COM

DIARY OF A

FOOTBALL

NOBODY

BY WILLIAM IVORY 5-20 OCTOBER Based on former Notts County player David McVay’s hilarious memoir Steak…Diana Ross: Diary of a Football Nobody, this new play is a frank and funny warts-and-all tale of life at Notts County in the 70s.

Autumn Season sponsored by

BOX OFFICE 0115 941 9419 NOTTINGHAMPLAYHOUSE.CO.UK

Walking straight out of school on Friday and into work on Monday.

Grafting in a building the size of a small town. Workmates walking around with their giant appendages hanging out near machinery that could rip an arm off. Suicidal staff members helping themselves to cyanide.

Mass copulation in the Pump Shop. Your workplace having its own fishing pond and ballroom.

If you weren’t around when Britain was the workshop of the world instead of its pound shop, only one word springs to mind when you read the tales of those who worked at Nottingham's iconic bicycle factory;

interviews: Pete Davis and James Walker

Derek Goddard Painter, 1950 - 1995

My first job when I left school was at Wheldon and Wilkins, steaming leggings into shape. I was only fifteen and I hated it. It was the same thing hour after hour, and it drove me mad. After three weeks I left and went to Raleigh.

I got a job in the cable shop, which had the worst pay in the whole firm. There were six young lads working there, all sat at a table, screwing nuts onto bolts and then throwing them into a tin. We got nine shillings for one hundred finished bolts. I caught one lad once stealing nuts from my tin and gave him a good hiding in the toilets. He never did that again.

After a while I got to drill gear cases with an electric machine. It was dangerous; if you didn’t hold the piece of metal tight it would fly out. One lad got one embedded in his cheek. That frightened me. Then I got to use a hand press stamping out bits of metal. I got quite quick at that, but once when I was trying to be too clever I looked away and left my finger under the press. I crushed it and I thought I had lost it, it was so badly damaged. I ended up in the machine shop, where my money doubled straightaway. It was hard graft, though; I had to work two milling machines at the same time. There was so much grease on the floor I used to slide between the machines. It was like a skating rink.

I had a great mate in there, Jack Sheriff. We worked together on nights, and he was so good he could get his quota of work done by 1am in the morning. Then he would have a quart of Nut Brown ale and have a kip. It had to end, of course; one day a bloke came in and told us that they had just bought a machine to do our jobs so off we went somewhere else.

I went into the Black shop, where the first layers of paint were put on the frames. They were dipped by hand into vats of paint, at first, my eyes wouldn’t stop watering because of all the chemicals. A couple of blokes fell into the dipping tanks; since they were about six feet deep it wasn’t funny, I can tell you.

Not long after I started there, an apprentice was sent to oil the conveyor and his sleeve caught in the rollers. His arm was ripped off - everyone said you could hear him screaming all around the factory. The nurses gave him morphine to stop the pain, and he stayed at Raleigh for the rest of his working life as the one-armed postman taking mail around all the departments.

There was always fun to be had, though; we had women working nights, and some of the blokes used to go into the pump shop where the paint was stored and have it off with them, until the management found out what was happening and took the entire female workforce off the night shift. One bloke had the biggest nob I have ever seen, he was so proud of it he would walk around the aisles with it on show, swinging it to and fro. There must have been nine or ten inches of it hanging out of his trousers - we got sick of seeing it.

No one was bothered about health and safety at Raleigh. At the end of each week we had to clean out the pit where the frames were painted. We had to climb in and scrape the paint off the walls and then fill the pit with solvent. It was lethal stuff, and we put gallons of it in there. I think it must have affected me as I now have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Worse than that, we had two cleaning tanks filled with cyanide to clean paint off the scratched frames before they were done again. You had to wear gloves, wellies and a mask, but one day a bloke from the shop next door came in and took a cup filled with cyanide away with him. He went out, sat in his car, and drank it. A few months later another young lad took some home, drank it and then jumped out of the window of the high rise he lived in. Only after that did someone think to put locks on the tanks.

There were commissionaires who were responsible for checking who came into and out of the factory and making sure nothing got stolen. Blokes would take wheels from the conveyor, with tyres and gears and everything on them.

They would take them to the gangway that ran out onto Faraday Road and bowl them past the commissionaire’s office out onto the road. Their window was quite high and they saw nothing passing by, they just sat there looking at the view. Loads got nicked: men would wrap inner tubes round their waists and walk out. Others would put tyres around their shoulders under their coats and take them home. Eventually so much was being nicked that the commissionaires began to search people as they left.

I moved up to the special painting section, where mudguards and frames were painted by hand. I had to do nine hundred units a day, but I could do these by dinner time. Then I used to go up on the flat roof and lay on an old mattress which I kept there, getting a sun tan until it was time to go home. Later I went into the special products section, where the handmade lightweight bikes were built from scratch and made to measure for the riders. They sold for £1,000 each, a fortune in those days.

After forty five years I was let go. My supervisor just came up to me on the Wednesday and said: you're being made redundant on Friday. I was amazed to hear that and I said if I was going on Friday I may as well go now. He said alright, and I just went home. No-one even said thank you.

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Brian Hughes

Pedal and Bar Section, 1957 - 1999 I left school and went straight to Raleigh. My dad worked there, so did my brother, so you could say I was following a family tradition. I started - and finished - pedal and bar section, making handlebars. I can remember my first day; A woman from the offices took me down to the foreman’s office where I was going to work and left me standing outside his door. I waited there for one and a half hours feeling really stupid, as everyone was goading and laughing at me.

My first job was on a ball press, putting cups on the end of rods for rod brakes. You had to work fast, as you were paid for what you turned out, not how many hours you worked. Once or twice I went so fast that I squashed my fingers in the press; it’s a wonder I didn’t lose them. There was a conveyor belt with squares printed on it, and in each square was a part of a handlebar. I had to pick up the part, work on it, and put it back in the square. No square was allowed to be empty and you had to work really quickly.

There were fourteen people on the line, and we relied on each other to make money. The total we had earned as a team was divvied up according to our age and job. Some jobs on the rail were worse than others; I had to use a tool to get the burrs out of holes that had just been drilled in the metal handlebars. It rubbed my fingers red-raw. The speed at which we worked was incredible; sometimes, when the conveyor belt broke down in the next department, the blokes there would come and watch us. They were amazed at how fast we were.

One thing about working at Raleigh was that we made things more sociable, as opposed to having it forced on us. I started the section football team and organised trips to London, Brighton and the like. There were loads of activities - we had a sports ground at Coach Road. There was even a fishing pond there, called Raleigh Pond.

Sue Davis

By the time I was ready to retire, Raleigh were buying in lots of parts instead of making them themselves. These parts were inferior to ours but cheaper. Eventually an American company bought Raleigh and sold it off a bit at a time. I took a good redundancy package and left at the age of fifty-seven - best

thing I've done.

Typist, 1965 - 1968 My very first job was at Raleigh, in the motorised division on Triumph Road. Raleigh made mopeds called Raleigh Runabouts and were developing a new moped called Wisp.

The building was a bit tatty; the toilets were absolutely shocking, and we had to share them with the working blokes who were covered in oil. The colour scheme was a nightmare too; dark Raleigh Green, as it was known.

Reg Tomlinson

Wheel Builder, 1952 - 1967 I started my working life at Raleigh straight from school.

Wheel building was hard work, and there was quite a skill to it. You had to learn to hold up to eight spokes in your hand at once and then thread them two or three at a time into the wheel. After a while I got a groove in my fingers where I held the spokes. I'd do sixteen spokes on a wheel, and put it on a rack behind me for a lad to tighten up with an electric screwdriver. He had to be quick, as he took work from five of us and couldn’t get behind.

They tried to use a machine to true the wheels but it wasn't a success. The wheels were just about right when they came out but they still had to be checked and adjusted by a man, so it was a bit of a waste of money. We hated it; sometimes one of the lads would throw a nipple into it while no-one was looking. Then the rims would be marked and the wheel would have to be done again. It vanished eventually.

There was a sense of community in factories, especially at Raleigh. The section I was in had lots of family members in it, we had three sisters working together, and there were one or two couples who met and married at Raleigh. When we weren’t very busy we used to have sing-songs; usually one of the girls would start and then a few more would join in. After a while the whole section was singing.

Sometimes I got a bit cheeky, and once, when I had been laughing at the older lads, they stuffed me in one of the big sacks that the inner tubes came in, pulled another sack over me and hung me up on a coat peg all through dinner-time. We used to have an old bloke who did the sweeping up. He saw this sack moving and nearly had a heart attack. He got me down and told the foreman and I was hauled into the office but I didn’t tell who had done it to me.

Things changed when TI took over Raleigh. They stopped all our perks, including the day trips and our Christmas bonus.

Then we started to get Chinese imports. We had hubs being made in Czechoslovakia that were just rubbish - when it came to putting spokes in them we had to hit them in with a bit of wood because the holes were so badly drilled.

I left Raleigh just as redundancies started to happen all over the factory. What with the foreign imports coming in, I saw the way things were going and got another job. I went off to Barton’s buses to be a fitter but I never forgot my time at Raleigh. In fact I went on about it so much at first that the blokes at Barton’s called me Raleigh Reg.

Ann Hodgkinson

Team Leader, 1976 - 2001 I started off as a machinist. It wasn't very nice but you got used to it. We did drilling, tapping, components...whatever needed doing.

I did all that for about fifteen years. It was very noisy. Even now people say to me, why are you shouting? And I don’t even know I am.

I moved from there onto the swarf dock. Swarf is all of the scrap from steel turnings; my job was to give out oils to them who needed to collect it. The barrows of swarf would go into a tank and a man would come along and suck all the suds up. It was a very dirty job. I ended up as a team leader. It was quite physical; I used to drive the forklift an'all. As a gaffer, I wasn't popular at first. Not because I was a woman, but because I’ve got a gob on me, and I say what I think, you know.

People were aware I was a lesbian, but I were lucky, I never had any unpleasant incidents. People wouldn’t dare say owt to me, and if they said owt behind me back, well, it didn’t matter. My only real work problem was that I don’t read and write very well, so when I used to have to write management reports I'd come home and dictate it all to my partner, Lynne.

I used to take on board the men’s problems, and give them help about things at home. I don’t think they looked on me as a woman; I climbed up things and did stuff and they never thought, bloody hell, a woman’s doing that. In the end, I think they respected me because they knew I wouldn’t ask them to do anything that I wouldn’t.

I loved me work, I really did. I couldn’t think of anywhere better to go and work than Sturmey-Archer. It was famous for gears, back then, we made so many components that I didn’t really have a clue what they went on or where they fitted. As long as we got our quota done, that’s all that mattered.

In the end they didn’t want me to leave when I did. There was a collection. I think they bought us a gold bracelet and something else. I didn’t get anything off of management because I was just short of twenty-five years. But I did go for what they call a ‘pass out’ do, and I did! In fact I fell down the stairs of the pub. I can’t even remember where we went now (laughs).

I had lots of enthusiasm and once - when I was typing furiously - I knocked my typewriter off the desk and onto the floor. That didn’t go down too well. I was asked to type small labels for parts fitted on some new bikes, and put; “This part is not shitable to be fitted to this frame”. Well, u is next to h on the keyboard - an easy mistake to make. No one saw the error until it was too late and the labels were printed and sent out. Never mind.

I was moved to the head office on Lenton Boulevard. No one asked you at Raleigh, you just got moved. I didn’t realise that everyone in the offices wanted to be at head office because it was so posh. When I got there it was gorgeous; when I went into the staff canteen for the first time I was astonished to see white tablecloths on the tables.

I worked in the middle of a huge open plan office with hundreds of office workers. My new boss was a little creepy; the way he looked at all the young girls made me shudder. He had his own secretary and I thought she was so glamorous.

She wore the right clothes, the right make-up and was so trendy, bang in the middle of the swinging sixties. I saw her years later, working on the checkout in Asda.

I was free to wander round the head office but it was the done thing to be quiet when you walked around. The doors were highly polished and you didn’t dare slam them. Once I actually peeked into the ballroom, which was amazing; compared to the rest of the factory it was so posh and clean.

They had dos for the bosses in there, and once or twice a year there were dances for the rest of us but I never went to one. Who wanted to go to a dinner dance when you could go to a disco at the Beachcomber Club in town? But I loved walking up and down the main staircase in head office - a real Hollywood job, with the busts of old Raleigh directors on pedestals lining the sides.

The thing I dreaded most of all was having to walk through the factory. My boss would delight in asking me to take things to the mail room, knowing full well what would happen. There was the incredible noise and smell of oil, and wheels and bike frames whizzing above your head, followed by a constant barrage of wolf whistles and remarks from the men. Raleigh was like a small town without signposts, and no-one had ever given us a tour of the premises when we joined, so you had to quickly figure out where everything was. My greatest dread was getting lost, which happened a lot; it was a maze. I only once got to go down to the basement; what a place that was.

Some really old Raleigh bikes were stored down there, and on the walls were original advertising posters. They were works of art, and I often wished I had managed to take a few home; they'd be worth a fortune now.

leftlion.co.uk/issue48

17

UK Arts International Presents

Edgy - Powerful - Provocative 8-12 October 2012 Lakeside is delighted to welcome Afrovibes – a biennial festival of cutting edge theatre, dance and music selected by festival artistic director James Ngcobo, and touring to venues across England and Wales.

Complementing the theatre programme is a series of informal experiences and post-show talks focused around the Township Café which will take over our Pavilion Café for the week to provide a meeting place for UK artists and audiences to engage with the visiting performers.

Drama/Comedy And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses Monday 8 & Tuesday 9 October 7.30pm

Dance Inception and My Exile is in My Head Thursday 11 October 7.30pm

Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD

Drama Mother to Mother

www.lakesidearts.org.uk Box Office: 0115 846 7777

Friday 12 October 7.30pm

AN EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN Alan Moore: one of the finest exponents of the comic book art form to have ever lived. interview: Jared Wilson illustration: Thomas Goodwin

Back in the 1980s, you were the first British writer to work on major US comic characters like Batman and Superman. Good times?

It was certainly interesting. The comics industry had just got through the 1970s, which hadn’t been easy. They’d fired most of their genuinely talented writers after they tried to form a union. Then they’d got in a bunch of very talented Filipino artists, who would work for less. When they heard that there were artists and writers springing up in England a few years after, they must have thought they could repeat the trick. Some of the first people they got over were artists like Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland. Then they got me over there and it all started to go horribly wrong.

They had pretty much alienated me within three or four years.

suggested we come up with new characters instead. We’d taken the idea of an atomic superhero from Captain Atom, but realised he was conceived when our ideas of the atomic realm were a lot more simplistic. So I asked myself what an atomic superhero would do in the modern day and decided it would all have to be based upon quantum principles.

How did you feel when you discovered the Occupy movement had adopted the V For Vendetta mask?

I was flattered. I thought it was a much better organised protest movement than anything that we saw in the 1960s. When it was happening, Channel 4 took me down to a camp and I thought they were terrific and really well organised. They’ve got a lot of hard work in front of them and the recent setbacks demonstrate that. But they’re resilient and they’re evolving. With a bit of luck, I think they may be around for a while yet.

You were becoming well known when the term ‘graphic novel’ was first coined and both Marvel and DC started to realise there was an adult audience for comics…

For my sins, I was definitely part of all that. They set up the Vertigo imprint for DC and all the writers were instructed to “write this like Alan Moore.” This was not something I was in favour of. I thought it debased and diluted what I was trying to do.

I’ve got no objection to the idea of an agency where genuinely talented writers such as Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman and Garth Ennis have been able to blossom. It’s just irritating to have one’s stylistic quirks and outlook misunderstood and made into a formula.

The independent magazine you run, Dodgem Logic - is as much a love letter to Northampton culture as LeftLion is to Notts, isn’t it?

Yes it is. Hopefully, at some point in the future, we might be able to get it going again.

I think we should all pay more attention to the actual places that we live in, because they’re all wonderful. Rather than berating them or complaining about them, we should actually appreciate the things that are mythical and powerful about them.

So why the hiatus?

Well, there are a lot of magazines out there that are selling fewer copies than Dodgem Logic was.

But we’d gone into it with an ideological, hippy, underground wave of enthusiasm. I’d decided I didn’t want any paid adverts; if that was good enough for Paul Krassner when he did The Realist then it was good enough for me.

We also wanted to pay all of our contributors a decent rate, and we wanted good production values.

So all of this is basically a recipe for publishing disaster. But the magazine did exactly what we wanted it to do and I’m really proud of it.

You’ve created a lot of characters; more than people realise.

John Constantine from Hellblazer was originally one of yours, wasn’t he?

Yes. He was created as a background character for DC’s Swamp Thing. But DC had sold the film rights to any characters that appeared in those comics, past, present and future.

That was why there was later a Constantine film; with Keanu Reeves playing a guy who had originally grown up in South London– those rights were sold before the character was even created.

The Olympics is now upon us. Any thoughts on that?

I have no interest in sports at all. But I’m appalled that historic Hackney and all its stories are being paved over by this appalling monstrosity, which we can’t afford and which has never benefited any of the countries that have hosted it. Most art, and most of the actual consciousness in society, is almost certainly derived from Shamanic roots. Competitive sports are one of the few things in culture that aren’t.

I can only assume that it was when the hunters wanted to show off.

Are there any characters you’ve particularly put a lot of yourself into?

I put myself into all of them. Whether they are heroes, villains, males, females, inhuman monsters, or demigods; in order to make them credible, you have to get into their mindset. It’s very much like method acting, and once you’ve done that, the dialogue is easy.

Any you feel you’re actually like in day-to-day life?

I suppose there are plenty. In many ways I’m like Rorschach (Watchmen), as the comics industry has probably learned to its dismay. But, for example, it was fantastic writing William Gull (From Hell); even though I was probably an oppressive presence to most of my loved ones during that time. Melinda (Gebbie - Alan’s wife) pointed out that, when I was writing as him, I would take on different mannerisms. These things infect you.

With Allan Quartermain (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), you were reinventing a character first written in the nineteenth century…

Yes, although ours is a different Quartermain in that he’s older and he has faked his own death. But most of the qualities that we show him having are those of the original character. His fondness for drugs is suggested by the several adventures in which he ingests taduki and his physical cowardliness is also present in H Rider Haggard’s original.

Did you find similar challenges reinventing all of the League characters?

Yes, for example Mr Hyde in Stevenson’s book is smaller than

Jekyll. But towards the end of the book Jekyll remarks that he thinks that Hyde is getting bigger. So by the time that we pick up the narrative ten years later, Hyde is very, very big indeed and Jekyll has practically faded away. All of these things may seem like radical interpretations, but most of them are taken from cues in the original text.

Is that also true for the characters in Watchmen? There were blueprints for those from the Charlton Comics imprint, which DC had just purchased?

Yes, but the idea that I was applying to them was one that I had already and could have been applied to any lame superhero group. I’d originally thought of a story involving Archie Comics superheroes, thinking that if one of them turned up dead it would change everything. So when Dick Giordano asked me to come up with a story for the Charlton characters, I thought we could finally do something with it. But then he saw that most of them would be either dead or mad by the end of the book and

You’ve always refused to put your name to any film adaptations of your work. How much money do you think you’ve turned down, for taking a moral standpoint on this?

Well, they asked me if they could give me a huge amount of money to bring out Watchmen prequel comics, which they are going to do anyway, and that was probably a couple of million dollars. I should imagine with all of the films together it would be another few million. It’s really empowering to say no to that; to know there is not an amount of money large enough to make you compromise even a tiny bit of principle that, as it turned out, would make no practical difference anyway. I’d advise everyone to do it, otherwise you’re going to end up mastered by money and that’s not a thing you want ruling your life.

Special thanks to the staff of Nottingham Contemporary and to Joe at Dodgem Logic for helping us organise this interview. dodgemlogic.com

leftlion.co.uk/issue48

19

OLYMPIC VILLAGE PEOPLE Two Notts athletes - one with her ticket booked for Stratford, one cruelly on the sidelines through injury on what it takes to get to the Games.

Grace Carter of Broxtowe has been a member of the British Women’s Volleyball Team since its inception in 2007, and plays for the French league Terville. Already a huge achievement to be at London 2012; the team’s entire Olympic funding was cut by UK Sport, meaning that the squad has been scattered across the world and they’ve had to raise £250,000 to finance their campaign - mainly through a team bike ride from Sheffield to London.

Tesni Ward of Worksop is one of the UK’s most promising young athletes, having won the England Senior Championships and the England Under 23s Championships in the javelin. A member of the City of Sheffield Athletics Club, Tesni succumbed to injury earlier this year; the road to Rio 2016 has already started.

How did you both get into your respective sports?

Grace: I did a lot of athletics and football and generally loved sport, but I didn’t play volleyball - or even really heard of it - until I was about sixteen. In a P.E. class at my school in Bramcote, we had a coaching session with George Bulman, who was the head of Volleyball England. I was quite tall and athletic and he said I could be good at volleyball - I liked the sound of that. So he took me under his wing a little bit and taught me how to play.

Tesni: I started athletics at school in year seven. I always enjoyed the throwing events more than the running and jumping - I’m not a fan of running at all. In year nine my P.E. teacher sent me to the local athletics club, and it all started from there. I ended up specialising in the three throws - javelin, discus and hammer - and then slowly specialised at the javelin.

What opportunities were there to train and compete in Notts while you were growing up?

Grace: I owe a lot of my general sporting ability to Broxtowe Borough; the guy who ran Broxtowe Sport got me involved in so much stuff. I found it easy to pick up a new sport and fasttrack to a high level because I had such a wide background of sports - in the early days it was definitely all to do with the opportunities.

Tesni: There aren’t actually many places where I can train in Notts. In Worksop we used to have gravel athletics tracks, but they were all dug up. There wasn’t any coaching for me here, either, so I had to go to Sheffield to train. About two years ago I applied for funding from the City Council, and was put on their Rising Stars grant; this year I was put on their Shining Stars one, which was considerably more money.

Grace: I’m also part of Shining Stars, and it’s been a massive help; I believe that volleyball’s the only Olympic sport that’s not funded; we get absolutely no money from the government or from UK Sport, so we’ve had to do it all by ourselves. It means that I’ve been able to train full-time.

How much of your respective success boils down to practice and form, and how much is it a matter of getting it right on the day?

Tesni: It’s both. You can be in the best shape of your life and your training can be going really well, but on the day if you’re not feeling right or your timing is off - even by a few milliseconds - it can all go wrong.

20 leftlion.co.uk/issue48

Grace: We want to be on an uphill slope, so that everyday we’re getting closer and closer to our optimum form. We don’t need to be playing perfectly right now; the idea is to improve every day and get our form on track, so by the time the Games start we’ll be hitting our optimal zone of performance.

We hear a lot about the sacrifices athletes make to succeed in their chosen fields. Is your regime really as hardcore as it’s made out to be, or is it a bit over-egged by sports drinks adverts and like?

Tesni: At the start it was just fun and I didn’t have to make too many sacrifices, but over the past eighteen months I’ve had to knuckle down a lot and I’m now training twice a day, six days a week. Obviously that doesn’t leave me much time for my friends, or to go out and do things. I’ve also just started a job, so I’ve got to go to training in the morning, then go to work, then go to training again, so once I get home it’s eight or nine o’clock and there’s just time for eating and sleeping.

Grace: It’s difficult for me to say because any sacrifice that I have made has been worth it. Currently, because of the funding issue we’ve had, our whole team is living in the accommodation block of a fire training centre in Sheffield, which is lovely and amazing, but things like that are probably the less glamorous side. We know that our dream of playing in the Olympics is worth it, so for me it’s not really a sacrifice.

We live in a country where football is often the only game in town. Winning a medal would have a huge effect on public awareness: do you feel that you’re representing your sport just as much as your country?

Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that we as a team are most excited about because it’s not a big sport. Our goal - apart from beating teams and doing better and playing better than we’ve ever done - is to raise the profile of volleyball and show people what we can do.

Tesni: There are only really four or five really good female javelin throwers in the country at the moment, and I’m in one of the younger age groups. Our top thrower is in her late twenties, and obviously she’s not going to be around forever, so it boils down to our younger people, they’re the ones who are going to have to step up to the mark when our senior throwers leave. There’s a javelin community and we all support each other - we’re all looking to develop the sport as best we can.

Do you resent the fact that sports like yours only get mainstream attention once every four years?

A little bit, yeah. It’s really hard because with the TV coverage they always show all

of the running and you might be lucky if one throw is shown in the entire competition. We’re not bothered about whether we’re on TV or not, but how are people supposed to say, “that looks fun, I want to go and try the javelin”, or be motivated by some of the performances they see, when they don’t even know how the UK are doing in javelin? The women’s javelin in the World Championships last year was the best competition out of all the events, but if you’re watching TV you’re less likely to see it.

You have to go online to specific feeds to watch the event, so if you’re not already into athletics you’re never going to see it - it’s not easy to attract new people to the sport when there’s nothing to motivate them.

Grace: It’s just the culture of sport in our country; it’s up to us to change that. I wouldn’t say there’s resentment - it’s just a bit annoying sometimes.

Sadly, Tesni, you’re going to miss the Olympics through injury. How hard was that to take?

Tesni: It wasn’t heart-crushing but because my winter training had already gone so badly because of injury I knew the chance had probably passed me by for this year. It was quite frustrating when I injured myself at a competition, because my training had started to go so well and everything had just clicked. Then in the warm-up I tore my UCL - my ulnar collateral ligament - and that was it.

Have you already started to plan for Rio 2016, or do you focus on more short term targets?

At the moment I’m just trying to think shortterm because that’s going to help me get to the Olympics in another four years. There’s the European under-23s next year which I’m hoping to qualify for, then there’s the Commonwealth Games the year after, so I want to work my way up slowly. It’s always in the back of my mind because every training session counts, four years sounds like a long time but it’s really not.

Grace, when did you first say to yourself “I’m going to compete at 2012” and set it as a definite goal?

Grace: When I was about six or something. I was obsessed with sport, and I told my teacher at the time that I was going to be in the Olympics, and I would buy her a ticket so she could come and watch me. When it was announced that the Olympics was going to be in London, I knew that it could be a reality - so I think it was back in 2005 when it really became something I could achieve. And yes, I’ve got a ticket for that teacher - she’s coming to watch our first game, which is pretty crazy but good.

What are the emotions at this stage, just a couple of weeks before the Games get under way?

It’s definitely still nerve-wrecking, although I think every day things are clicking in training and getting better. With every day that comes I’m feeling more and more ready. We’ve just been to our kitting-out day in Loughborough so we got all the stuff and were officially invited to be part of Team GB. It’s becoming more real with

every surreal experience we have, and the anticipation is building.

How much of an advantage is the chance to compete in front of a home crowd?

Tesni: Obviously you’re going to be cheered on, even if they don’t know you - if they see you in the GB kit they’re going to get behind you and want you to do well. The atmosphere will be amazing. I’ve been in the Olympic Stadium and when that’s full it’s definitely going to be overwhelming.

Grace: We’ve played in and against countries that have huge home support, and it’s difficult playing against them when you know you have thousands of people screaming against you. I’m excited that for once there’s going to be 15,000 people cheering for us. It is going to enable us to hit a whole new level just having that home support.

What’s the stadium like on the inside, Tesni?

Tesni: The British University Championships were held there - it was the official test event. Obviously it wasn’t packed out to full capacity, but it was still a great experience to go there and look around and basically be treated as if it was actually the Olympics.

We went through all the procedures that the athletes will have to go through. Personally, I loved the track - it’s so fast, and I think there’s going to be a few surprise performances. Weather permitting, of course...

In Nottingham we have the Brian Clough statue, the Torvill and Dean tram and Bolero Square. If you were to win an Olympic gold at some point in your career, what would you fancy having in town?

Oh gosh! Probably just a day in town where loads of people could come along and be introduced to the sport and try it out. It would be a great opportunity to introduce some younger people to the javelin. We’re always looking for younger people to get into it because it is an event you can really enjoy.

Grace: When we go to other countries there are volleyball nets up in parks so people can just go and play - I’d love to see some volleyball courts that everyone could go and use.

What does competing in the Olympics mean to you, and what would winning gold mean for the rest of your life?

I think it’ll be a life-changing experience. I don’t really know exactly what to expect, but that’s what I like about it - it’s unknown territory and I’m ready to take on these experiences. It’d be great if we could pull off the unexpected and take some shock wins and really turn some heads, but I’ll just be happy to know that all the work we’ve done will have created a legacy for volleyball and get more people playing. interviews: Joe Sharratt

What’s the Olympic Village like?

It’s huge - from the warm-up track to the actual stadium is a good ten minutes. People there are going to be surprised by the amount of walking they’re going to have to do, because I sure was!

Have your families managed to get tickets?

Grace: Yeah. My dad has been on the computer getting all the tickets, so he’s made sure my whole family get to see me play at least once.

Tesni: I tried to get tickets but I wasn’t successful, so unfortunately I won’t be going, which is a shame.

volleyballphotos.co.uk leftlion.co.uk/issue48

21

On September 5, 1972, two weeks into the Munich Olympics, members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped and murdered eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team - all witnessed by Mike Breckon, then manager of the Canadian cycling team. Now living in Notts, he speaks for the first time about that day.

How did someone from the UK end up running cycling in Canada?

Cycling was seen as an immigrant sport in Canada, outside of Quebec. I was lucky; I’d spent three years trying to make it as a pro in France, which helped.

I got involved with the Canadian Federation, was always volunteering for stuff, and soon became the director of the Canadian Cycling Association. When Montreal was awarded the 1976 Games in 1970, all the sporting bodies had to pull their fingers out, so I created a plan for a proper national team. By 1972 we had a national team; sponsorship, the right equipment, and the resources to send riders to Europe for training.

meeting and asked what the hell was going on. But nobody knew; by this time, four hours in, the village was in shutdown.

The police were there, the authorities were there, but nobody really knew what was going on.

What did you say to your team?

I said, "You can’t go out for breakfast". I didn’t know what to tell them. Fortunately cyclists tend to eat a lot, so we had lots of bananas and fruit bars and energy drinks in the apartment. And then gradually the news started to trickle in. We essentially just kinda sat there all day.

Considering the emotional turmoil the team went through, what kind of reception was there?

There wasn’t any. I went back to work, people said "that must have been rough", I put a report into a small Canadian cycling newspaper, and that was it. Incredible, really, when you consider the way in which we respond to events like 9/11.

How close were you, physically, to the Israeli team?

The Canadian cycling team's quarters were in a small square setting. The Olympic village was built to become apartments afterwards, it was a lovely kind of square, quite close to the village. The fence where the terrorists got in was only twenty or thirty yards from where we were. Opposite us on the square were the apartments where the Israeli wrestlers and weightlifters stayed.

What about the team? Was there counselling or therapy sessions afterwards?

No, it didn’t happen in those days.

And I have no idea, to this day, what effect it had on the other members of the team. I’ve never discussed it with them, ever. We’ve never spoken about it. We just lived it.

Did your experience prey upon your mind as time went on?

No. I totally blocked it out until the Spielberg film Munich came out in 2005 and I thought, I’ve got to go and see that.

To lay some ghosts to rest. But there were no Canadians in the film at all. I was in London and went to the Odeon in Leicester Square, which is huge. I sat right in the front row in the middle of the balcony entirely alone, shouting "that’s a load of bollocks". That was my kinda, whatever the shrinks would call it, facing up to it.

Did you meet them?

Of course. They were nice guys, and we were friends. They used to laugh when they saw us training because they had everything they needed in the gym and we’d be going out and doing sixty to seventy-mile training rides. We exchanged pin buttons, because that’s what you used to do.

Did nobody contact you?

At about 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon we got a call. It was from a Canadian radio station who had used its initiative, found the Olympic village telephone operation, and got put through. So I heard this booming Canadian voice saying, "Hi! This is Chel Jones" - or whoever - "from CKAC from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan!" and they were live on air, doing a phone-in show.

When did you realise that something had happened?

We had a Canadian national team meeting that day at eight o’clock in the morning. As I stepped out the door, I immediately knew that something was wrong and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I know that sounds dramatic, but it did. I walked across the square and when I got to the corner, right beside where the Israeli apartments were, a strapping guy in a black suit with a rifle appeared and said, "Get back!"

What were they saying? Were they sympathetic and supportive?

No. It was awful. Behind the back of our apartments was some concrete footpaths, so I had got the lads on their bikes to give them some exercise and help take the pressure off. It was like being in the eye of the hurricane - you're just there, you have no idea what’s going on, and then you get all of those people in Saskatchewan telling us what’s happening, and that they were disgusted with our behaviour.

Was he a security guy?

I have absolutely no idea. He grabbed me by the tracksuit top and pulled me behind the post. And I looked up, and there was the image that the whole world saw: the bloke in the black balaclava. I just about wet myself and scuttled off to the team

What do you think they expected you to do?

I don’t know - go out and fight the terrorists? They thought it was a disgrace that while these poor men were dying we were riding our bikes. I’d just seen the dead body of Moshe Weinberg, the Israeli wrestling manager, near the car that we used to take

22 leftlion.co.uk/issue48

And the next day, after eleven Israelis were murdered... ...the next day they had a memorial service at the Olympic Stadium. We all came and sat in the centre of the track. As you can imagine, it was pretty...uh, look at my goosebumps. The music was provided by the Munich Philharmonic; the Funeral March by Beethoven. And you’re sitting there thinking, this is a German tribute to Jewish people - it still makes me cry to think of it. At the end of the service they said the Games would continue, and the flags were run back up their poles. The cycling road race was the next day.

What was it like to return to work, as it were?

Well, the amazing thing was - and this has never been mentioned anywhere before - there was a protest at the start line, less than forty-eight hours after the massacre. Started by one of the Irish cycling federations, because of the other Irish federation being in the same road race. And the race started half an hour late. The Games finished two days later, and we came home.

As a naturalised North American citizen who had spent time in Europe, were you aware of the political climate at the time?

No. In those days things were different. We all went to bed one night, and the next day it was a different world. There hadn’t really been any serious terrorist threats until then.

It was actually members of the Canadian team who unwittingly helped the terrorists to get in, wasn't it?

All the Canadian team knew, but the identity of the team members only came out a month or so ago, when a journalist managed to track them down. Apparently they completely broke down, like it was a confessional. One guy said that he'd borne that stigma for forty years and had not been able to talk about it.

But who would have thought someone would invade the village?

The terrorists came over the fence at about 4am, helped by some Canadian athletes who’d already finished their competition and were taking a shortcut after having a few beers and watching an ice hockey game in the Canadian press office. They just thought they were athletes returning to their camp and dodging curfew like them.

our lads out in. But obviously, the citizens of Saskatoon knew better than I did. So I just pulled out the phone and wouldn’t speak to anyone else. It was fourteen hours before we came out.

How do you feel about the Olympics now?

I was twelve when we last had the Games in London, I was totally caught up with the whole Olympic thing and it stayed with me all my life. I was out recently to watch the torch pass through at Newark. The whole Olympic movement - its concept and principles - is something fabulous that means a lot to me personally. To be able to have been involved and to have been able to take a team to the Olympic Games...I still get teary about it.

Mike Breckon is currently working on a project with the National Byway Trust to create a 4,000 mile leisure cycle route round Britain which avoids major roads thenationalbyway.org

interview: James Walker photo: Paul Fillingham

words: Scott Oliver illustrations: Becca Hibberd

TEAM NG 542 athletes have been selected to represent Great Britain in the Olympics. Sixteen are from round here, or have links to the Motherland. Our Sports Editor Scott Oliver thumbs through the schedules, so you'll know when to shout in front of the telly, and who for/at...

Wednesday July 25

16:00: Yeah, we know - this has been and gone already, but the womens' football kicks off two days before the official start, the sort of illogicality that gets us twitching and calling for sedation. At the heart of GB’s defence for the opening game against New Zealand will be Nottingham-born Sophie Bradley, a former England U-19 captain now playing for Lincoln after spells with Forest and Leeds. Despite receiving a central contract from the FA of £16k she continues to work in a care home (as does Craig Bellamy).

Thursday July 26

20:00: Again, not only does the Mens' Football start before the Games do, but it's not even in London. Eng-, er, GB, kick off their campaign with a match against Senegal at Old Trafford, so if you want to see Stuart Pearce as The Gaffer, hope you didn't miss it. And what do you mean, he’s not 100% genuine Notts? This is a man who is permitted to walk his cattle up Parliament Street, wash his clothes in the Market Square fountain, and eat swan on the Council House steps – not because he has the Freedom of the City or anything, but because he’s rock.

Friday July 27

09:00: OK, he comes from Grantham - home of Satan aka the Iron Lady - but since he competes in the sport for which Nottingham is most famous (no, not Shooting; Archery), we all need to get behind lorry-driving Simon Terry in the Mens' Individual event, and not only because getting in front would be quite dangerous.

The venue? Why, it's Lord’s, the home of, um, cricket. Then it's the opening ceremony - which will be just like the beginning of EastEnders in 3D. Possibly.

Saturday July 28

09:00: This is where it starts to get busy. Mr Terry returns for the Men’s team Archreh (with Little John and Will Scarlett, hopefully)...

10:00: ...followed by the first of four consecutive days of equestrian eventing at the beautiful Greenwich Park - home of the Royal Observatory - featuring Newark-born Mary King in the Dressage section (which is to the individual Dressage as the Decathlon 100m is to Usain Bolt’s event), followed by Cross-Country and Jumping. Aah Mareh picked up team bronze in Beijing and silver in Athens, and having competed when five months pregnant in 1995 and recovering from a broken neck in 2001 - is clearly as nails as the things that keep the shoes on the horse.

11:00: The qualifying for the Men’s Artistic Gymnastics at the Millennium Dome will feature nineteen-year-old son of Keyworth Sam Oldham, currently the World Junior Olympic Champion for the horizontal bar. He rejected offers from Forest and Derby County in order to concentrate on gymnastics, don't you know. It's a crucial day for the lad, as what he does today will determine whether you'll see a lot of him

over the next few days or he comes home early; the top eight teams go through to the team final (Monday July 30, 16:30), the top 24 gymnasts progress to the individual all-round final (Wednesday August 1, 16:30), and the leading eight proceed to the finals of each of the six disciplines. Oldham is considered to have a chance in high bar, pommel horse and floor (parallel bars, rings, and vault are the others).

14:45: Grace Carter and the Women’s Volleyball team play their opening pool match at Earl’s Court against Russia. Clock the interview we did with her a couple of pages back.

17:15: Women’s Football - GB vs Cameroon.

Sunday July 29

10:00: Here we go. As the topranked freestyler in the world over 400m and 800m, Mansfield-born Rebecca Adlington is perhaps the strongest Notts gold medal prospect at the Games. In Beijing, she became the first British doublegold winner in the pool for a hundred years. Put that another way: if Mansfield was a country, it would have finished joint 28th in the gold medal table in 2008. Repeating the trick will not be easy, however, she starts her campaign with the 400m Freestyle, following morning heats with a final in the evening (19:30).

10:00: Mary King, in Eventing Day 2 (Dressage).

18.20: Hucknall’s Sean Ryder appears for the GB Men’s Water Polo team in the first roundrobin game against Romania. If he’s anything like his namesake, he’ll be a decent – if occasionally incoherent – interviewee, and might need to hide behind the bins if WADA, the anti-doping bods, rock up. GB and Romania will be splashing it out with Serbia, USA, Montenegro and Hungary in one of two, erm, pools. So, if you ever find yourself on Family Fortunes being asked to “Name something for which Eastern Europe is famous”, consider water polo before going for pornography, stag tourism, and people-trafficking.

19:45: Men’s Football - Psycho's Army vs UAE.

19:00: Three members of Beeston HC compete for GB in the opening game of Men’s Hockey against Argentina,who’ve wisely left at home the hombre who, in May, was filmed doing a Rocky impression on the WWI monument in the Falkands (or “training on Argentine soil” as the advert put it) and got The Sun’s knickers in a twist: Ian Lewers and Alistair Wilson, both 28, line up alongside Glenn Kirkham, a year older and winner of over a hundred caps. GB finished fifth in Beijing; can they get on the podium here? And will the podium be long enough?

22:00: Women’s Volleyball vs Algeria.

Tuesday July 31

10:30: Eventing Day 4 (Showjumping) 18:20: Men’s Water Polo vs Serbia 19:45: Women’s Football vs Brazil

Wednesday August 1

13:45: Men’s Hockey vs South Africa 15:30: Women’s Water Polo vs Australia 16:45: Women’s Volleyball vs Italy 19:45: Men’s Football vs Uruguay

Thursday August 2

10:00: Aah Beckeh returns in the heats of the 800m Freestyle, the event in which she holds both the Olympic gold and the world record.

11:00: It's the first day of Dressage qualification, featuring 56-year-old Nottingham-born Richard Davison team captain in Beijing and a former British number one from 1996 to 2002. We're not sure what part of Nottingham he was born in, but seeing as the three major influences on his sporting career are Sandra Pearson-Adams, Barbara Slame-Fleming, and Lady Joicey Kottas, we're guessing he didn't knock about with them round the back of Top Valley Tesco.

18:20: Men’s Water Polo vs Hungary

Tuesday August 7

10:10: Hucknall’s Andy Turner gets going in the 110m Hurdles heats. After winning bronze in the last World Championships - despite having had lottery funding cut - the 31-yearold is an outside chance of a medal. He’s certainly a handy all-rounder: having been offered trials with England rugby as a junior, he also spent two years with Notts County and says the first thing he’ll do upon retirement is join a pub footie team.

15:37: Final of the Men’s Gymnastics Horizontal Bar. Louis Smith - he of the Adidas ads reckons our Sam Oldham will be better than him at this discipline, so keep everything crossed.

19:00: Men’s Hockey vs Spain

Wednesday August 8

09:30: K-1 1000m Sprint Kayaking final. Come on, Dr Tim. 19:15 and 21:15: 110m Hurdles semi-finals and final. Gwan, Andeh.

Thursday August 9

Unless the GB Women's Football team have made it to the final, it's the first Notts-free day of London 2012.

Friday August 10

18:20: Men’s Water Polo - GB vs USA

09:51: Dr T. Brabants’ Nottingham Kayak Club colleague Richard Jeffries competes in the heats of Sprint Canoeing: Men’s C-1 200m, with the Semi-finals at 11:16. Born on the Isle of Wight, he walked away from his Sport Science course at Luffbrah to chase his Olympic dream, and is the last of the Notts contingent to step up.

Friday August 3

Saturday August 11

09:00: Simon Terry returns for the Individual Men’s Archery finals 16:00: Men’s Hockey vs Pakistan 16:45: Women’s Volleyball vs Dominican Republic 18:20: Women’s Water Polo vs Italy 19:00: The Mansfield Mermaid (hopefully) defends her crown in the 800m Freestyle final

Saturday August 4

Monday July 30

18:20: A relatively Notts-free weekend starts with Men’s Water Polo vs Montenegro, followed by...

14:10: Francesca Clayton reps NG for the Women’s Water Polo against Russia, which is a huge deal for her and her teammates, seeing as while the male competition has been an Olympic staple for years, the ladies have had to sit on the sidelines (presumably kicking their feet in the water, looking well narked) until this year.

Sunday August 5

12:30: Mary King gets back on the horse for Eventing Day 3 (Cross-Country)

Brabants MBE. The 35-year-old emergency medicine specialist graduated from Nottingham University ten years ago, also bagged a bronze in Sydney in 2000, and - when not at QMC - can be found honing his water-borne specialisation: the individual kayak (the twin-bladed paddle, as opposed to the Hawaii 5-0 single blade of canoeing, where the racing stance looks as though you’re about to be knighted). Major prospect.

14:45: Women’s Volleyball vs Japan 19:00: Men’s Hockey vs Australia

It's the final of the Men's Football. Just saying.

Sunday August 12

All sixteen of Team NG will stroll into the Olympic Stadium before it becomes another sterile Premiership ground and will wave frantically at cameras and take photos, before thinking about Rio 2016 or hanging up their spikes, paddles, swimming caps, saddles or whatever they ply their trade with. Hopefully, they'll have a bit of precious metal round their necks, too. teamgb.com

Monday August 6

09:30: The heats for the Men’s Sprint Kayaking: K-1 1000m begin. Enter reigning Olympic Champion and adopted NG-er, Dr Tim leftlion.co.uk/issue48

23

Unimpressed by people in tight shorts running about and chucking stuff? Take what they do off the track and overlay it onto the very real setting of our beautiful home town, and what the world's elite athletes can do at their best will do your head in.

In August 1991, Mike Powell of the US recorded a long jump 8.9 metres long, equivalent to the zebra crossing near Frankie and Benny’s on Upper Parliament Street.

In August 2010, David Rudisha of Kenya ran the 800m - the equivalent of from the Theatre Royal, across Upper Parliament Street, down Clumber Street, past Primark, along the Council House and up Market Street back to the Theatre Royal - in 1 minutes and 41.01 seconds.

devised by: Al Needham and Alan Gilby illustrations: Rob White

In June 2008, Dayron Robles of Cuba ran the 110m hurdles - the equivalent of the steps of Broadway to the side entrance of The Old Angel - in 12.87 seconds.

In August 1986, Yuriy Sedykh of the USSR threw a hammer 86.74 metres, the equivalent length of the Clough statue to the middle of the steps of the Council House.

Bleddy hell!

In August 2005, Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia ran the 10,000m - the equivalent of Top Valley Tesco to Belle and Jerome at the bottom of Central Avenue in West Bridgford - in 26 minutes and 17.53 seconds.

In May 1990, Randy Barnes of the USA recorded a shot put 23.12 metres, equivalent to the distance between the Left Lion and the Right Lion.

In May1996, Jan Železný of the Czech Republic threw a javelin 98.48 metres, the equivalent length of Yates’s to The Bank.

In August 2009, Usain Bolt of Jamaica ran the 100m the equivalent of Wetherspoons on the Square to the 24hour Greggs - in 9.58 seconds.

In August 1995, Jonathan Edwards of GB recorded a triple jump 18.29 metres long, equivalent to the Pit and Pendulum to the Bodega Social.

In September 2004, Saif Saaeed Shaheen of Qatar ran the 3000m steeplechase - the equivalent of running round the Council House ten times - in 7 minutes and 53.63 seconds.

In August 1999, Michael Johnson of the USA ran the 400m - the equivalent of Tantra to Walkabout - in 43.18 seconds.

Shurrup!

North

In June 1986, Jurgen Schult of East Germany threw a discus 77.08 metres, the equivalent length of Exchange Walk.

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In August 2009, Usain Bolt of Jamaica ran the 200m - the equivalent of The Salutation Inn to the Robin Hood statue - in 19.19 seconds.

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In July 1998, Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco ran the 1500m - the equivalent of going round The the Cornerhouse five times - in 3 minutes and Cornerhouse 26 seconds.

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In May 2004, Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia ran the 5000m - the equivalent of Sainsbury’s in Arnold to Viccy Centre - in 12 minutes and 37.35 seconds

Ya Jestin’ meh!

All distances are rough estimates taken from the Distance Measurement Tool in Google Maps, because we didn’t have time to arse about town with one of those trundle wheels, even though we really wanted to. To the best of our knowledge, all distances are sort of correct. You can go off and check for yourself if you want to have a go at us, but that would say more about your lack of anything better to do with your husk of a life than our distance-related calculation skills. Actually, just saying that has got us right paranoid that we’ve made a Spinal Tap Stonehenge-style cock up, because surely no way can someone run from Arnold to town that fast when it’s not that much faster to drive there...(goes off to check)...no, apparently it’s right. Jesus. Really? That’s mental. All distances are the shortest route between two points when unencumbered by buildings or the shortest route by road. All distances and times do not take gradients, wind speeds, sharp corners, trams, slack-jawed mouth-breathers hanging t Street am en Parlibags Uppaerdozen about outside trainer shops, fat Mams coming out of Primark with of rammel, people dressed up as giant pizza boxes handing out fliers or track surfaces into account. If you get done for lobbing a javelin about in town, don’t even think about telling the coppers you got the idea from us. You’re on your own, duckeh.

All Ball

James Michie I don’t make as much art these days as I used to just the occasional drawing, sculpture, or painting.

I still think of drawing as the fundamental form of art for me, and as a way of staying sane, painting, particularly, is very therapeutic.

But about every two years I get an idea in my head that I can’t shake and it will nag away at me, and I have to make it so I can get it out of my head and move on with my life. These pieces are generally large free-standing works made of everyday materials - what you would call ‘installation’ art which tells you very little about what kind of art it is, but does give you an idea of what it isn’t.

This last piece is “All Ball” - an icosahedron about three feet across made of doors and walls in a wooden frame that is displayed by suspending it on wires from the ceiling. Like most of my work it was a reconfiguring of the things around me. I like to work with the materials that are in the room or the area so what you notice in the work is the process the materials have been through - not the materials themselves. You should be capable of using any material to make art, from crushed cans to gold leaf. It is the way you reconfigure and leave your mark on the material that gives it your signature.

I think everyday objects and ordinary materials work well in unusual configurations; umbrellas made into giant balls, rain barrels and drainpipes made into giant insects, chairs and tables made into giant structures. They have a lovely oddness to them, as well as giving me the enjoyment of having turned something mundane into something out of the ordinary.

An object that is familiar but altered is satisfying to me, like a good puzzle: the brain has a starting point of associations with the familiar aspects of it and then runs up against the unfamiliar changes. It tries to make connections to them and finds not the old ones, but new connections. This isn’t a conscious questioning of, “Why has the artist done this?”, but the automatic work the brain does when it sees something it considers to be out-of-place: it attempts to make sense of the information it is given, it looks for patterns and exceptions to those patterns. And this is a nice feeling. A touch of confusion and a sense of wonder, along with conveying the simple joy of playing around with materials. It is the basis of what I am trying to get across with my work.

There is no cultural or political message in my art, unless that message is “Try to make the world a more beautiful place”, because when I see a good piece of art it makes me want to go and create something unique myself. And if my work doesn’t always succeed in communicating that, then hopefully it fails in interesting ways. carnival.org

Art Works Weighting

Louisa Jane Irvine I grew up in family of artists and have travelled extensively - both of which have influenced my work.

I’m a textile artist, designer and photographer: my mother trained me as a photographer and although I see the world as a photographer, I’ve always been fascinated by textiles. As a child I loved going to fabric shops to look at the spools of ribbons and threads, feeling and collecting different colours and textures.

Through my formal creative education I explored my passion for light and texture through photography, but was inspired by the sculpture of Kiki Smith, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Eva Hesse. During my degree I had the opportunity to experiment in a wider range of media and to develop ways to integrate alternative photography techniques with textiles. I haven’t combined the two disciplines for a while as I now I see them as quite separate.

With my textile pieces, I go through cycles of intense periods of producing work, interspersed with periods of learning - I love working with new techniques.

After my degree, I did an eighteen-month apprenticeship in traditional Mayan weaving in Guatemala, then spent a couple of years building and exhibiting a body of sculptural textile work between Barcelona and Nottingham, where I explored concepts of femininity and living / dying. Over the past few years, though, I have become somewhat obsessed with perfecting traditional textiles techniques and have taken numerous sewing courses at the Textile Workshop in Sherwood, an amazing resource in Nottingham.

I was based in Nottingham with a studio at Oldknows Factory but have recently relocated to London to work on an Arts Council project. I’m now actively involved in working with a range of organisations who support and promote individual artists and the creative industries across the UK. I am a member of the Board of Trustees for Lewisham Arts Education Network and an active member of Southwark Arts Forum.

I’m in the process of working on a more decorative series of work creating bespoke and commissioned pieces using the fabrics I’ve been gathering from markets and charity shops for the past ten years. This new strand of work is more inspired by other people’s memories, and includes a bit more colour and pattern, than my previous work. I always use craft-based, labour-intensive methods of production, and focus on materials and process.

Weighting, and some of my other work in the past, has been created using hundreds of pairs of my grandmother’s old silk and nylon stockings. I exhibited a similar piece to this one in Barcelona several years ago, when my grandmother was at the end of her life. It’s quite a personal piece for me, I wasn’t ready to exhibit it in the uk for a while but I’ve recently started looking for the right place. louisajane.net

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LEFTLION LISTINGS

featured listing...

AUGUST – SEPTEMPER 2012

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

PAGAN PRIDE

They’re here, they’re shamanistically aware, get over it.

We’ve been promised some sun in August – stop sniggering at the back – and what better way to spend a sunny day than down the Arboretum. Home to not only a large collection of trees, it also welcomes many a festival and gathering throughout the year.

Pagan Pride, on Sunday 5 August, is one such event and the Arbo is a very apt place for raising awareness and bringing people together in a celebration of all things magik, mystical and mother naturely.

Cast aside any preconceived notions that you may have, get yourselves down and find out what they really are all about. Last year’s event saw over a thousand supporters from far and wide visit our fair city to celebrate the diversity of the community and learn more about the Pagan culture, and this year even more look set to descend for an afternoon of fun and frolics. The day kicks off in style with a parade at 10.30am that starts on the Market Square. Pagans from around the country will be marching through the city; the walk culminating at the Arboretum. The event then officially opens at midday until 6pm. So what else can you expect except floaty fabrics and wind chimes? Loads, that’s what.

Two unplugged music stages will be present this year with headliners for the main stage being Luxury Stranger, a post punk indie collective, and headlining the acoustic stage, Serpentyne, who give a unique blend of medieval and world music, They’ll be joined by, among others, Lee Burns, Fae Brotherhood and Scaramanga Six. If you fancy getting into the musical spirit yourself, you can join the open drumming circle for a bash on a bongo; all welcome, no matter how off your timing may be.

There’ll be talks throughout the day covering paganism, spirituality, history and folklore. From 5pm the speakers’ area will be transformed into a chill-out spot for relaxation and meditation. There will also be a variety of dance classes, ranging from medieval branle to steampunk bellydancing. You could even take a variety of classes and combine your new skills into a cacophony of jumping, kicking and grinding that you can demonstrate in the dance arena, just make sure you have at least a metre space on each side.

For those who want to party hardy and learn hardy, there will be loads of people to chat to as this year sees the start of the Pagan Community Networking area. Located by the Green Man Tree, for those who wish to learn more about the pagan ethos, understand what a moot is, or just fancy a chat. Don’t forget to swing by the stalls on your way around; selling handmade crafts, Pagan Pride t-shits and witchy paraphernalia. There will also be entertainment for children, with face painting, bracelet making and games which will distract them long enough for you to sneak off and down a quick pint of Castle Rock’s finest ale at the on-site beer tent.

After the event, there will be a cheeky après party at The Olde Salutation, so head over for more merriment and another opportunity to let those dance moves shine well into the night.

Pagan Pride, the Arboretum, Sunday 5 August, 12 6pm. Free entry. paganpride.org.uk

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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Forest Thump Get ready to feel the bass this August, as the Red Bull Academy meets the Nottingham Caribbean Carnival Whether you have grandparents from Clarendon Parish or you went to Clarendon College, the Caribbean Carnival - held on the the Forest Rec every August - has been a staple of Nottingham’s summer since nineteen longtime. It’s pretty obvious what to expect at an event like this; cans of beer that look like Peru’s football kit, horned animals on the barbecue, speaker systems the size of the obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and thumping tunage from the red, gold and green section of the musical spectrum.

This year, however, things have changed, thanks to the involvement of the Red Bull Music Academy. It’s a globe-trotting series of music workshops and festivals which scoops up a diverse group of producers, vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and all-round musical mentalists from different countries, disciplines and points in their career - and gives them a concentrated blast of exposure to the top flight of the music business. Our very own Ronika has been a beneficiary, don’t you know.

On Saturday 18 August, the Red Bull Musical Academy Stage will descend upon the Forest, boasting a stellar line-up. The stage will be headined by Redlight and Dread MC - the former a Bristolian beats behemoth who barged his way to the front rank of the DnB scene under the guise of DJ Clipz and has remixed Roots Manuva, Little Boots, Pendulum, Toddla T, Hockey, and Athlete, the latter a dnb/dubstep bar-spitter of considerable renown who - together - prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the West is still holding it down.

On selection duty is a living legend; Norman Jay MBE, the man who learned his DJ craft at the feet of his New York-based uncle in the late seventies, took what he’d learned at Dancetaria, Zanzibar and the legendary Paradise Garage back to the UK, and created a sound system (Good Times) which took the edge off an increasingly moody Notting Hill Carnival. Earl Gateshead, Lunice and Doc Daneeka will also be stepping up, but if you think the local talent has been shunted to the side, you’re wrong; the mighty Elementz, the ridiculously talented RubberDub, Wigflex overlord Spam Chop, and the always on-point Mimm.

That’s not all, though; The main stage will be hosted by MC Kat B from MTV and the Real Deal Comedy Jam. If you’re looking for a in-route to the next school of NG urban, this is it; Lady Leshurr and Stylo G are the highlights in the early evening, before followed by the immense headliner Donae’o. The Parade Stage will be the domain of Kemet FM and its DJs over both days - a chance to link up with the people responsible for the city’s most

essential music station.

And it goes without saying that it’s not about the music. The Zumba Hearty Party is making a bid at breaking records, while Bantum will be doing screen printing on site. Bring your own tee and they’ll print on it for free. Notts Property - the graffiti festival that is happening all across August and is featured on page 39 of this every mag - will also be there to do a live spray-up of a custom-placed wall, and Detonate will be hosting the official after party for the event.

Add to that stalls, quad biking, funfairs and, of course, The Big Parade on Sunday that starts at 2pm on Castle Gate and winds (and quite possibly grines) its way around the city, ending up at the Rec at about 4.30pm. Expect a blistering wave of colour and sound over two essential days of pure, unadultered vibe.

Nottingham Caribbean Carnival, Forest Recreation Ground, Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 August, 12 – 9pm. Free.

music event listings...

Wednesday 01/08

Friday 03/08

The Old Nick Trading Company The Lincolnshire Poacher Free, 8:30pm - 11:30pm

The Big Dig With Holmes The Golden Fleece

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

FOLKY JOKEY BLOKEYS

More comedy and music than you can shake a stick at this late summer at Glee

We Are Fiction The Rescue Rooms £6, 7pm

The Lost Weekend The Chameleon Cafe Bar £4 / night or £9, 7:30pm - 11:30pm Runs until: 05/08

Thursday 02/08

Saturday 04/08

Wire & Wool The Alley Cafe Free, 8pm - 12pm

Vinnie Caruana The Rescue Rooms £8, 6.30pm

On Sunday 23 September, The Boy With Tape On His Face will be gracing their stage. The Boy (a.k.a. Sam Wills - a Kiwi, though you’d never tell from his accent) is a mime act with musical jokes, awkward audience participation, a dry sense of humour and a necessarily wide vocabulary of facial expressions. He’s been making quite a name for himself lately, appearing last year at the Royal Variety Performance. If you haven’t seen him before, you’re in for a real treat and an unusual evening.

Scritti Politti The Rescue Rooms £14, 7.30pm

Bartons Unplugged Bartons £5 / £7, 7:30pm - 11:30pm

Tim Key will be there on Thursday 27 September with the third part of his Slut Trilogy, Masterslut. Like the previous show, Slutcracker, which won the Edinburgh Award, there will be poetry, stories and Pythonesque short films in a purposefully shambolic performance revealing an unusual and slightly disturbing obsession with bath-time.

Like Well Good Karaoke The Old Angel Free, 8pm

Widows & In Isolation Rock City £3, 10pm

As ever, folk acts and Nottingham bands are well represented in Glee’s music line up. New Orleans folk/country band Hurray For The Riff Raff will perform on Tuesday 4 September, with support from young Nottingham singersongwriter, Frankie Rudolf.

The Song Is You Broadway Cafe Bar Free, 8:30pm

The Joe Strange Band The Approach

Folked Up The Maze £3, 7:30pm - 11:30pm Clara Barker, Elena Hargreaves and Ali Bonsai.

Shake n’ Bake JamCafé The Smears, Sanguine The Maze £4 / £5, 5pm

Marc Reeves, The Listeners and Daniel Dobbs JamCafé Free, 8pm - 12am

Nice Up The Dance The Golden Fleece

Alpha Male Tea Party The Chameleon Cafe Bar 7:30pm

Anais Mitchell (USA) The Maze £10, 7.30pm

Friday 03/08 Karaoke with Cliff Fox The Running Horse Urban Intro The Approach Wax Dramatic JamCafé Notts Collective The Maze £1 before 10pm, 9pm

The Glee Club promises another couple of months of great comedy and intelligent music. They defy the August comedy lull, when the whole world seems to decamp north of the border for the Edinburgh Festival, to continue their ‘Best In Live Stand-up Comedy’ shows on Friday and Saturday nights.

These will feature names such as Ian Cognito, Gary Delaney, Nathan Caton and a host of other acts.

Feisty acoustic musician Liz Lawrence will be taking to the stage on Friday 14 September supported by an acoustic set by one of Notts finest up-and-coming bands, Hhymn and Glee’s new artist-in-residence, Alexa Hawksworth.

The Glee Club, British Waterways Building, Canal Street, NG1 7EH. glee.co.uk/nottingham

Monday 06/08

Thursday 09/08

Monday 13/08

D.O.A The Old Angel £10, 7pm

Like Well Good Karaoke The Old Angel

Notts In A Nutshell The Maze £3, 7:30pm

Samuel Kirk and Natalie Squance Nottingham Playhouse

Summer Meltdown The Maze £12 / £15, 7pm

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Wednesday 15/08

Tuesday 07/08

Friday 10/08

The Old Nick Trading Company The Lincolnshire Poacher

Open Mic BrewDog 8pm - 11:30pm

About To Break Tour The Rescue Rooms £6, 6.30pm

Karaoke with Cliff Fox The Running Horse

Richie Muir The Approach

Monday 06/08

The Maddigans The Maze

Head Automatica The Rescue Rooms £12.50, 6.30pm

Thursday 16/08

Sunday 05/08

Set Your Goals Rock City £10, 7pm Folked Up The Maze £3, 7:30pm

Wednesday 08/08 The Old Nick Trading Company The Lincolnshire Poacher Notts In A Nutshell The Maze £3, 7:30pm

ALL BARK AND BITE Brewdog: Woof.

Since opening last winter - and immediately putting itself about a bit as the self-styled purveyors of ‘Beer for Punks’ - Brewdog has not been shy in letting you know what its about. Owning and running a brewery that originated in Aberdeenshire, Brewdog are making a lot of waves around the beer world with their new, unrelenting ale that claims a depth of flavour and character that is unrivalled. Recent beers include Punk, the fastest selling alternative IPA, and a 55% beer – yes, you read that right, 55 blinkin’ percent - which we’re not entirely sure you could drink a pint of without some form of out-of-body experience. Slightly more palatable is Tokyo, at 18.2%, that is a regular feature on the beer board.

Marketed as a ‘craft beer oasis’, Brewdog Nottingham - one of only four in England - is housed in a factory building on Broad Street that was Shaws Restaurant in a previous life. Having given the place a bit of a revamp that involved a lot of polished wood and shiny metal, they have furnished the place with fourteen beer taps, a whole host of weird and wonderful bottled ales and some artisan style snacks to keep the dreaded beer-munchies at bay. And there’s always board games for your slightly hazy entertainment, or open mic nights on Sundays for those more musicallyminded.

Brewdog’s philosophy of making real ale sexy again is definitely working. You won’t find a lounge full of beardos that spray themselves with air freshener instead of deodorant telling you about that time they met Gemini Rising once in Hackney. Nor will you find monotonous mass brewed beers on sale. It’s just good, hearty ale brewed with a sense of dedication by a company that has 6,567 shareholders; thanks to their Equity for Punks scheme, which allowed customers to invest in their dream product. This is one dog that is set to have its day in Nottingham.

20 - 22 Broad Street, NG1 3AL brewdog.com/bars/nottingham

I’m Not From London JamCafé Wild Honey Soundsystem The Golden Fleece

Saturday 11/08 JD’S - Ska, Soul & Rock The Hop Pole Unrepresented Music The Chameleon Cafe Bar £4, 7:30pm - 1am

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Like Well Good Karaoke The Old Angel An Audience with Carl Froch The Approach £15, 6pm Tom Wardle The Bodega £3, 7pm DIY Poets The Maze £2, 7:30pm Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Celebrating 50 years of Jamaican Independence Nottingham Contemporary

Friday 17/08

Boogie Street The Approach

Charlotte Church The Bodega £12.50, 7pm

Stealth V Rescued Stealth £5, 10.15pm

Acoustic Room v Our True Intent The Rescue Rooms £3, 7pm

Just James The Maze £4 / £5, 4pm

Loefah (Swamp 81/DMZ) Stealth £5, 10pm

Soul Inferno The Golden Fleece

The Afterdark Movement The Maze £5, 8pm

Sunday 12/08 Open Mic Night BrewDog 8pm - 11:30pm Proper English Gentleman The Maze £3, 4pm

The Natural Selection with White Toast and King Kahlua The Golden Fleece

Saturday 18/08 Dead Harts The Rescue Rooms £4, 7pm leftlion.co.uk/issue48 leftlion.co.uk/issue48 leftlion.co.uk/issue48 29

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music event listings...

Saturday 18/08

Stagefright The Running Horse

Honour Is Dead Rock City £3, 10pm

Detonate - RBMA Carnival Afterparty The Bodega £7, 10pm - 4am

Roots Reggae with Boysie The Golden Fleece

Kold Chillin The Old Angel

Sunday 19/08

Gallery 47 The Maze £3 / £4, 5pm

Monday 20/08

Oberhofer The Bodega £6, 7pm

Bleed Till Dawn and Before My Eyes The Maze £3, 7:30pm

Open mic Night The Golden Fleece

Wednesday 22/08

The Old Nick Trading Company The Lincolnshire Poacher

Richie Muir The Approach

Thursday 23/08

Like Well Good Karaoke The Old Angel

Mood Indigo The Approach

Ordinary Heroes The Maze £3, 7:30pm

Thursday 23/08 Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Friday 24/08

Coki (Digital Mystikz/DMZ) Stealth £5, 10pm

The Money The Maze

Saturday 25/08

Plague of Ares The Running Horse

Grader Rock City £3, 9pm

The Joe Strange Band The Approach

Hellfire Harlots Presents The Maze £3 / £5, 6:45pm

Pathosis The Old Angel £5, 7:30pm

S.P.A.M. Wild 60’s music with Vinyl Jacks The Golden Fleece

Sunday 26/08

Soul Buggin’ Presents: Psychemagik The Bodega £5 / £7, 10pm - 4am

Holy Other The Rescue Rooms £8, 7.30pm

Acoustic Gathering The Maze

Monday 27/08

Paul Kelly The Bodega

Giles Rive Co. Presents The Alley Cafe

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

Wired Was Sound

Vital fundraiser for local music projects at Rock City this Sept In January last year local singer Roy De Wired - a man who was as popular with his fellow Notts performers as he was with the public he so eagerly entertained for over thirty years - lost his battle with cancer. And for the second year running, his fellow muso pals have organised a memorial concert in his name at Rock City that will not only celebrate Roy’s legacy, but also help to raise funds for the Roy De Wired Foundation.

The Foundation was set up by Roy’s widow Sarah, and is a scholarship fund that aims to help young and talented musicians find their way into music and the industry, supporting free music projects for children in local schools.

Working closely with the MLC Academy - a music school in West Bridgford - projects include free music tuition, sessions on DJ techniques, instruction in music technology, and music workshops.

The memorial concert will be a celebration of local talent, including many who give their time freely in order to raise money to distribute to the projects run through the Scholarship Fund. At the time of going to press those confirmed to play on the hallowed main stage at Rock City include The Money, Joe Strange, The Pesky Alligators, The Keystones, Buster, Urban Intro, Steve McGill, Kris Ward, The Richie Muir Band and The Herb Birds with loads more still to be announced (so keep ‘em peeled on the official website for the latest announcements). The whole evening will be compèred by BBC Radio Nottingham’s Mark Dennison.

Last year the concert pulled in over 700 punters; this year they hope to smash the 1,000 mark, which can only happen if you buy your ticket and show your support. Tickets cost £10 - less than a quid per act - with all proceeds going towards the Roy De Wired Foundation Scholarship Fund. The show is for fourteen-year-olds and upwards, and tickets are available from the usual online outlets including Alt Tickets and See Tickets, but they can also be picked up from Rock City, The Approach on Friar Lane, Fuzz Guitars at Abbey Road in Bridgford, The Riverbank Restaurant and Bar on Trent Bridge, and Tom Browns at Gunthorpe.

Roy De Wired Memorial Concert 2012, Rock City, Sunday 16 September, £10 roydewired.com

Monday 27/08

Friday 31/08

Green Hill Zone and Tommy Disfigure The Maze £3, 7:30pm

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Bob Marley Legacy Night The Maze £3, 8:30pm - 12:30am

Detonate Stealth £8 / £10, 10pm - 5am

Tomorrow Come The Wolves The Old Angel

Whole Lotta Led Rock City £10, 6.30pm

The Doors Alive The Rescue Rooms £11, 7.30pm

The Big Dig With Holmes The Golden Fleece

Saturday 01/09

Saturday 08/09

Thursday 30/08

Like Well Good Karaoke The Old Angel

Roy Stone The Approach

Acoustickle The Maze

Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Friday 31/08

Justin Townes Earle The Rescue Rooms £14, 7pm

AfroVibes

Get Veldt up at Lakeside in Autumn AfroVibes is a biennial festival of African theatre, dance, music and spoken word which will be touring the Netherlands and the UK and is set to hit HoodTown in the week beginning 8 October.

During the week, there will be performances of two plays from South Africa. The first, And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses by Zakes Mda, is directed by the award-winning young director, Princess Mhlongo. The play is a black comedy in which a retired prostitute and a domestic servant form a friendship whilst standing in an interminably long food queue. They compare their vastly different life experiences, bearing witness to the huge gap between rich and poor.

Mother to Mother explores the legacy of South Africa’s violent history. It takes as its basis the real-life murder in a township riot of a young American woman, Amy Biehl, who had gone to South Africa to help the country prepare for democratic elections. The mother of one of the killers imagines a conversation with Amy’s mother in which she shares her grief. The violent environment in which her son was brought up is revealed and the mother’s love endures through the sorrow and guilt.

There is also a double-bill of dance performances. In My Exile is in my Head, Nigerian dancer and choreographer Qudus Onikeku takes us into the dream-world of migrants in a high-energy, acrobatic performance. Inception is a work by Sonia Radebe, from Soweto, and explores the fact that all living things have an origin.

The festival also includes the Township Café, which will take over Lakeside’s Pavilion Café, not only serving authentic South African food and drink but also providing a meeting point for performers and audiences. It will also host a variety of fringe events with DJs and spoken word performances.

Afrovibes, Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, NG7 2RD, Monday 8 to Friday 12 October. afrovibes2012.co.uk

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Bartons Unplugged Bartons £5 / £7, 7:30pm - 11:30pm

Slam Cartel Rock City £9, 7pm

Bad Axe The Running Horse

Macmillan Fest 2012 Stealth £7, 2pm

Nice Up The Dance The Golden Fleece

Monday 03/09

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Tuesday 04/09

Hurray For The Riff Raff The Glee Club £6, 7.30pm

Red Sea The Malt Cross

Wednesday 05/09

Richie Muir The Approach

Thursday 06/09

The Song Is You Broadway Cafe Bar

Kris Ward The Approach

Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Friday 07/09

Crazy Lixx Rock City £11, 7pm

Hoochie Coochie Club Spanky Van Dykes £8, 9pm - 2am

The Joe Strange Band The Approach

Aba Shanti I and Selector Bronson The Maze £6, 8pm

Soul Inferno The Golden Fleece

Sunday 09/09

Emma Pollock The Glee Club £8, 7.30pm

Monday 10/09

Dan Stuart Band and Sacri Cuori The Maze £12, 7:30pm

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Tuesday 11/09

Rue Royale The Malt Cross

Wednesday 12/09

Richie Muir The Approach

Notts In A Nutshell The Maze £3, 7:30pm

music event listings...

Thursday 13/09

The Moons The Bodega £7, 7pm

Richard Howell The Approach

Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Friday 14/09

The Smyths The Rescue Rooms £10, 7.30pm

Torche Rock City £10, 6.30pm

Blood Brothers The Bodega

Urban Intro The Approach

Liz Lawrence, Hymnn and Alexa Hawksworth The Glee Club

Wild Honey Soundsystem The Golden Fleece

Saturday 15/09

The Thin Lizzy Experience Rock City £10, 6.30pm

Nottingham School of Samba The Malt Cross

The Joe Strange Band The Approach

Porckchopper Presents The Maze

Roots Reggae with Boysie The Golden Fleece

Sunday 16/09

Aynsley Lister The Glee Club £10, 7pm

Monday 17/09

Rachel Sermanni The Rescue Rooms £8, 7.30pm

Open Mic Night The Golden Fleece

Tuesday 18/09

ODI The Malt Cross

Wednesday 19/09

Kan The Glee Club £12, 7pm

Richie Muir The Approach

Thursday 20/09

Pierce The Veil Rock City £10, 6.30pm

Butch Hancock USA The Glee Club £12, 7pm

Offcut Records Relaunch Party The Maze £tbc, 7:30pm

Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Friday 21/09

From The Jam Rock City £20, 6.30pm

Ensiferum The Rescue Rooms £15, 6.30pm

Hey Sholay The Bodega £6, 8pm

Notts Collective The Maze

Warhead The Old Angel £7, 7:30pm

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

#NottinghamRocks If you’re a chirpy tweeter than you may have been aware of the #nottinghamrocks campaign that hit our city on 29 May. If you’re more of a twitcher than a twitterer, you may be screwing your face in absolute confusion right now.

Basically, Nottingham Rocks. That goes without saying, but not everyone in the world knows that. Or they didn’t until everyone on Twitter was encouraged to shout about how awesome Nottingham is by ending their tweets on that day with #nottinghamrocks to get Nottingham trending. A massive success, it has now fuelled many a creative’s fire to make Nottingham rock even more.

One such event that has been inspired by the trending proclamation is #NottinghamRocks at the Theatre Royal. It will be bringing to one stage the cream of the crop of Nottingham’s female artists. It’s a hard one to call but Farmyard Records seem to have nailed it right on the head with a line-up including Natalie Duncan, Nina Smith and Indiana. All local singer/songwriters, their inimitable styles will be accompanied by a live orchestra for what will be one hell of a sweet musical treat.

If you’ve not heard of Natalie Duncan, shame on you for not reading our last issue, and shame on you for depriving your tabs. She’s an incredible local talent who plays the ivories like she was born in a jazz bar and sings with the heart of a lion. Her debut album was released on Verve Records in July and has been creating a bit of a stir. We defy anyone not to sit through one of her sets and not feel a shiver down their spine at least once.

Nina Smith is a young lady on the scene who’s collaborations with numerous performers have bridged genres like no one before. A pop princess at heart, she has soul in spades and can’t resist a bit of hip-hop when it comes a-calling.

Her debut EP, Lonely Hearts Club EP, has been played on both BBC 6 Music and 1Extra. You may not have heard of the first act of the evening, Indiana, but we assure you that if she is kicking off a night like this then she means serious business and should be placed at the top of your “ones to watch” list. We’ve heard her vocals be compared to the likes of Sarah McLachlan and it seems that she is going to be one bright star in the Nottingham night sky.

So go on, get your tickets now because they won’t be around for long. #NottinghamRocks, Saturday 22 September, Theatre Royal, Theatre Square, NG1 5ND. Tickets £12.50 trch.co.uk

Friday 21/09

Saturday 22/09

Thursday 27/09 Acoustic Session The Golden Fleece

Saturday 22/09

Ministry Of Goth The Maze £4 / £5, 9pm

#Nottingham Rocks Royal Centre

The Natural Selection The Golden Fleece

Joe Brooks Rock City £12, 6.30pm

Halestorm The Rescue Rooms

Twisted Wheel The Bodega £9, 7pm

Shoes and Socks Off The Chameleon Cafe Bar £4 / £6, 7:30pm - 11:45pm

The Joe Strange Band The Approach

DUBBY SCARECROW

The Maze livelies up itsen for a good cause Jamaica - it’s a bit nice, in’t it? Not only is it decorated with stunning beaches, huge waterfalls and other such amazing scenery, it has bestowed on us such gems as Usain Bolt, Blue Mountain coffee, Island Records and of course, Bob Marley.

Now, most of us would give our right arm to be sunning ourselves on a Jamaican beach this summer, rather than jostling with some snot-nosed kid for a space in a big paddling pool at Nottingham Riviera, but let’s face it; only a handful of us will be going anywhere near anything other than a Ryan Air flight.

So, while we’re dreaming, why not take part in something to ensure that the beautiful rainforest of Jamaica is around when we finally save enough pennies to actually go and have a reccy. Currently the last remaining rainforest, Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, is in a bit of mither; thanks to mass deforestation and unsustainable farming, and the country is at risk of losing habitat for some rare and beautiful native animals and plants, as well as homes for some Maroon communities (if you don’t know about them, look them up, they’re inspirational). Step up Tropical Dub Storm, a benefit night created to input funds to this very worthy cause.

Tropical Dub Storm nights mhave been happening in London and Leicester for a while now; so it’s about time Nottingham got involved. And theyve lined up a soundsystem veteran in the shape of reggae king Aba Shanti-I, who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to this sound as he’s been going at it since 1994. With extensive tours around the globe, the man knows what it takes to get a crowd in the mood; when he’s finished doing his thing, local Nottingham deck-wizard Selector Bronson, a regular on Unique radio will continue the fun into the early hours.

All this is kicking off on Saturday 8 September for a mere 6 quid. Check it out to party safe in the knowledge that you’re helping to save one of the world’s most important eco-systems.

As they say over there; walk good, people, walk good.

Sunday 23/09

The Boy With Tape On His Face The Glee Club £12, 6.45pm

Tuesday 25/09

The Maine The Rescue Rooms £11, 6.30pm

Gravenhurst The Bodega £9, 7pm

Adam Barnes and Richard Walters The Malt Cross

Kathryn Tickell Nottingham Playhouse 7:30pm

Wednesday 26/09

The Dunwells The Bodega £8, 7pm

Richie Muir The Approach

Folk at The Glee Club: Emily Portman Trio The Glee Club £10, 7pm

Urban Intro The Approach free, 8pm

Detonate Stealth £10 / £12, 10pm - 5am

Muzika The Maze

Saturday 29/09

Wet Nuns Stealth £5, 10pm

W.A.S.P. Rock City £19.50, 6.30pm

Straight Lines The Rescue Rooms £6, 6.30pm

Ronnie Londons Groove Lounge Grosvenor £3, 8pm - 1am

Thursday 27/09

Giles Rive Co. Presents The Alley Cafe

Tim Key - Masterslut The Glee Club £13, 6.45pm

Danny Schmidt and Carrie Elkin The Maze £5 / £10, 7:30pm

Tropical Dub Storm, The Maze, Mansfield Road, NG1 3FT, Saturday 8 September, 8pm, £6 themazerocks.com

Friday 28/09

For even more conclusive and detailed listings: leftlion.co.uk/listings Get your event in this magazine and on our website: leftlion.co.uk/add

leftlion.co.uk/issue48 31

Nature Celebration

WEYA THE WORLD, WEYA THE CHILDREN Long after the Olympics are over and London wonders what to do with a big stadium, Nottingham will be bringing together 1,000 of the world's most talented new artists from over 100 countries, and turning them loose on the city over ten days. Do expect live music, dance performances, theatre installations, spoken word, film events, visual arts exhibitions and gastronomic events over two and a bit weeks in September. Don't expect to get a table in Lee Rosy's.

The work of these artists - all under thirty - are going to be scattered across thirty venues in town. Some of them are the obvious choices; the big places, like Broadway, Lakeside Arts Centre, The Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham Contemporary, New Art Exchange and Nottingham Castle will be taking part, along with indies such as One Thoresby Street, Crocus Gallery, Backlit, Gonzo and Switch Studios. But there’s more to WEYA than that; certain spaces, shop units, and churches are getting involved, including Paul Smith on Low Pavement.

And - it goes without saying - the Old Market Square will be acting as the hub of the festival, showcasing live performances over the whole ten days, including the finale of the Cultural Olympiad in the East Midlands which will be huge. This will be - without question - the biggest art event to ever hit Nottingham; it’s almost like everything that’s happened in town art-wise over the last decade has been leading up to this moment.

Silke Pillinger, Director of World Event Young Artists, on why you should be wappy about WEYA In a nutshell, what is World Event Young Artists?

I’m afraid it’ll need to be a large nutshell, because it’s such an ambitious project. On a deeper level, WEYA will be an opportunity for international exchange on a global scale; it is as much about intercultural dialogue across political borders as it is about the practice of young artists. An inspiring events and workshop programme will run across the main festival, and will offer artists and visitors an intriguing, interactive and challenging series of events, happenings, debates, lectures and interactions across many settings. The World Event is for everyone. And I should mention that it’s free.

What’s your definition of a ‘young artist’? What’s the cut-off point here?

All of the artists are aged between eighteen and thirty. Following much debate about “what is young” as a team we have worked hard to be as inclusive as possible. This age-range also brings the festival in line with other European festival models.

How long has it taken to organise?

Discussions and commitment from the four main partners - Arts Council England, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham City Council and Igniting Ambition/Cultural Olympiad started a few years ago. The WEYA team came together a year ago, and the production team came on board a few months ago.

How hard has it been to get all this art together?

It’s been very complex, but thankfully we have a really fantastic, dedicated team who work together brilliantly to make sure the process for everything - gathering artist profile information, technical specifications, travel requirements - is as seamless as possible. Shipping the artwork, as you can imagine, is a very big job; so is getting the visa applications sorted. Almost 500 artists required visas, and we’ve been really fortunate that our legal partner and immigration law specialist Paragon Law came on board in the early stages. They’ve guided us through the whole process and have been amazing.

What’s been the hardest thing to get over here?

The two Syrian artists and their art works, given the current political situation there. We cannot mention their real names in any communication or even next to their art works, due to the repercussions they might face.

What do you think of Nottingham’s art scene?

Nottingham has a vibrant, independent and exciting art scene that certainly holds its own with its international counterparts. There’s a lot of support for independent artist led organisations, especially from established institutions such as the School of Art at Nottingham Trent University, which you can see by the level of graduate retention here. The quality of work from UK WEYA applicants was very high; I think there are eleven just from Nottingham. It really is the perfect place to hold the World Event, and the way that the city - and in particular the arts community has embraced the festival has been fantastic.

Whittling down a global creative community down to a thousand sounds like a huge job.

The shortlists must have been incredible and amazing. Our partner organisations in each of the almost 100 countries put them together following an open call in each country. We had about 400 applications in the UK; we believe it was a similar amount - if not more - in other countries.

It sounds like the perfect introduction to art for those who have never set foot in a gallery.

What would you recommend?

There’ll be a wealth of creative creativity into the city in all sorts of spaces, not just galleries.

A great place to start will be the Market Square, where there will be all sorts of events and showcases throughout. It’ll act as a sort of festival highlights showcase, giving people a taste of what’s on offer across the city, and inviting people to try new things. In the lead-up period, there

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are a number of exciting projects happening with partner venues and community groups; many of these will be in the Square, from photography projects in Bulwell to Middle Eastern poetry. There will also be a number of drop-in family days that people can get involved with.

Portrait version

Some of our independent galleries are putting up their own exhibits, almost as a fringe event.

What’s your take on that?

This festival has a democratic approach; we’ve worked to ensure the event isn’t monopolised by one person or a group of people coming to Nottingham externally. We’ve been working in collaboration with local venues; many of them are not only hosting the World Event exhibition, but also presenting work and events by local artists in response to the festival. It’s been very important to us that the local creative community is engaged and involved as fully as possible.

What are you looking forward to the most?

There are so many events and activities every day that it’s very difficult to choose. One activity we’re working on right now is one of the opening events for Saturday 8 September; Gilles Peterson will be curating a music event at the new Barton’s Bus Depot in Beeston. We’re organising a bus shuttle service between the city centre and the venue to take people there and back. Starting around 6pm, there’ll be live performances by WEYA musicians that Gilles has selected before he finishes with a set.

Anything else you’d like to say to LeftLion readers?

Make use of the WEYA volunteers at the information point in the Square: they’ll be able to point you in the right direction. There’ll be guided walks that people can sign up to that will take them to different elements of the festival, mass singing events, the creation of a 46 metre length of dyed silk that will happen live in Market Square, music, poetry, dance and much more.

Art Editor Tom Norton picks out a selection of pan-global highlights this September

Only Give Me Back The World I Threw Away

The Big Dinner

One of the talents representing Notts is a sculptor who’s worked with Tether since 2007 and has been selected to join forces with another local creative powerhouse; a certain Sir P.Smith. The private garden of the flagship store next to Broado will be the site of three sculptures that reimagine present day disasters as relics rediscovered in the distant future. It’s littered with satire, ripping apart the hysteria of the news and how we like nothing more than to mither about impending doom. A bit of a sombre affair, this, centred round rebuilding hope from an earth-shattering disaster yet to be seen.

Paul Smith, Low Pavement, NG1 7EA

Making Festen look like a teddy bear’s picnic, this video project - which takes a succession of scathing digs at the frustrating social mores we’re forever bound to whenever society sits itself down at the dinner table - might put you off your tea. As a camera pans around a dining room, a naked woman serves out and eats the meals of six people, who carp and bray at her every action. Projected for the audience against a recreation of the film’s setting for even more disquieting immersion, it might be wise to grab a nibble beforehand.

Location TBC

Lauren O’Grady, UK

RMB Solution, <the future currency>

Alejandra Alonso de Noriega, Spain

Mathias Isouard

Dessins d’Espaces

Mathias Isouard, France

Dongyuan Lv, China

If you think videogames are for bug-eyed teenagers and comatose stoners dribbling over Call of Duty, investigate the work of this man - a game designer and one of many groundbreaking artists who bring button-mashing out of the bedroom and into galleries. This project - brought together by a huge team of volunteers from around the world - allows viewers to interact with his work via the net, allowing users to build their own independent financial system and see what sort of effect it has on the world. The aim, in his own words, is to “question the disaster caused by the root cause of the monetary and financial systems.” Lv’s hope is that we all have the means to solve this perplexing global mess before it really is Game Over.

The Cutting Room, Nottingham Playhouse, NG1 5AF

Unsatisfied with keeping course on a single dimensional plane - and let’s face it, who is? - Mathias’ work flits between graphics and installation, built to adapt each space it occupies. His work not so much trick of the eye as throw about the senses with the tactical manipulation of a juggler, bringing impossible structures from page to reality, transforming each environment as he sees fit.

This unpredictability makes each new show a different performance between architecture and perception.

Just make sure you don’t trip over an impossibility by accident.

New Art Exchange, Gregory Boulevard, NG7 6BE Lv Dongyuan

Music Editor Paul Klotschkow spits out a selection of the musical highlights of WEYA

AN Attempt

Marwa Adel Attia Mohamed Seida, Egypt Some of the ugliest reports to emerge from the Arab Spring were the incidences of sexual and physical violence upon women, committed by both government and resistance forces. Far from earning the opportunity to engage in protest, some women found themselves the victims of vicious abuse often at the heart of the swelling crowds. Seida, part of the vanguard of Egypt’s photography world, is one artist brave enough to tackle this abhorrent social division in her work. Although speaking from personal background, the potency of her experiences has reverberated across the globe, leading to her exhibiting across Europe as well as scooping up the 2011 prize for “Best Arab Photographer”. WEYA marks yet another accolade for her acutely confrontational art.

New Art Exchange, Gregory Boulevard, NG7 6BE

Let’s start in Africa; Rwanda’s Mujyambere Abdoulrahim is a young artist and contemporary dancer who combines traditional Rwandan styles with other panAfrican dance influences. His continental compatriot Itoko sings in the different languages spoken in his home country of Cameroon, mixing soul, afro-beat, acoustic and world beats, blending them together into a polyrhythmic stew.

Zambia’s Francisca Margaret Msisha explores different cultures and traditions within performing arts, using music as a medium to address important issues that affect lives in third world countries.

Ashley Peevor, UK A rural reimagining of those naff and presumably defunct living statues that knocked about Lister Gate for yonks, Peevor’s piece has him garbed head to toe in garden matter as a human topiary. Now this might still sound like little more than a novelty knock-off, but the presentation as Peevor describes it is of controlled engagement and mythological symbolism, adapting to the environment around him. The result is a highly skilled performance artist channelling the spirit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the organic portraiture of Arcimboldo.

No bodypopping or making-a-phone-call gags.

Lakeside and Nottingham Castle

Tzion Avraham Hazan, Israel

Untitled

Farniyaz Zaker, Iran Graduating from university in Tehran in 2005, Zaker has gone on to study at several universities in Iran and the UK, and is on course for a doctorate at Oxfor. Since 2002 she’s put on over two dozen exhibitions and garnered awards both here and at home. In this wallpaper-based piece, she aims her sights at the thorny matter of the Muslim veil. Far from worthy dry talk, however, Farniyaz uses pop art printing that is not only a visual delight, but fluently forces the viewer to consider how the veil compartmentalises the personality and vivre of the individual. A bit clever-clever as well; she deploys a wellworn Warhol motif to make a point far more incisive than he could with a entire supermarket of canned soup.

Bonington Building, Nottingham Trent, NG1 4BU

While nosiness and moral piety seems to be the name of the game among our blessed political landlords, at least we can give them the boot if they start getting a bit too snotty with us. For someone like Tzion, however, it’s never been that simple. For an artist growing up in Israel, art for him has been about finding a personally liberating release from the iron boot of autocracy. Creativity, for him and many others, is a journey that takes him beyond his country’s history and landscape, so what better way to explore this world than on a guided tour? This in-depth video project escorts the audience along the barriers of an omnipotent military complex in Tel Aviv. Embarrassing its hostility with a self-penned love song to the facility, Tzion makes the government’s barbed omnipotence seem, well, a bit sucky.

New Art Exchange, Gregory Boulevard, NG7 6BE

South and Central America are properly repped with a melange of styles and genres. José Miguel Ando Alvarez is a classical guitarist from Bolivia who has won three of the country’s most important guitar competitions, and will be presenting his work From Dominguez to Prodencio as a solo guitar piece.

Because from Chile is a space for audio-visual improvisation inspired by the lyrics and structure of The Beatles’ song Because. Separated into four sections related to the four classical elements from antiquity, the piece aims to explore the link between popular music and electro-acoustic improvisation - new sounds generated by stochastic rhythms, soundscapes, textures. José Guillermo Puello explores the cultural heritage of the carnival rhythms of the Dominican Republic with three separate pieces at WEYA, while Jose has been involved in hip-hop culture in Panama since 2003, as a graphic designer and visual artist.

Possibly the most intriguing musical acts come from the Middle East: Taht Ahl El-Hawa descend from Beirut and are accomplished in the interpretation of the musical traditions of the ‘Levant’ - they’ll be performing their work Classical and Traditional Arabic Renaissance. Toot Ard are a mountain reggae band from the mountainside village of Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights, Palestine.

They sing in Arabic, and weave classical Arabic motifs into funky African inspired reggae and ska grooves.

There’ll be British representation as well. Ex-Easter Island Head, a Liverpudlian musical collective whose debut record Mallet Guitars One was released by Nottingham-based Low Point records, will perform newly-commissioned works at WEYA in Music for Moai Hava, which unfolds over sixteen minutes and incorporates a hugely varied number of sound sources. And the hometown input will be provided by Late of the Pier’s Fahey and Sam Potter, who bring their Blackout event to Nottingham Contemporary, which encourages audiences to shut off the lights and open up their tabs.

World Event Young Artists, across Nottingham, Friday 7 - Sunday 16 September worldeventyoungartists.com leftlion.co.uk/issue48

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music event listings...

EXHIBITIONS Tuesday 01/08 Politics and Olympics: Ideals and Realities Nottingham Central Library Runs until: 08/09 From May day to the close of the London Paralympic Games in September 2012, Free Word is hosting Politics and Olympics: Ideas and Realities, an exhibition that offers alternative perspectives on the Games, exploring how political and commercial pressures have buffeted the ideals and values of the Olympic movement.

Runners and Riders Harley Gallery 10am - 5pm Runs until: 01/02 Telling how the CavendishBentinck family at Welbeck developed horse racing to become the sport we know today, accompanied by works from leading equestrian painters.

Kanaval New Art Exchange Free, Various times Runs until: 11/08 The photographs in this exhibition document the pre-Lenten Mardi Gras festivities in Jacmel, a coastal town in Southern Haiti.

Leah’s photographs register Haiti’s juncture between its history, its cosmology and the present. Gordon’s images document troupes of ‘performers’ acting out mythological and political tales in a whorish theatre of the absurd that course the streets unshackled by traditional parade.

Susan O’Byrne - Menagerie Harley Gallery Free, 10am - 4:30pm Runs until: 12/08 Ceramic creatures made from delicate paper clay, built up layer by layer to create whimsical, loveable sculptures.

Tuesday 01/08 Lois Walpole - Urban Baskets: Tradition Recycled Harley Gallery Free, 10am - 4:30pm Runs until: 12/08 Girls: The Female Gaze Djanogly Art Gallery Runs until: 19/08 Confrontational portraits of children reflecting her interest in female identity and the archiving of memory.

Kashif Nadim Chaudry: Memes Djanogly Art Gallery Runs until: 27/08 Memes Lakeside Arts Centre Free, Various times Runs until: 27/08 Mela Fest 2012 New Art Exchange Runs until: 05/08 Francis Upritchard Nottingham Contemporary Free, Various times Runs until: 30/09 Psychedelically coloured human figures on islands of ornate furniture. There is a festival feeling to their gatherings, emphasised by Upritchard’s acid-bright colours, hand-woven blankets and tie-dyed silks.

Alfred Kubin Nottingham Contemporary Free, Various times Runs until: 30/09 Haunting drawings of death, trauma and fantastical creatures inhabiting imaginary worlds.

Culture Cloud New Art Exchange Runs until: 25/08 Sonya Viney: Fragile Djanogly Art Gallery Runs until: 27/08

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

MEADOW PAIN Stage version of classic Notts County memoir clatters into the Playhouse

Out of all the football biographies written by former local players over the years, one stands out like a rusting floodlight; Steak...Diana Ross, the diary of journeyman Magpie David McVay. Maybe because it depicts (with unflinching honesty) the life of the average footballer in pre-Premiership times. Maybe because it documents a club that was on the verge of one of its rare upswings, and places like the pre rat-run Meadows. Mainly because it’s the only book we’ve ever come across where professional footballers have to work part-time selling eggs door-to-door and indulge in horrific sexual banter with Nanas.

Finally - with the assistance of local screenwriting overlord William Ivory - the book has been turned into Diary of a Football Nobody, and - if it’s anything like the book - this is one show that’s guaranteed to have (footballer’s) legs.

It’s also being worked into the Pies’ 150th anniversary celebrations, with a gala performance of the show that also includes a special introduction to the play, drink and snap, and the opportunity to meet some of the stars of the mid 70s teams and the actors who play them, as well as Mr Ivory and Mr McVay. The Playhouse have always known the value of a good local sports play, what with Stephen Lowe’s Old Big ‘Ead..

The Spirit Of The Man and Michael Pinchbeck’s The Ashes; with its utterly grim, touching, vivid and outright hilarious take on a sport that has changed for the worse and is never going to be as in touch with the community as it once was, this could be the best one yet.

Diary of a Football Nobody, Nottingham Playhouse, Friday 5 - Saturday 20 October, tickets £7.50 - £27.00. Gala performance 11 October, tickets £35 nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk

Thursday 02/08

Wednesday 15/08

Monday 06/08

Blackdrop New Art Exchange Olympic Slam competition. If you wish to take part in the Slam competition, arrive before 8pm.

Mary Byrne ‘Hidden’ Nottingham Society Of Artists 10am - 4:30pm Runs until: 20/08

Retina Dance Company’s Summer School NCN Clarendon Campus £80, 10am - 4pm Runs until: 10/08

Wednesday 08/08 International Open Show 2012 Surface Gallery Runs until: 25/08

Wednesday 15/08 Mix and Mag Nottingham Contemporary 6pm - 8pm Runs until: 12/09 An introduction to the art of old skool self-publication. A creative writing course with a difference, led by our Associate Artist Chris Lewis-Jones.

CHILL WELL

Get stranded at the drive-in with Bartons If you’ve been kicking round Nottingham for any time you will have placed your derriere on a Trent Barton bus to get to an exciting destination – or work – or at least seen one as you potter about your business. Originally Bartons Transport, before they sold up and merged with Trent Buses, they were Europe’s largest independent bus company.

But why are we giving you a potted history of independent local transport kings? Because the founder’s greatgrandson has turned the old Chilwell depot, originally built in 1913, into Nottingham’s newest venue, Bartons, and he’s not being mingy with his events. And why would he when he’s got 35,000 square feet of space to play with?

‘Diverse’ doesn’t even cover what’s going off down Bartons; keep your peepers peeled for comedy, music, heritage and arts events, and even markets. But most of all, especially if you’re a cinephile, get your diaries out and poise your pen because they are bringing a drive-in cinema to Nottingham for the very first time. Yes, a real-life drive-in cinema. It’ll be like Nottingham has turned into Rydell or Milwaukee, and leather biker jackets will be in fashion once again.

Films will be projected from a heritage Bartons recovery vehicle onto a ten-metre-wide screen whilst the sound will be sent directly to your car radio. There will also be a bar with food and drinks so you can proper hunker down and enjoy yourself. The scheduled films take in some absolute car classics with Bullitt, Senna, Vanishing Point and American Graffiti. Ticket prices range from £6 per person to £17.50 for a car; a downright bargain if you’ve got a seven-seater.

Set in the vast area behind the depot, you can drive up and watch in your car or, if you don’t have a car, sit in the open air. Plus, for one of the nights you can hire a classic car to kick back and get retro in. All we need now is for the weather to hang in there for four short nights.

Not The Cannes Film Festival, Bartons, Holly Lane, Beeston, NG9 4AB. Thursday 13 – Sunday 16 September, £6 £17.50. bartonsplc.co.uk

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Wednesday 22/08 Annexinema St. Christopher’s Hall, Sneinton Free, 8pm An evening of short films responding to themes raised in the Francis Upritchard exhibition.

Ptolemy Mann: The Architecture of Cloth, Colour and Space Harley Gallery Free, 10am - 5pm Runs until: 18/10 Bringing together the broad and unusual range of Ptolemy’s work.

Experimenting with colour to make vivid, luxurious textiles, used by designers and makers, as well as stand alone wall art, Ptolemy has also used these skills to work with architects - using the built environment as a new canvas for her vibrant palette.

Murder In The Small Hours Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 11/08

Monday 13/08 Chicago Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 18/08 Frankenstein Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 18/08

Monday 20/08 The Final Twist Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 25/08

Friday 07/09

Tuesday 21/08

World Event Young Artists Various Locations Various times Runs until: 15/09 In September 2012 World Event for Young Artists (WEYA) will bring a staggering 1,000 young artists (18 – 30 years) from 120 nations to Nottingham. Over a period of 10 days, these artists will bring the city to life with creative activity across all art forms including visual arts, music and gastronomy.

These artists will have the chance to showcase their practice, exchange ideas and build future collaborations.

Starlight Express Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 25/08

THEATRE

Friday 31/08

Saturday 04/08 The Gramaphones - End to End Lakeside Arts Centre

Tuesday 28/08 Starlight Express Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 02/09 Shock!

Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 01/09

The Importance of Being Earnest Nottingham Playhouse Runs until: 22/09

music and theatre event listings...

Saturday 08/09

Every Sunday

Layers of Skin Royal Centre Various times

Pub Quiz Malt Cross £2 / team, 6 max., 8pm - 12am

Monday 10/09 Cabaret Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 15/09

Friday 03/08 Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Monday 17/09

Saturday 04/08

Lady Bracknell’s Confinement Nottingham Playhouse Various, Various times Runs until: 22/09

Saturday night comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Friday 28/09

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Decadance Nottingham Playhouse 7:45pm

Wednesday 08/08

Bones Nottingham Playhouse 7:45pm Runs until: 29/09

COMEDY

Every Wednesday The LeftLion Pub Quiz Golden Fleece £2 per team, 8pm - 12am Get your arse over to the Golden Fleece on Mansfield Road and win yoursen a gallon of beer, you brainy get. Loads of triv, freeflowing ale, good people and proper tunes.

Frankie Boyle Royal Centre Various times Runs until: 09/08

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

LACE FOR YOUR FACE

Excessive amounts of Literal stimulation coming at you

If anybody in Notts moans that there’s nowt to do then please roll up this paper and clonk them around the chops now. Here’s why. The Nottingham Writers’ Studio will be launching their inaugural Festival of Words in February 2013, the first major literature festival in the city since 1970. To give us a little teaser of what we can expect there will be a specially themed Word of Mouth on Wednesday 12 September at Antenna called Love, Lace & Revolution.

Why so early? Well, partly to tie in with the Lace Season, which will see various events and exhibitions across the city celebrating the fact that once upon a time we were pretty nifty with a needle. Secondly, because the studio has been selected as one of the 1,000 artists from 100 countries to strut their stuff as part of the WEYA arts shenanigans.

And thirdly, when you’ve got a studio that includes the likes of Jon McGregor, Niki Monaghan, Nick Wood, Paula Rawsthorne and the like, why wouldn’t you want to flaunt your talent as soon as poss? So we’ll say that once more.

1,000 artists, a whole festival celebrating Lace, and a mint writing studio that puts on events for free.

When it comes to the Olympics, Lord Biro is not lovin’ it. He seems to have a problem with the fact that it’s sponsored by McDonalds despite it being a well-known fact that all athletes love a burger, fries and McFlurry to help them hurry down the track. With eleven billion being spent on the Olympics and a whopping 533 million on security alone (that’s 243,378,995 Happy Meals in case you were wondering) our favourite grumpy satirist is certainly spoilt for choice when it comes to venting spleen although we reckon he’s just jealous because he hasn’t got a missile launcher on his roof. His latest exhibition Teddy Bears Picnic Banned From Olympics is the usual mix of poetry, art, etc , stuck on the window of an empty shop in West End Arcade from 27 July to 16 August which is being shown alongside his White Elephant art installation. Lord Biro is the leader of the Bus-Pass Elvis Party who most recently stood in the Feltham By-election, London, December 2011 and campaigned against fast food corporations sponsoring sports events. In 2005 he campaigned against junk food in the General Election (Erewash) on behalf of the Church of the Militant Elvis. Who needs Jamie Oliver when you can have the King?

Teddy Bears Picnic Banned From Olympics, Friday 27 July – Thursday 16 August, West End Arcade shop fronts. Free mclympics.wordpress.com The Nottingham Festival of Words Launch (a Word of Mouth special), Antenna, Beck St, NG1 1EQ, Wednesday 12 September, 7.30pm, free nottinghamwritersstudio.co.uk

Saturday 11/08

Saturday 18/08

Saturday 25/08

Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs

Friday 10/08

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Friday 17/08

Friday 24/08

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Thursday 09/08 Comedy Night Bartons £5 / £7, 7:30pm - 11:30pm Brian Damage, Ben Schofield, Ben Lawes with compere Spiky Mike.

Friday 31/08 Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs

JOHN STEINBECK’S

OF MICE

AND MEN 2-17 NOVEMBER

A deeply moving story of two outsiders in search of the American Dream, by one of America’s greatest playwrights.

Autumn Season sponsored by

BOX OFFICE 0115 941 9419 NOTTINGHAMPLAYHOUSE.CO.UK leftlion.co.uk/issue48 leftlion.co.uk/issue48 35 leftlion.co.uk/issue48

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theatre and art listings...

Friday 31/08

Friday 14/09

Glee Club £3 - £6, 8:30pm - 10:30pm

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Saturday 01/09 Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Saturday 15/09 Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs

Sunday 02/09

Thursday 20/09

Pub Quiz Malt Cross £2 / team, 6 max., 8pm - 12am

Comedy Club Bartons £7.00/ £5 in advance, 7:30pm Joe Lycett, Andy White, Anthony King with compere Spiky Mike.

I Love Nottingham Royal Centre

Monday 03/09 Michael McIntyre Nottingham Arena Runs until: 08/09

Friday 07/09 Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Saturday 08/09 Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Friday 21/09

for more: leftlion.co.uk/listings

DEAL WITH IT

Violent death and failed idealism at Tempreh this summer.

Nottingham’s favourite concrete bunker has notched up yet another UK ‘first’ by exhibiting Francis Upritchard collection, A Hand of Cards. Upritchard’s recent works feature human figures on elaborate bases that come in acid-bright colours or clothed in woven textiles. This exhibition includes twenty new works, nine of which are ‘soldier’ figures which taps nicely into the medieval myths of the area – the gallery itself, remember, is the site of both a Saxon fort and the medieval town hall. It wasn’t always just about Delilah and Jamie.

There are also eleven melancholy hippies, or “holy fools”, that appear to be marooned in an alternative universe and represent the failure of the Woodstock generation to find an alternative means of living and clearly haven’t heard about the Sumac Centre in Forest Fields. One massive blue figure looks like an extra that didn’t quite Francis Upritchard, Jockey, 2012. Image courtesy of Kate make it onto Avatar, and instead sits, with legs akimbo, MacGarry, London as if wondering when his time will come (don’t worry mate, they’re doing a sequel). The collection also sees collaborations with her husband, the renowned furniture designer Martino Gamper (we reckon, to save on cash) as well as contemporary writers such as Ali Smith who will be doing a talk on Tuesday 4 September. Yep, there’s a little bit for everyone in this collection.

Saturday 22/09

Alfred Kubin began scribbling around the 1900s and as you would expect from that period, his work is pretty disturbing. His drawings deal with violent death and psychic trauma and were influenced by the nihilistic ideas of Nietzsche and Mr Happy Pants himself, Schopenhauer. So if the weather and our rammel performance in the Euros wasn’t enough to get you down, this certainly will. Kubin had a pretty messed-up adolescence after his mam popped her clogs and then a pregnant woman tried it on with him. But it didn’t stop there. At nineteen there was a failed suicide attempt followed by a complete nervous breakdown at twenty. To ordinary folk out there, this would be the perfect excuse to get kaylide and then confess all on Trisha. But Kubin opted for a different route. He jumped on a train to Munich, studied art and then began knocking out these amazing drawings. Misery and misfortune to an artist are like bacon, eggs and toms to a hungry builder. He wolfed down these experiences and began to create works that would go on to influence the dystopian world of Kafka’s The Castle as well as anticipating the dreamworlds of both the surrealists and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. So next time things aren’t going your way, don’t lamp the nearest youth you see. Get out a pen and start drawing.

Funhouse Comedy Club Bunkers Hill Inn £5, 7:30pm

Francis Upritchard A Hand of Cards and Alfred Kubin The Other Side, Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, NG1 2GB, Saturday 21 July - Sunday 30 September 2012, free. nottinghamcontemporary.org

MissImp in Action: Live Improvised Comedy Glee Club £3 - £6, 8:30pm - 10:30pm Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

MUSICAL TRUTH

Gaz Peacham talks about the Maze, it’s current financial situation, and how the future of the Nottingham music scene is in the hands (and wallets) of people like you...

“Since the economic crisis in 2006 that has seen the country dive into what seems like a permanent state of recession, some of the country’s most famous music venues have closed. Places like The Cavern in Liverpool, The Marquee in London, King Tut’s in Glasgow and The Boardwalk in Manchester have disappeared. Bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, Oasis, The Happy Mondays and Arctic Monkeys played some of their first and early shows at these venues, yet now they are just lingering memories.

With the rise in interest in Nottingham’s music scene and if - as expected - acts like Jake Bugg, Dog is Dead and Natalie Duncan get chart success in the coming months, Nottingham will become the new focus of the UK music scene. But what happens if the small venues that gave these and other up-and-coming Nottingham acts their first breaks succumb to the financial fall-out?

We’ve already seen the once-famous Junktion 7 and Central kick the bucket, but things could get worse. Recently The Maze - the venue I manage - suffered a major financial setback, after losing big money at their festival in Burton on Trent, meaning that now we’re struggling to get by. Rumours have also been circling for months that other venues in town are fighting for their lives. Which leads me to ask; how can a scene that is meant to be booming have so many small venues struggling?

There’s many reasons, as far as I can see. One is that people still come to the gigs at weekends, but they don’t drink as much as they did, meaning we don’t make the revenue we need. Yes, busy rooms with good vibes is great, but places like us have huge overheads and we need to sell booze to cover these. Bottom line; we can’t compete with shop prices, and if everyone gets pre-loaded at home, venues like ours will close sooner or later - and as far as I know, you can’t see bands or check DJs at Tesco.

The ironic thing is that this is happening at a time when the seeds of our scene that were nurtured by local venues like ours are finally bursting into flower. After recent radio play, TV appearances on Jools Holland and his tour selling fast, Jake Bugg is expected to become a household name; he played many of his first gigs at the Maze.

I remember saying he’d be a star when I first saw him. It’s a 24-hour job running a venue and you have to be passionate, take risks and work to a tight budget - but when you see a band or artist who you put on in their early career on TV or hear them on the radio, it makes it very special. Obviously the chances of him playing a venue as small as ours again is highly unlikely, but that’s the paradox of being a successful small venue.

When a city gets recognised for music many people on the outside are only aware of the bigger venues, but there’s actually an ecosystem of venues that, in a perverse way, work together. It would be great if a by-product of Nottingham acts breaking through was more people coming out to nights here to see the next wave of local bands and artists, but if the small venues close I fear the boom won’t last long. Nottingham is in good shape to be the next hotbed of musical talent in the UK but this is not by mistake or luck; people at small venues, local promoters, label operators, journalists and - obviously - a lot of musicians have been working towards this for a long time. If you live round here and you like your music, I hope you’re enjoying every minute of what’s happening on the local scene at the moment - but if you don’t want it to fade away, or you want to see it get even better, please support those smaller venues that make such a difference; you can find full listings for them in Leftlion...” themazerocks.com

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leftlion.co.uk/issue48

Saturday 22/09

Thursday 27/09

Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Roisin Conaty and Paul McCaffrey Nottingham Playhouse 7:45pm

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Friday 28/09

Alan Davies Royal Centre

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am

Sunday 23/09

Saturday 29/09

Funhouse Comedy Club Bunkers Hill Inn £5 / £7, 1:45pm Silky, James Dowdeswell, James Acaster, Nik Coppin, Rob Rouse and Christian Reilly.

Saturday Night Comedy Just The Tonic £7 - £13, 7pm - 1am

Marcus Brigstock Nottingham Playhouse £15, 7:30pm

Monday 24/09

Stand Up Comedy Jongleurs 7pm - 1am Sandi Toksvig Nottingham Playhouse 7:30pm

Pub Poetry - Open Mic Comic Canalhouse Free, 8pm

Monday 24/09 Al Murray Nottingham Playhouse £25, 7:30pm

Tuesday 25/09 Should I stay or Should I go?

Maze £4 / £5, 8pm - 12am

For even more conclusive and detailed listings: leftlion.co.uk/listings Get your event in this magazine and on our website: leftlion.co.uk/add

THE CANS FESTIVAL Notts Property: explaining the theory of Graffiti this August words: Alison Emm The explosion of street artists in the eighties. The In Living Colour crew in the nineties.

Popx and his masterpiece Stop Wars. Oxygen Thieves, Switch Studios and Dilk continuing to shake things up this century, Nottingham has a graffiti heritage that has more than held its own. And this August, it’s having a coming-out party.

“Notts Property is about bringing people together.

We’ve got a rich graffiti history here; we want to bring that back.” Says Boaster, one of the organisers of a new monthlong celebration of spray upon street. “Graffiti isn’t just about bombing and ruining public and private property - there’s a lot more to it than that.

That’s not what we do and it’s not what a lot of people do.”

repainting the walls of Russell’s Youth Centre in Sneinton and the beer garden wall of The Lion at Basford.

Kicking off in early August with an outdoor event at the Hopkinson Vintage Centre where local, national and international graffiti artists will be painting the walls of the Hopkinson building, Notts Property will have a serious open-house feel to it, with food, music, a kids’ chalk wall and a serious mission to explain an art form that is still misunderstood on many levels. Over the rest of the month, over a hundred artists will be inhaling fumes for our benefit across eight venues. So why now?

“It’s nice to get everyone together painting, from Nottingham and from out of town as well” says Boaster. “Yeah, we’ve possibly picked the worst summer ever to do stuff outside, but most of us go out painting in the rain most weekends so it won’t be much stress for us.”

Highlights include James Huyton’s typography screen-print exhibition at Antenna on Friday 10, live drawing around Hockley on Saturday 11, and on the Forest at Nottingham Carnival on Saturday 18. Furthermore two graffiti jams are going off out of town in a hip-hop/Changing Rooms mash-up,

To be honest, the organisers of Notts Property – which consists of pretty much everyone local who knows the difference between Montana and Montana Gold – are piling on the events as we go to press, so make sure you link up them online. And if you or your business own a wall that looks a bit rank, and you like the idea of a spontaneous urban art happening taking place on your doorstep, they’d definitely like to hear from you.

As the man Boaster says “Put your judgement to one side, come down, have a look and see what you think after you’ve seen what we do. It’s an art and it’s a live performance. You never capture the true feel of a piece until you’ve been in front of it and seen the size of it with all the details that are involved – that’s where the impact is.”

Notts Property, across Nottingham, from 4 August facebook.com/property.notts

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

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

Cheshire and The Cat

Frazer Lowrie

Ryan Thomas

A jazz-rap fusion who offer up a fresh-out-the-smoothie-maker sound that is cooler than The Fonz in a fridge, CATC were formerly a duo consisting of rapper Jack Hickman and soulful Malaysian maestro Omar Farouk, but they now appear to have adopted a third member who goes by the name of El Sparrow.

Señor Sparrow brings a jazz flute to the equation - and as there aren’t enough jazz flutes around these days, his input takes their sound to a whole new level of slickness. This outfit carry an assured swagger about them, none more so than in the scatpeppered delight that is Off The Ground, “We are the new faces in this town, we’ll make our mark with our sound.” A student band that should be back on our circuit around September time but if you can’t wait that long, check out our Future Session. facebook.com/cheshireandcat

Cambridge-boy-turned-Nottingham-lad, this lovable scruffbag only hit our scene late last year, but immediately started whoring himself out on the gig circuit. He can be found in pretty much most music venues on pretty much most nights, fuelling the conspiracy theory that he has in fact cloned himself in order to please more folks with his roguish tunes. His gravelly tones, down to earth demeanour and poetic song writing earned him a Future Session not once but twice. Debut EP Things Have Changed is an essential addition to any CD collection and can be purloined from the man himself for either a pint or a few rollies. If you wanna check him out live, he’ll be playing Market Square on 28 July and the Acoustic Rooms on 17 August. Frazer is not only a prolific songwriter but also a prolific tweeter; send him a sweet tweet @FrazerLowrie. frazerlowrie.com

After about ten seconds of listening to Don’t Strike Me Down we knew we had to make room on the podcast for this guy.

Outrageously cool old-man blues from a nineteen year-old-lad; imagine the bastard love child of Bob Dylan and Muddy Waters and you aren’t far off, but Ryan Thomas still manages to sound unique in his own right. Bluesier than a Smurf with pneumonia, his masterpiece Hangover Blues is the perfect hangover cure so good in fact that we recommend you set it as an alarm after a heavy night and you will wake up feeling awesome; “Well I went out last night, til the sky turned blue, well I woke up this morning singing the hangover blues.” Serving suggestion: grab a harmonica, don some shades and roll a cigarette. reverbnation.com/ryanthomas92

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How did you come up with the Blackout concept?

Sam: When we were touring with Late Of The Pier. We really wanted an arena to play to people without them knowing who we were, where you have the excitement of when you are starting out; playing just for the music without the audience having any preconceptions about you.

Have people had any strange experiences?

Sam: One lady said that her fillings were rattling. Then she went on to say that she started reliving childhood memories and it put her mind into a place that it hadn’t been for a very long time.

Because there was a lack of stimulus around her she was able to focus on these things more.

Andrew: When you are touring with a band, you are always playing the same songs and same ideas. From the audience point of view there is always an expectation attached to a new artist.

They have preconceptions of what they expect from the artist and the music, which is very wrong if you view music as art.

Andrew: I think that anyone who goes out to an event is seeking some form of escape, whether that is out of their minds or back into themselves. Blackout events make it more interesting and exciting to go back into yourself. I wouldn’t recommend getting drunk or taking any drugs because it will most likely put you in a very strange place. I think the only thing that people can expect from it is the unexpected, which is horribly vague.

Sam: Being a musician these days is not just about the sounds that you make. You see the band, you see the video, you see the artwork, and inside your head you have a fully formed universe that is that band. The point of Blackout is that it is only the sound. We’re letting people create their own world around it, rather than enforcing one on them.

Andrew: When you are a major label band you have to provide people with what they want, and sometimes it can be very damaging to the stuff that you have been working on for so long.

If no-one knows you or expects anything, then that gives you the opportunity to blow peoples’ minds.

So what is it, exactly?

Sam: The idea of a band playing live in the pitch black was what I initially thought it was going to be, but the stuff that we’ve been doing at Broadway has involved listening sessions.

We still don’t know what the form is; we’re still experimenting with it and trying new things. The luxury of listening parties are they’re a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to put on. When people are more relaxed, it’s easier to play around with the conceptual side of it and put people into a particular state of mind. We make a point at the listening sessions to have a talk at the start; for instance, we’ve had a neuroscientist talking about the signals to the brain.

Andrew: It’s a very private and personal experience but in a social environment, which makes it even stranger. It’s down to the individual what they take from it. It’s interesting that people will go to the same show, but come away from it feeling very different and having experienced something different from one another.

Presumably, the live shows are even more random?

Sam: The difference is considerable and is something that is driven by the bands who are playing. People act like they would in a normal gig environment, but they dance a bit strangely, more elbows and head shaking. With the more ‘sonic’ artists, people are much more still, and when they came out they were talking about how they were picturing things in their minds. One band we had at the Barbican in London was playing regimented, very repetitive Krauty type stuff which left people exhausted, but in a very fulfilling way. I was with my girlfriend and she saw a lady in period dress stood behind me. I guess in a way people did get into a trance with it.

What’s your music policy?

Andrew: It’s just weird, wonderful and unreleased music. We also want to have guest mixes where artists will collate a mix that they want to play to people in that environment Have you managed to get funding to pay for all of this?

Andrew: That is what we are in the process of. The live shows we can do on our own, but when it comes to streaming and playing with new technology then it involves silly money. We’ve have a lot of support from some of the best people in Nottingham such as Broadway, yourselves, Nottingham Contemporary, and the Arts Council.

Sam: We are Nottingham people and we want to make sure that it’s clear that this project comes from Nottingham. One of the things that we regret with Late of the Pier is that we didn’t really champion the place enough, because Nottingham didn’t really

like us at first. This is the place that we were born and it’s got great people. We want Blackout to be a worldwide thing but we want to bring Nottingham people into it.

You’ve got a lot on over the next few months, we notice...

Sam: We’ll be taking part in the World Event Young Artists festival at Nottingham Contemporary in September. We’ve chosen three of our favourite submissions and are giving them the Blackout treatment. One of the pieces will be an all-day Blackout binaural event; the other two will be more conventional gigs. Then we’ll be having our public launch event in October at Contemporary involving live music.

Andrew: We’re going to have big artists whom you would never expect to play in a small room. It’s people who are in a similar position to that which LOTP were in, and giving them the platform to do something a bit different. In October we will announce the live shows and have been talking to people in Paris, Berlin, Tokyo - a lot of people internationally - to take the concept further. We’re also looking into streaming the shows for an online audience.

Are Late Of The Pier a thing of the past, or is this a break?

Andrew: We didn’t split, we’re just very much on hiatus.

Sam: We have no pressure at the moment, which is a godsend.

The idea of Blackout came out of feeling the pressure of being in a band, and finding the whole treadmill of it draining. We just never got the chance to push ourselves as much as we would have liked. I guess that’s the danger of being on a major record label - you get a timetable and constantly have to be doing something, so you have no time to cultivate the ideas that you have. We had a million ideas and a lot of them got lost, but now we’re in a position to cultivate them.

Blackout is part of the World Event Young Artists at various venues around Nottingham from 7-16 September 2012. For more information visit worldeventyoungartists.com

interview: Paul Klotschkow pic: Dom Henry

NOTHING TO SEE HERE The Blackout series of gigs and listening parties: an exercise in sensory deprivation, a back-to-basics move for experimental music, or a good way for two members of Late Of The Pier to save on their leccy bills? “Put that light out!”, bellow founders Sam Potter and Andrew Faley... leftlion.co.uk/issue48

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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 8mm Orchestra

The Afterdark Movement ADM EP (Self-released)

Captain Dangerous

Orbit EP (Super Music Collider) Another new EP with the band on top form. Track one, Kevin Spacey’s Box Of Mystery, is a tune that drifts towards the space rock/electronic sensibilities of Pink Floyd, whilst paradoxically staying rooted to their post-rock cornerstone. Starting with warm, ambient synths, the song builds consistently towards a satisfying and skyscraper-sized climax. Pale Blue Dot, perhaps a reference towards Voyager 1 leaving the solar system, would make an excellent soundtrack to that craft’s eternal wanderings throughout time and space.

After a brief intro, the track settles into a groove with massive drums and arpeggios galore that are eventually overwhelmed by fuzz, feedback and the sweet tinkering of a glockenspiel.

Super Gigantic Guardian Elephants trudges along slowly and majestically, punctuated by occasional shifts in dynamics, until an allegro theme emerges from the dying delay and ends the EP in a wonderful wave of rhythm and guitar noise.

Antony Whitton 8mmorchestra.bandcamp.com

A distinct lyrical progression runs through this six-track debut from our current Future Sound of Nottingham champions. Even on ADM, its cheery opening signature tune, voices in the fade-out mutter of “not having a future, not having any kind of possibility”. This sense of impending doom colours the seemingly chirpy Since I’ve Been Here, which references the sunny, playful optimism of nineties hip-hop as MC Bru-C recalls the lost innocence of his childhood. Things take a bleaker turn on Better Days, which sees the rapper trapped in a struggling single-parent household (“I can’t remember the last time I was happy”), paving the way for a full-scale eruption of pain on the metal-tinged Psycho:Sik. Street Spirit adds a nervy, desperate rap to the Radiohead classic, and on Made In Britain, with its bitter denunciation of political incompetence and greed, the rage is finally turned outwards. Mike Atkinson facebook.com/theafterdarkmovement

Proof positive that you can feature on the soundtrack to Grey’s Anatomy without sounding bloodlessly insipid. Captain Dangerous are more Hefner than Snow Patrol, and all the better - and quirkier - for it. There’s a touch of Los Campesinos! here too, with songs like Everything Beautiful Reminds me of You and The Terrorist surging joyously and ever-so slightly chaotically out of the speakers. Sounding much bigger than the five members the band boasts with many songs managing to pull off the trick of rollicking along nicely whilst also retaining a core of frailty and intimacy, perfectly displayed in Boozehounds. It’s a fine album, standout tracks are the soaring Forgive Us We’re British and Heather and Tommy, a touching, almost entirely straight-faced elegy to the failed relationship between Heather Locklear and Tommy Lee. Big arrangements by a band clearly on the up.

Tim Sorrell captaindangerous.com

Natalie Duncan

Felix

Oh Holy Molar LP (Kranky Records)

Junkie Kut

Devil In Me LP (Verve Records)

The Grammy-winning producer, the distinguished musicians, the top-flight recording studio, the major label push… faced with such an abundance of resources, a lesser artist could have been drowned by the sheer weight of expectation. Thankfully, Natalie Duncan has risen to the challenge from the off, beginning unaccompanied and letting rip with one of her most unflinching lyrics: “Sometimes I feel you looking for the devil in me, like I’m a dying dog and I’m begging for your bones.” She remains in full command throughout, steering us through thirteen tracks that cast her as tormented soul (Sky Is Falling), cool observer (Pick Me Up Bar), or concerned friend (Flower), offsetting her searing, soulful vocals with elegant, stately keyboards. Rather than letting herself be moulded into the “new Adele” – whatever the opening bars of Old Rock might suggest – she asserts her own personality, whose complexity is reflected in the densely worked songcraft and the surprisingly varied shifts in mood.

Mike Atkinson natalieduncan.com

The songwriting vehicle for Nottingham Trent graduate, photographer and classically trained musician Lucinda Chua, Felix return with their second album on a Chicago-based label. Recorded last summer at Paper Stone Studios - a converted cinema on Haydn Road - Lucinda is joined by Chris Summerlin (Kogumaza/Grey Hairs) on guitar and Neil Turpin (Bilge Pump/Yann Tierson). Together the trio have concocted a delicate, yet grand-sounding album that sits somewhere between the nervy, anxious delivery of Cat Power and the earthy pop of Feist. Chua’s piano is as worldweary and as heavy-hearted as her lyrics, whilst Summerlin and Turpin combine to frame the songs in soft jazzy percussive flourishes and woozy guitar lines that drift in and out of the record with the haunted feel of a spectre that has no particular place to go. A meditative record that prefers to look inward rather than force itself upon the listener. Paul Klotschkow felixtheband.com

It’s not often that a concept album about ‘a fundamentalist ecological terrorist organisation’ creating a weapon that has the ability to destroy all ‘electronic technology and systems of government’ falls in your lap.

T.H.E.Y is the story of Junkie Kut and his attempts at saving the world - a battle that takes place amongst a speaker-destroying barrage of industrial-strength drum breaks, seizure-inducing electronic noises and hard and heavy punk rock. If this is what the end of the world sounds like then bring along your earplugs, as it is very loud indeed. Bringing to mind Atari Teenage Riot in its relentless energy and even The Prodigy at their most in-yer-face, this album isn’t for the faint-hearted. It takes a lot out of the listener; by the end you hope that he does save the world so your hearing can go back to normal.

Paul Klotschkow junkiekut.com

Moscow Youth Cult

Russian Linesman Icelandic Skies LP (Loki Recordings)

Sleaford Mods

Happiness Machines LP (Loaf Recordings)

Thinking, dancing and rocking outside the box, we have Moscow Youth Cult.

Love>Lore is a blockbuster Odyssey of a track. Starting with skittery beats and punctuated by handclaps, it soon ascends into dreamy dancerock heights before morphing into an almighty onslaught of drums and settling back down again. Album highlight Move Truck Bitten Leg is a genre-bending wave of weird, while Break-in Work-out is a mischievous but fierce rush of rave-pop.

If you put the track Above Empty Seas in the hands of anyone else, it could be a radio-friendly gust of summer breeze, but in the hands of MYC it’s delightfully twisted. In short, it’s pop music torn inside out. If you were making a time capsule to showcase the wonder of Notts music today, you needn’t even put MYC in there: they’re already in the future, partying in tomorrow. Andrew Trendell moscowyouthcult.co.uk

This album has been knocking around on my laptop for the past couple of months and it’s only now that I’ve had the chance to give it a proper listen. And oh my, what an album. Inspired by trips to Iceland and written as a love letter to his wife, Russian Lineman has created something special. Opening with a chiming guitar line that could have come from a lost out-take from Disintegration by The Cure, it swiftly transforms into a magical mix of crystalline synths and softly textured loops that feel like a comforting arm being draped around your shoulder. With hints of ambient synthpop and 16-bit electronic flourishes that remind me of playing Sonic 2, this is a record that radiates warmth and soul. I doubt another album will come out of Nottingham this year that is as delicately poised and full of beauty and heart as this one.

Paul Klotschkow soundcloud.com/lokirecordings

Jason Williamson’s fifth album continues in the same manner as previous efforts: vitriolic, yet poetic, diatribes about living in the city. “I get the feeling sometimes/I’d better watch how I speak my mind” he spits on opening track PPO Kissing Behinds. Thankfully, he doesn’t: over the following thirty minutes, bile spills from his mouth at every opportunity, with sparse post-punk basslines and drum loops providing the perfect setting for his no-holds-barred approach. If you think of yourself as a bit of a ‘scenester’, wrap your tabs around Don’t Wanna Disco Or 2; tears were streaming down this reviewer’s face in utter pleasure at how unrelentingly bang-on it is. Once again, he sums up how pointless, and, well, wank everyday life really is. He’ll probably hate me for saying this, but Sleaford Mods is a local treasure. Paul Klotschkow sleafordmods.bandcamp.com

Tribute To Nordberg

We Show Up On Radar Sadness Defeated LP (Hello Thor)

You Slut!

The Day After LP (QRW Recordings)

Tribute to Nordberg began life without a vocalist. They added a singer a few months down the line, but those crucial early days have clearly left their mark on them as a tight, muscular unit. Turn the Other Way opens their debut album with a volley of ferocious riffing before the single Breathless sees them stamp down hard on the accelerator pedal, driving us forwards into the black heart of this band.

They cite influences by the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Audioslave and Alice in Chains, but once the singing starts, the group they bring most readily to my ear is a heavier version of Pearl Jam, with grinding, unforgiving riffs tempered with a keen sense of melody and questing, yearning vocals. It’s a formidable combination. There’s subtlety here too; tracks like No Denial and Long Ride Home might leave you battered but they also leave you wanting more. Tim Sorrell tributetonordberg.co.uk

Reacquainting yourself with the solo project of Swimming’s Andy Wright is like stepping into a Polaroid: a nostalgia-tinged world that is very close to our own, yet not quite the same. Andy’s vocals, hushed and whispery at times, speak volumes and tell a host of stories for you to lose yourself in. Feeling a bit low? Slip into The Anchors In Your Heart and you’ll feel right as rain. Whimsical tales such as I’ll Be A Ghost will take you out of the cold and send you on a trippy fairytale ride that will swell in your mind and let your imagination illustrate the words as they flow. There’s an uplifting feeling to the rich folk layers that punctuate the electronica vibes, making this a calm and charming body of work. A perfect progression from 2010’s A Loaf of Bread… EP - fans of Bright Eyes, The Flaming Lips and Psapp will instantly fall in love with this delicate yet strong album. Alison Emm wsuor.com

A You Slut! album? Hell goddamn yes, and you’ll find absolutely no disappointments here. It’s aggressive, mathy and noisy from the outset and maintains that level of intensity and madness almost completely throughout. It is truly a testament to riffage of monumental size, staccato time signature stabs, discordance and rare wanderings into the more formulaic and melodious territory of post-rock. The songs are fairly short, giving the impression that they are each their own island dedicated to specific musical ideas and complicated compositional structures. In its entirety Medium Bastard is an epic voyage, full of unpredictable passages to maintain a constant level of excitement. Fifzteen stands out particularly as an exceptionally schizophrenic example of the band’s utilisation of dynamics, whilst songs like Magnifiererer demonstrate a jazzy dissonance that hints at Don Cabellero and Battles. There are no highlights, however, the whole album is solid gold. Antony Whitton facebook.com/youslutband

The Empire Never Ended LP (I’m Not From London)

T.H.E.Y LP (Unrepresented Music)

Wank LP (Deadly Beefburger Records)

Medium Bastard LP (Stressed Sumo Records)

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Write Lion

“I have never practised any kind of sport. It has always seemed to me that sport only serves

to enslave the mind. It is the main ‘civilising’ weapon of the western world ethos, a way of enforcing collective discipline which no self-respecting savage like myself could ever take to.

Society was built on ‘competition’, and ‘sport’ is a preliminary to this society. It is a sort of training ground for entering into the war of life. The Olympic torch is a flame of enslavement – run from it as fast as you can, and that in itself will give you plenty of exercise.” Alan Sillitoe

The Consequences of Preserving Outlaws in Arsenic

What You Don’t Know

The Lives of Ghosts

Made in Nottingham: A Writer’s Return

Joy Unconfined! Lord Byron’s Grand Tour Re-Toured

Appearances in the Bentinck Hotel

S.C. Maxfield ebook, £2.57 This is your ordinary boy meets girl story, only one where the boy is an inept outlaw who gets shot and mummified and the girl is a gun-slinging Calamity Jane style single-mother. Inspired by the true (after) life exploits of one Elmer McCurdy, as featured in the excellent BBC Timewatch documentary from several years ago, Consequences is a rollickingly fast-paced comic thriller concerning lonely teenager Johnny and a quest to find his perfectly preserved grandfather, Oklahoma Bill (the outlaw of the title). In part this is a western, in part magical fantasy, but what carries the novel best is the author’s choice to narrate a large chunk of the story through the eyes of the long dead protagonist. Beautiful prose expertly brings together well-defined characters from past and present in an imaginatively told tale of the world’s oddest family reunion.

Andrew Graves amazon.co.uk

Peter Mortimer Five Leaves, £8.99 Considering the author’s previous books have required him to travel 500 miles penniless across Britain, spend six months as a fisherman in the North Sea, travel through mountainous Yemen, spend a winter on Holy Island and two months in a Palestinian refugee camp, you would think that returning to his childhood home of 97 Danethorpe Street in Sherwood after a 48 year exile would be pretty straight forward.

Wrong. The current occupier is far from hospitable and has little interest in indulging the author’s whims. Mortimer is quickly confronted with the realisation that the past is gone and that it is not so much the physical coordinates that determine a life but the act of living itself. The book is written in diary format and slips somewhere between social commentary and memoir. Dave Gorman for the sexagenarians. James Walker fiveleaves.co.uk

David Belbin Tindal Street Press, £12.99 The second outing for ex-lovers Sarah Bone and Nick Cane jumps off from Nottingham’s real-life Dave Francis drug worker/dealer case and dives into a web of secrets about drugs (mostly), sex (quite a lot), politics (national, local and personal), and violence (nonicky). Switching between Blair-babe Bone’s Westminster life, and ex-con Cane’s career as a stoner in a small flat off Canning Circus, it’s more about sense of place and time than suspense and detection. For all that, there’s enough mystery to make it a compelling one-session read. One of the characters reads A Gun For Sale, Graham Greene’s 1936 ‘entertainment’ set in Nottingham, and says “it’s kind of cool, reading about the city all that time ago”. What You Don’t Know isn’t set all that long ago - 1997 - but for those of us who were there, it’s still kind of cool to remember what you used to know.

Greene hated Nottingham but Belbin clearly loves it. Matt Hurst tindalstreet.co.uk

Ian Strathcarron Signal Books, £19.99 (HB) Strathcarron faithfully follows Byron’s footsteps in this superb travelogue of the Mediterranean. On board his yacht ‘Vasco da Gama’ Strathcarron encounters storms (which Byron weathered by wrapping himself in his cloak and lying on the deck), a narcoleptic crewmate, an amiable Athenian journalist, Greek protesters and police, the King of Albania, the glamorous French Cultural Attaché, the eminent President of the Messolonghi Byron Society and numerous archaeologists, hoteliers and locals. When Byron set off on his tour he was 21. He swam the Hellespont, satisfied some of his exotic sexual urges and was sent on a diplomatic mission to meet the tyrant Ali Pasha. When he returned, two years later, he had the manuscript for his poem ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ which made him famous overnight. With its superb photos and witty style, this fascinating book made me want to stowaway on the first boat out of Falmouth. Christy Fearn signalbooks.co.uk

Megan Taylor Weathervane Press, £7.99 Megan Taylor’s third novel tells the story of Liberty Fuller at two pivotal times of her life. At twelve, Libby loses her parents in a car accident. Her distraught pregnant stepmother, Marie, takes her to a remote loch house in search of healing. In her late thirties, a pregnant Libby returns to the loch house to discover the truth behind the veil her mind has draped over the events twenty-five years earlier. This is a book about the ghosts we all have – the events and people who haunt our memories and won’t leave us alone. Taylor’s beautiful dark prose interweaves the two timelines, skilfully revealing Libby’s story and showing how she comes to terms with the ghosts lurking in her childhood. A fascinating exploration of the way events separated by a quarter of a century can resonate with each other, The Lives of Ghosts grips from the first line to the last. Pippa Hennessy weathervanepress.co.uk

Tim Cockburn Salt Publishing, £6.50 Tim Cockburn is a bohemian young rake from Nottingham whose twenty-page debut pamphlet Appearances in the Bentinck Hotel combines beauty with brevity. Last time I saw the author he was sat on the doorstep of the Flying Goose Café in Beeston with a half-empty bottle of red wine in his hand, after giving a brilliant reading, insisting he didn’t care how he got home, he was happy to sleep right there. He may die young in a dramatic fashion, but let’s hope he produces a few more books like this one first. I could expand on his profound voice, his spark of genius, but anyone who can write “I have been in love once or twice but a weir spits out a drowned dog eventually” or “My tenderness has trodden on a three-pin plug” is beyond that, really. Aly Stoneman saltpublishing.com

Katie Half-Price

Nottingham’s orangest book reviewer packs her essential airport books, even though she’s only going to Chapel St Leonards

Even the Dogs

Jon McGregor Bloomsbury, £7.99 Jon McGregor found fame as the cute four-eyed get in the Milky Bar adverts but then his hair started ter goo grey and they sacked ‘im. Unperturbed, Jon Boy set aht on a mission never ter gerra proper job, a skill he has excelled in. But Jon Boy is a right lazy get and so by the time he got ter his third book he cun’t even be arsed ter finish off his sentences or paragraphs. (We shun’t be surprised cos he can’t even be bovvered to spell his name wi’ a ‘h’.) Luckily for Jon, the Dublin literateh love this kind of fancypants writin’ and they’ve just gee’im £81,000 so he can avoid work a bit longer. It’s like lichracha’s version of benefits. His novel is a rip-off of Where the beans on my plate come from, which is one of them do-gooder kiddies books that shows yeh the journey yeh food takes ta gerron yer plate so that yer can feel guilteh while yer eatin’. He just does it abaht smack.

Verdict: Gargle bloomsbury.com

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leftlion.co.uk/issue48

How Much is Enough?

Robert and Edward Skidelsky

Other Press (NY), £20.

Last time I signed on for meh dole it wor like steppin’ inta Mos Eisley. I wor seen by some dezzeh bell-end wi’ one on them stupid fat earrings that mek yer tab hang like a turkey’s giblet. He tolt meh I had ta gerra job. So I hit him. In his fanny tab. Anyways, meh point is I’m sick of folk tellin’ meh worra should be doin’, which brings meh onter this bag of rammel. The authors reckon that capitalism is as shagged-up as Tom Cruise and that instead we should measure success by the ‘good life’. This means yer can drink wine (middle-class special brew) but not WKD, opera instead of Oprah, and that fake tan and bling is vulgar but it’s alright ter flaunt yer privileged education by gooin’ on abaht Aristotle. Sigh.

Well if money in’t important, duck, why yer charging £20 a pop?!

Fancy the good life? Come seagulling wi’ us in Colwick. It’ll cost yer nowt.

Verdict: Spit otherpress.com

The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music

Dylan Jones Bedford Square Books, £25 Now as yer know I luv slebs so yer would think I’d cream meh drawers gerrin’ 838 pages abaht musos, burrit turned owt ta be a bit gash. Why? Cuz the first thing I did was flick ter the index ta see if owt were written abaht Britney Shears. There wor, on page 465. One word! That’s as helpful as geein’ Uri Gellar a plastic spoon. I then looked up Shakin’ Stevens, Jedwood, Simon Cowell and Pete Waterman. Nowt. So meh first problem is this collection is abaht as ‘popular’ as a vegan barbecue. I couldn’t work out why anyone would bovver purrin’ together a collection when we can find out stuff on Wikeh, and then I realised DJ is the editor of GQ and he wanted an excuse ter namedrop all the famous ppl he’d met and spill the goss. A vaniteh project, but definitely worth a goz on the bog – if yer can afford it.

Verdict: Swallow bedfordsquarebooks.com

This issue, we are happy to publish the four winners from the Nottingham Poetry Society Performance Poetry Competition 2012 which was judged by MulletProofPoet. Thanks to Bee Patience (1st), Katy Carrington (2nd), Leo Swarvett (3rd), and Dori Kirchmair (4th). nottinghampoetrysociety.co.uk He Didn’t Want to be a Victim Bee Patience

What did you carry?

Anything – flick knife, lock knife, butterfly knife – How can something so beautiful share its name with something so...

Why? I didn’t want to be a victim. I’ve seen things, lost things.

The whisper of prison missed my ears beneath the shouting streets.

A slap on the wrist – I can handle that then he’ll fall back into concrete embraces, continue to subsist in a vulnerable bubble of kindred pretences choosing violence, over conversation Because they live in another postcode?

Their skin’s a different colour to yours?

Or you can’t pronounce their surname?

I didn’t want to be a victim.

I didn’t want to be anybody’s victim.

We can’t harmonise with a handshake.

Peering from my back pocket, hidden in my jacket the blade boasts protection, saves face in front of connections better to arm yourself with a weapon, denote intimidation than be a victim.

Victim?

I didn’t want to be a victim.

I didn’t want to be anybody’s victim.

We can’t harmonise with a handshake.

And now all I see are these walls eats and sleeps a metre away from his toilet – it disgusts him. The drip drip drip of the sink, syncs with the thud of his heart and the blink of his eye

as he tries to forget the encounter of my shank with their skin puncturing layers of cotton, cells, tissue flesh tearing

at the point of his knife and the life that taints his iron hand that can’t be washed away with peroxide.

illustration: Steve Larder

Erase and Replace

In an English Country Churchyard

The Sun and The Moon

All Christmas week there were beasts in the fire. Mammoth, wolf, north-sea ghosts crowded the grate, a bear facing west, the crouching half-burned manuals.

(You think if something’s not forever it’s not worth having)

Nothing stirs, the graveyard– Beyond the faint breeze, With its rustling of dry leaves.

Tonight I celebrate that the sun and the moon have not come together for the world needs them in separate places and at different times

Katy Carrington

We are clearing the decks.

Phone books for the Wash (later versions might apply) Our guide to natural death, five years old, can’t have expired, flapping its wings to ashes.

But this is the north-sea coast.

Daft at new year we bow to the unknown tide, the cutting edge.

Storm birds roll in like debris fronting a surge which screams at end-of-the-line landscapes, discontinued hearths.

Leo Swarvett

Nothing stirs, the graveyard– Beyond misplaced superstitions And primal make-believes.

Nothing much– stirs the graveyard Since time and burials immemorial.

Nothing.

Then– the soil stifled, zany tones, Of the dear departeds' mobile phones.

Dori Kirchmair

And whilst the moon orchestrates the stars, governs the tides and casts our shadow as we walk home late the sun’s rays touch the hearts of all but one of every living being and growth begins afresh whilst birds resume their song Tonight I celebrate my independence for when you long left in a pitch dark night I – got on with my day And whilst the night sky evokes my longing with every single shooting star the brightness of a rising sun repaints the sky anew with radiance and joy Today I recognize that the sun and the moon could not come together for the world divides them into – day and night But on the rare occasion when both align and one eclipses the other I feel your warm lips touching mine

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Join us on the

Sillitoe trail Old Market Square The White Horse Raleigh Trent Embankment The Goose Fair The Alan Sillitoe Committee is one of fifty-three organisations selected to produce content for The Space; the new digital arts platform funded

by Arts Council England in collaboration with the BBC. We are the only literary organisation outside of London participating in The Space and proudly rub shoulders with the likes of London Review of Books and Faber & Faber.

We are creating a virtual tour around Sillitoe’s Nottingham, based on five key locations from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

We believe the themes raised in the novel are as relevant today as they were in 1958.

Celebrate Sillitoe Day 27th October 2012 at Nottingham Contemporary Admission £15 - includes free Sillitoe Trail book.

Join the conversation www.sillitoetrail.com

Share stories and pics on our website and social spaces:

This project is part of the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Events.

Get involved by joining us online - you could be featured in the forthcoming Sillitoe Trail iPhone App and book.

f

Like our Facebook Page:

Sillitoetrail

t @Sillitoetrail

Follow Arthur Seaton @TheSpaceLathe

Support the Sillitoe Memorial Fund www.sillitoetrail.com/donate Contact: info@sillitoetrail.com

Bonzai

The Kiosk

Man v Southbank

The former Skinny Sumo sets out to recreate the atmosphere of an authentic oriental café/restaurant, and they’ve succeeded.

From the moment you clock the decor - a smart red and black fusion of recognisable Westernised oriental elements in an L-shaped room, with an open food preparation area in the corner, you feel you’re not in Nottingham anymore.

It was Sunday morning and we were hung-over and hungry, a hazardous combination. We wanted something substantial - no grease, no gristle - and a decent coffee. The Kiosk, an exciting new brunch-stop in Sherwood, offers just that. Healthy creative food is a speciality of proprietor Beth, best known for her popup supper club Nottingham Underground Restaurant and her foodie blogsite. The Kiosk has outdoor seating on a tucked-away terrace, equipped with an enormous green parasol to protect patrons from the elements, while mismatched quality tableware and colourful vintage deckchairs add a quirky touch. Menus are hand-written on brown paper and chalkboards, offering worldinspired brunches, tapas, salads, sandwiches and cake to eat in or take away.

I bloomin’ love pancakes, but - like most people - I only eat them once a year on Shrove Tuesday. So when I was offered the chance to visit The Southbank Bar - West Bridgford’s tellyencrusted sports pub - to take part in their epic Man vs. Foodstyle pancake challenge, I didn’t need asking twice.

Nippon over to Hockley

Alfresco Metro

Immediately upon arrival, my friend and I - a long-time sushi fiend and someone who has lived in Japan, respectively - were welcomed and seated by a smiling waitress and handed an extensive menu. The original Japanese was decoded, although vegetarian options weren’t clearly labelled. I chose my favourite starter from Japan; agedashi tofu, tasty deep-fried tofu served in a rich broth (£4.00) whereas my friend chose gyoza dumplings resembling small, white Cornish pasties stuffed with chicken and vegetables and served with a sesame dipping sauce (£5.00).

Both were fresh, flavourful and delightfully authentic, although they arrived at different times.

Hot on the heels of our starters came the sushi - again, arriving at different times. I steered clear of more daring food options such as squid and opted for salmon and cream cheese futomaki (£5.00 for three pieces) - rice and cream cheese wrapped in delicious slivers of very fresh salmon. My friend’s Bonzai sushi platter (£12.00) was a work of piscine art; four beautiful ‘maki’ (fish nestled in sushi-rice nests, wrapped in seaweed), four ‘nigiri’ (delicate rice-parcels with a surprising filling in the middle), and sashimi (raw fish sculpted into a ‘fin’ design and served on bite-sized nuggets of sushi rice) all beautifully presented on a traditional Japanese platter. We tried to appear dignified and to eat at a polite pace, but it was so good that we struggled not to demolish the lot like gannets. Luckily, I had also ordered vegetable futomaki (£4.00) - four little sushis of rice and vegetables – which arrived a way into the meal. Even the salad and dressing were authentic, turning the meal from a experience into an event; I’d not tasted a salad like this since leaving Japan.

The traditional Japanese dessert option of green tea ice cream was on the menu, but we were both full and instead rounded off the evening with the liquid version, served in traditional small cups. With its delicious, authentic, fresh food presented as works of art, Bonzai offers an authentic and cultural gastronomic experience. They also do a telephone ordering service, making it the city centre’s healthiest take-away option by several hundred calories. Sally Anderson 11-13 Carlton Street, NG1 1NL. Tel: 952 0188

A Bridgford too far

When we visited, the theme was Mexican. My companion opted for Mexican eggs, fried in smoky olive oil and served with zingy tomato sauce (£4), adding bacon for an extra 50p, while I plumped for smoky chorizo scrambled eggs (£4). There was a choice of tortillas or Turkish bread; we ordered the latter, cut into oblongs, toasted and served with pats of real butter on the side of the plate. We’d heard that this place served an outstanding coffee, so we started with a latte (£2) and an espresso (£1.50) followed by a pot of refreshing lemongrass tea (£1.20).

Despite a steady flow of customers and the minute size of the kitchen the food arrived quickly and was beautifully presented.

The soft yolk of my companion’s egg was rich, golden and tasty, and the bacon was cooked to crispy perfection, contrasting delightfully with the cold salsa which delivered a light kick to the taste-buds. My scrambled egg with chorizo, cheese and coriander was fantastic and a pretty effective hangover cure.

Beth sources most of her ingredients within two miles of The Kiosk. Being vegetarian herself (but with a carnivorous boyfriend), she’s aimed to create a café-style menu where the vegetarian, vegan and meat options are equally good. Her skills were honed in the family home where her father, mother and grandmother were all excellent cooks and foragers, welcoming hordes of guests for slap-up meals at the drop of a hat, and Beth has continued this tradition.

Slap bang next to the City Ground and a ball’s-throw from Trent Bridge, it pulls no punches as to what it is: a sports-themed watering hole. As menus go, it has the required fare on offer to soak up the pre-match booze or act as a bridge between match and night on the town, but I was not here for the regular menu.

The premise of Man v Southbank is simple: lay down £15 and get dealt a gargantuanly pimped-up dish. If you deck it in 45 minutes, you get your money back or win beer tokens, as well as the title of, well, the fattest bastard in Bridgford. My partner, being of sound mind, opted for a proper dinner of fish and chips, which I was informed was a tasty chunk of haddock with beer batter courtesy of their own Navigation Brewery ale (£5.95). I, however, had bigger things to worry about, namely the stack of American pancakes that had just been put down in front of me.

Dripping in blueberries and sticky sauce I dove into the floury mountain of sweetness...

In the States they eat these things for breakfast and, unlike our traditional French-inspired crepes, they pack a punch. Within minutes the stark reality dawned on me that you’d have to be some kind of Marvel superhero to put all this away. With my stomach filling and my vision on the wane, I felt light-headed as all the sugary carbohydrates started to take their toll. With a few locals cheering me on I slowly approached the halfway mark and hope was fading fast. With only half of the pile downed and fifteen minutes on the clock, I wimpishly threw in the towel. As I nibbled upon the agony of defeat (and was given a t-shirt that read ‘I CAME, I SAW, I FAILED’), I could hardly bring myself to look at the huge photo of Brian Clough above my table. Had he been there I would have welcomed the slap he would have deservedly applied to my face.

The Kiosk is currently open seven days-a-week, and is a beautiful, friendly little nook from which to watch the world go by, possibly while munching on beetroot, rum and chocolate cake (£1.50) made by Beth’s mum. How naughty! Aly Stoneman

Part of me feels I would have faired better with a savoury challenge - previous dishes have include a burrito the size of a baby, and a burger that Elvis himself would have found a bit too massive. But who knows? For those attempting such a foolhardy feat, take caution with these portions; they’re veritable monsters. Beane Noodler

1B Winchester Street, Sherwood, NG5 4AH nottsunderground.co.uk

The Southbank, 1 Bridgford House, Trent Bridge, NG2 5GJ southbankbar.co.uk

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

SANAM Since moving to Sherwood, I’ve been a bit like a kid in a sweetshop. With takeaways as far as the eye can see, where on earth do you even start? Spicy Nights - one of my favourite curry gaffs - sits only two minutes from my abode, so it took a lot of willpower to shun its alluring aroma for Sanam, but I got pre-lubed with super-strength lager and hit the place HARD. Deploying my usual review tactic (walk in with a slight wobble on, open menu, opt for first thing that was labelled ‘hot’ - the rather disco-sounding chicken laziza, in this case) seemed like a good idea at the time, but Christ in Travolta’s flares - my arse quivered with every mouthful, as if it knew what awaited it in the morn. But this otherworldly beast was most tasty and flavoursome, as was my partner’s chicken tikka masala (although both far too heavy on the sauce) and the accompanying fragrant pilau rice and excellent onion bhajis make this place well worth a drop-in if you’re in the area - but when they tell you something’s hot, please do have a listen.

510 Mansfield Road, NG5 2JJ

NIBBLES Hang on - a cob shop? In a takeaway review section? Settle down, everyone; Man can’t live on nowt but kebabs every day (believe me, I’ve tried). In any case, while most lunchtime eateries offer the usual sarnie-fare, it ain’t that kind of party at Nibbles; this gaff has a blazing array of hot munch, tempting hungry Sherwoodians in from the cold like nowhere else I’ve seen upon the Road to Mansfield. From scrummy lasagnes and stir fries to shepherds pies and riceyness, you’ll almost wish you owned the walking carcass of Giant Haystacks so you could try everything on show and while it might not always be up there with your Mam’s own recipes, for two squid a pop you have absolutely no right to have a cob-on over leaving the cob off, if you will. As for the breadular comestibles, what are they like? Well, with a fine mountain of fillings to choose from, there’s plenty to load up on and get stuck into, dished out by happy, friendly staff. I bloody love popping in here on Saturday mornings as I do the rounds, and I recommend you do the same too.

622 Mansfield Road, NG5 2GA leftlion.co.uk/issue48

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NO LEFTLION 49 UNTIL SEPT 28 Leo (July 24 - Aug 23)

It’s true that whenever you come into contact with animals, they always seem to really like you. However, this is mainly because you’re fat and slow and thus will be easy to cut from the herd when your time comes.

Virgo (Aug 24 - Sept 23)

Lots of people will tell you that all is fair in love and war. However, according to the Geneva Protocol of 1925 the use of chemical weapons is actually banned in both. Your partners family will not get the joke.

Libra (Sept 24 - Oct 23)

A wise man once said that astrology and palmistry are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

Scorpio (Oct 24 - Nov 22)

Good news this week: after twenty years of enduring horrifying and unrelenting psychosexual nightmares, you will finally meet the man of your dreams.

Sagittarius (Nov 23 - Dec 22)

There’s almost certainly a more efficient way to get through life than the route you are currently taking. By this point you’re pretty used to just following any old conga line that goes by. Do-do-do, it’s conga night for sure.

Capricorn (Dec 23 - Jan 19)

The very heavens themselves shall bestow their benevolence upon you this week, allowing you to take fifteen percent off selected main courses at a popular chain of restaurants. Your drinks bill will remain full price though.

Aquarius (Jan 20 - Feb 19)

You will be instrumental in disproving several popular theories over the next week. These will include the idea that laughter is good for you (not when your stomach has been stapled) and that a little fresh air never hurt anyone (thousands will die).

MAKE SU WELL EMO

Pisces (Feb 20 - Mar 20)

At first the story the old zookeeper told you about how you were switched at birth seemed far-fetched. However, you have to admit that when you look around at work you are the only giraffe in the office.

:(

Aries (Mar 21 - Apr 20)

There will be other lips that I may kiss, but they won’t thrill me like yours used to do.

Yes, I may dream a million dreams, but how can they come true if there will never ever be another you?

LEFTLION ABROAD

Taurus (Apr 21 - May 21)

Les Deux Alps, Isère, France

The most difficult week of your life is coming up. But you can take heart from the knowledge that once you get through that, you’ll have something to remember during the next 1,872 uniformly boring seven-day instalments of life.

Gemini (May 22 - June 22)

If someone had told you a week ago that there was something even better than sex, you wouldn’t have believed them. This week, however, you will discover the joys of sex with other people.

Cancer (June 23 - July 23)

The ghost of Nicky Platnauer will appear to you in a dream to tell you he’s very disappointed in the person you have become.

This will make you feel inadequate and force you to find out who Nicky Platnauer actually is. leftlion.co.uk/horroscopes

We’re still a good read, even at an altitude of 11,000-odd feet. In the highest ever LeftLion Abroad entry, Nusic maestro Mark Del rocks our magazine at France’s second oldest ski resort (after Chamonix) and next door to Europe’s largest skiable glacier. Mr Del had actually broken his collarbone, snowboarding, at the point his mate Richard Hall took this photo too. That’s some serious dedication to reppin’ Notts for you.

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

Queens Medical Centre

46

leftlion.co.uk/issue48

Nottingham City Hospital

Opened: 1977

Opened: 1903

le Next door to: Studentvil

Next door to: Bestwood

team for: Used by the LeftLion ies enc Emerg

Used by the LeftLion team for: STD clinic

ce Charles Famous ex-patient: Prin

Famous ex-patient: Col in Gunn

London 2012 Festival and Cultural Olympiad in the East Midlands

Man free y even ts

Many events including: Bright In The Corner

Mandala

Red Baraat

September dates in Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Wirksworth Festival £10

Sunday 9th September 8.30pm Old Market Square, Nottingham FREE

Thursday 6th September 7.45pm Curve, Leicester £10

Energetic, uplifting and exciting musical dance theatre collaboration between artists from Derbyshire and South Africa.

Spectacular illumination in colour and light, 3D projections with international and British Asian music and dance.

www.ignitingambition.co.uk

Appearances will not be all they seem…

World Event Young Artists

Live music by Talvin Singh, live contemporary and classical dance including performances by Devika Rao and Aakash Odedra.

Seriously hot, larger than life, Brooklyn based dhol ‘n’ brass band Red Baraart combine infectious north Indian rhythms of bhangra with funk, jazz, Latin and go-go, their sound is big, brassy and full of energy.

Friday 7th – Sunday 16th September 1000 artists, 100 nations, 10 days FREE From live music to dance performances, theatrical installations to spoken word, film to visual arts exhibitions and gastronomic events at venues across Nottingham.

World Event Young Artists will be an extraordinary finale to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. www.worldeventyoungartists.com

The FREE outdoor multimedia spectacle not to miss!

See the trailer at www.sampad.org.uk

www.curveonline.co.uk Find free events and search for what’s on near you: www.ignitingambition.co.uk www.london2012.com/festival