n quentin woolf

sleepless in whitechapel

Adrian Morris

This week’s show was a real treat to present, although a sleepless night left me sounding a bit flat. Alexes Walker and Thomas were first in to the studio. Alex T has the most complex-looking customised electronic set-up connected to his violin, consisting of a home-grown laptop program and an impressive-looking set of pedals, all of which produce the amazing sound you can hear on the recording. Alex Walker’s voice is great – all the brooding aggression of Lou

Alex Walker

Reed or Nick Cave, with the addition of that Scots snarl. I haven’t come across any acts like Ura-Ana.

Actually, we had quite a music-heavy show this week – and about as diverse a mix as could be dreamt up. It was great to welcome Kalia from London Greek Radio and her nay, and Alex Farrell and Kleibans from London Afrobeat Collective, who gave me a guided tour of a musical world I

Alex Thomas

hadn’t heard of a week ago. Their music is a defiant marriage of the chilled to the deft, and I’ve had it on my MP3 player all day today.

Fran Millican-Slater and I often run into each other at critique groups in the area, so already had an idea she’d sound good on radio but – what a voice. I swear she could make the ingredients of a packet of Monster Munch sound interesting. The situation reminds me a little of my much-missed friend, writer Dan Nicolai, currently waiting for rain in the Pacific NW, who used to attend the same critique groups and who also has a calming, almost hypnotic, reading voice; occasionally you could tell from listeners’ blissful

Francesca Millican-Slater

expressions that they’d long abandoned the narrative he was reading and were just lost in his voice…

Artist Gareth Williams and Adrian Morris of the Whitechapel society were getting on like long-lost friends before the recording; so much so that I felt bad breaking them up. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, by any means (there was a good debate going between Francesco Benenato and Jacob Sam La Rose last week, I seem to recall), and I think I may be missing a trick: perhaps I should

Gareth Williams

save myself a lot of trouble and just mic up the green-room. Individually, both men gave interesting angles on social responsibility as integral parts of what they do. Adrian was particularly keen to talk about the responsibility he feels for highlighting the plight of women at the time of the Whitechapel murders, while Gareth’s views on community art seemed to chime with those of Marsha Bradfield of HTAP, a few weeks ago.

So plenty to entertain and entrance, and even more to think about. By

Kleibans and Alex Farrell

the end of the show the sleeplessness had been blown away.

Listen to this edition of The Arts Show.

in the envelope

Karen Andrea

The raison d’etre of The Arts Show is to showcase current talent, particularly acts and artists who defy easy classification or fall between genre-types. But we permitted ourselves a few guests who work within categorisable forms, this week, and may devils eat our socks for having done so.

I haven’t seen Karen Andrea in a couple of months, so it was great to see her looking so well. She’s currently taking the kids’ story market by storm with her novel The Enchanted Library. I heard parts of it read, during its incubation phase, in the critique group I run in Brick Lane – since then it’s taken on a life of its own. KA’s done a sterling marketing job; especially impressive given that she’s quite busy enough with her day-job as a lawyer. The Library has natural appeal, given its themes of inclusion and using one’s imagination. Sea Fire, her current project, blends several even bigger themes – I can’t wait. Given the amount we both have on, it might provide the excuse for our next meeting.

There was a wealth of music to play into Luke Styles’ interview, each track using

Tim and Luke

different instruments – far too great a selection for us to give an accurate representation of the breadth of his musical output. I really enjoyed what we heard. That uncomfortable, jerky sound seemed to be a recurring motif. During the sound-check, Tim Orpen, the clarinettist (and boy, that man can play) explored the upper range of the piece, an ear-splitting screech like a terrified goose. Horrible, said one of the sound techs. That’s the point, said Tim.

Jacob Sam La Rose is an accomplished poet, clearly. His second poem, the one that dealt with a distant father, really spoke to me; it was moving and understated, and I’d strongly urge you to keep an ear or eye out for Jacob’s words.

I expect big things of The Darlingtons. To my mind, for a band that’s been together for so short a time (just a year) they’ve created a surprisingly mature, rich and self-assured sound. Glitch, the song I played, is their latest release, but they sent me a couple of others – one pretty lively and one built for chilling out, and listening to those I feel like I’m in the hands of musicians who know what they’re doing.

Francesco and Jacob

We returned to ‘alternative’ form with our final guest, Francesco Benenato, a visual artist who uses different materials each time he works, and who revealed that he once asked all his friends to give him their pubic hair in order to fashion a hirsute reclining nude. Francesco is engaging not only because he has a genuine passion for finding original and meaningful ways to express himself, but also because his perspective as an ‘art brut’ artist – that is, an auto-didact – is refreshing and incisive, untrammelled by convention.

Which I think returns the show to its familiar turf.

Listen to this edition of The Arts Show.