A Brief History of Hull’s ‘Edgy’ Art Experimentalists – Dave Ellis

Introduction

Mention of Philip Larkin is probably not the wisest or safest place to begin a brief exploration

of avant-garde, ‘outsider’ art making in Hull. However, his comment that the city is “...in the

world yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance...”1 might go some way

to providing an initial explanation as to how and why such a wide variety of left-field artists,

musicians and performers - operating in so many disparate elements of what might loosely be

described as the area of experimentalism - have become part of something akin to a local

tradition, either starting out, passing through or ending up in a city described by percussionist

and performance artist Paul Burwell in 2004 as culturally “...punching above its weight.”2

Hull has long been viewed as one step removed, the end of the line, a rough and ready, robust

city of character with strong links to an historic maritime tradition. It is not a place for airs

and graces but, with low house prices and cheap rents, it has proved attractive to those who

arrive from elsewhere in the UK, perhaps as students at the University or the School of Art,

and then elect to stick around and make things happen on a do-it-yourself cultural front. That

is not to say that Hull has ever been without its own home-grown pool of one-off originals or

the just plain curious. Mike Stubbs, director of Hull Time Based Arts, an organisation which

operated in the city from 1985 to 2005, explained it thus: “HTBA and the events...{it created

and promoted}... attracted those on the edge, those not happy with the status quo or

mainstream culture – idiosyncratic people, from those artists wanting to show with us and an

audience/membership who were not sure about the ‘product’, but knew we were up to

something, and that it had the potential to talk with a non-art world. Equally, producers and

enthusiasts of experimental art were attracted to a self-build organisation that seemed

tolerant and informal.”3

However, film maker Jo Millett, who left the city in 2008, goes so far as to suggest that:

“Having lived and worked in Hull for many years I am concerned that it is somewhere that

has a kind of amnesia. Challenging work in many disciplines, whether music, performance

or dance for example, has come and gone in Hull but little remains. But at the same time this

quality may make it a place where challenging work can be tested out.”4

This written project is an attempt to identify some of the more memorable groups, characters

and projects that have passed through the city over the last half century, some conceived here,

some electing to stay while others have moved on in time. The transient nature of so much

live art, in particular that which is spontaneous or improvised, which leaves only

documentation as evidence of events ever having taking place, makes memory a significant

factor and amnesia, even nostalgia, an ever present concern. Poet, painter and performer John

Fox, born & bred in Hull, founder of Welfare State International, widely renowned but still

uncelebrated in the city of his birth, warns: “Nostalgia dulls reality...{it} can be a tool of

authoritarian centralism which maintains the old order and demonises the dissenting

underbelly. So if I look back, it’s not in nostalgia but only to offer tools, models and lessons

for the future.”5

The Brick House

Worthy of brief mention although the enterprise lasted barely a year, The Brick-House on

Baker Street was located in the former Albion Congregational Chapel building. It was

organized by Barry Nettleton (1946-2008) and Rick Welton (director of the 2016 Amy

Johnson celebrations) as part of their Hull Brick Company, a promotional body that formed

in 1970 and was responsible for bringing top rock bands to Hull, usually performing at the

City Hall. The likes of Emerson Lake & Palmer, Yes, Free, Mott the Hoople, and most

famously The Who played in Hull (the night before recording their legendary 1970 “Live at

Leeds” album) during this period. However, Nettleton and Welton also saw the need for a

smaller venue to call their own and opened the Brick House in April 1971. Based on

underground Arts Lab principles it was open during the day with a ‘head’ shop and a café,

where those described by Mike Bradwell as the city’s “idiosyncratic sub-culture”6 could

congregate, drink (non-alcoholic beverages only), smoke (and quite possibly inhale), discuss

important matters of the day and bring in LPs from their own vinyl collections to play on the

stereo system, as long as it met with Barry Nettleton’s critical approval! Despite booking an

impressive line up of emerging acts the venue closed later the same year. Christmas Eve

1971 saw the last gig and it had ceased operations completely by January 1972, although the

faded lettering over the entrance on Baker Street remained as a visible aide-memoire for

many years after. The Brick House never obtained a licence to sell alcohol, and staged

provocative shows by the likes of COUM Transmissions with the subsequent threat of

prosecution under obscenity laws It also had problems with local trouble-makers opposed to

the ‘hippie weirdos’ ethos, all of which contributed to its rapid demise, along with the

opening of the Hull Arts Centre on Spring Street. This more successful long-term venture

was also associated with Rick Welton in an administrative capacity and Barry Nettleton who,

after closing the Brick House started ‘The Magic Garden’ there on Sunday nights, live

sessions which soon provided a sympathetic platform for adventurous work in the performing

arts.

The Hull Arts Centre

With regional arts subsidy across the UK in its infancy during the 1960s (Yorkshire Arts

Association was only formed in 1969, while Lincolnshire & Humberside Arts did not come

into existence until 1975), Hull’s Municipal Authority barely included art and culture in its

remit. In 1965 they spent approximately £3,000 on music and drama, mostly subsidizing

orchestral concerts at the City Hall, and visiting repertory companies performing popular

shows at the recently acquired New Theatre (the former Public Assembly Rooms, built in

1830 and also the original home of the Hull School of Art and Picture Gallery from 1861-78,

had been taken over by the local authority in the early 1960s rather than allow it to be turned

into a bingo hall, and is currently undergoing major refurbishment, scheduled to reopen in

autumn 2017). All this constituted significantly less than a halfpenny in the pound

expenditure from the rates. The visual arts fared significantly better, as local industrialist and

benefactor Thomas Ferens (1847-1930) had stipulated a purchasing fund (which he endowed

with £1,000 per annum from as early as 1905) when he presented the city with the art gallery

on Victoria Square in 1927 that still bears his name today.

In 1964 locally based theatre playwright and screenwriter Alan Plater (1935–2010) had the

idea of trying to establish a performance space in Hull. “I discovered a group of like-minded

people, all equally concerned that a city with a population of a quarter of a million didn’t

have a theatre capable of generating its own drama...Between 1965 and 1970 we raised the

money and, courtesy of a friendly vicar, found a building.”7 The St Stephen's Church Rooms,

a parish hall and temporary space for worship on Spring Street (the original, war-damaged

church had finally been demolished in 1957) was surplus to requirements and the Diocese of

Hull was seeking options for its disposal. Plater, who had an architectural background,

checked out the premises and decided that it was as good as he and his group of supporters

were likely to find in such a central location, albeit described as a ‘twilight zone’ “...behind

the bus station and handy for the morgue.”8

The Hull Arts Centre began operations in 1970 as “...a workshop and shop window for all the

arts and to provide a social and creative focal point for the people engaged in the arts in

Hull.” The initial problem being, according to Plater: “...{we} were almost immediately

broke.”9

However, the enterprise filled a significant cultural void and attendances proved sufficiently

encouraging to justify its existence from the onset. This fact was duly recognised with

funding to the amount of £5,000 from the local authority’s Recreational Services Committee

for the financial year 1971-72, the same year in which the local council confirmed its

membership of the newly created Yorkshire Arts Association.

Following the formation of Humberside County Council in 1974 - merging the previous

authorities of Kingston-upon- Hull, East Yorkshire & North Lincolnshire - the Arts Centre

was re-named The Humberside Theatre. Jon Marshall, a well-known stage magician who

also led the newly created local Theatre in Education programme, was appointed artistic

director and for a couple of years it even managed to sustain a small repertory company. In

addition the auditorium featuring work by many other regional theatre groups, the emerging

Hull Truck Company included, and premiered new stage productions from Alan Plater.

On Sunday evenings (and occasional weekdays when the stage wasn’t set for a drama

production) the space was available for other areas of performance, providing an early

platform for many local and national folk, jazz, rock groups, and poetry readings by emerging

voices including John Robinson, Tony Petch, Sean O’Brian and Douglas Houston under the

collective title of ‘Verbals’. Occasionally rather more left-field work was encouraged,

attracting artists such as Genesis P-Orridge, Vivien Stanshall, Ron Geesin, and students from

the Regional College of Art interested in creating multi-media ‘happenings’ and what would

become recognised as performance art. Hard-to-categorize groups such as the People Show,

featuring the likes of Jeff Nuttall, Mark Long, George Kahn and Emile Walk made annual

appearances. Tours presented by the ACGB Contemporary and Regional Music Networks

provided occasional concerts of avant-garde music, including performances by Tim Souster’s

Intermodulation, electronic music from Kontakte +, and new works by Hull-based electro-

acoustic composer John Stead. The national and international jazz scene was represented with

regular appearances by performers such as Stan Tracey, Eberhard Weber and Ian Carr’s

Nucleus (Carr was a regular visitor to Hull, running an annual jazz summer school at the

Humberside College of Higher Education/Polytechnic for several years). The Humberside

Theatre foyer and bar area, with wall space for exhibitions, was also available for small-scale

lunchtime live music sessions, usually provided by local jazz musicians. A weekly roundup

of cultural events in Hull was broadcast live from the foyer on BBC Radio Humberside, an

initiative of adventurous programme producer Jim Hawkins.

The venue changed its name once again in 1981, becoming Spring Street Theatre, but was

forced to close within the year, having endured a difficult relationship with Lincolnshire &

Humberside Arts, the regional funding association, since its inception in 1975. Following

negotiations, the Hull Truck Company took over the building in 1983 with Barry Nettleton as

administrator and began to achieve popular success from 1984 onwards under its creative

director and principle writer John Godber. The premises were expanded and the auditorium

refurbished in 1994 with an enlarged capacity of 280 seats, and also the addition of a flexible

workshop/rehearsal/performance space elsewhere in the complex with seating for audiences

of up to 50. The building was finally closed in 2009 and demolished shortly afterwards, by

which time the Hull Truck Theatre had moved into a new £15 million purpose-built

complex on Ferensway.

Basil Kirchin

In 1961 big band leader Ivor Kirchin (1905-1997) moved to Hull to take over the resident

dance orchestra slot at the Mecca Locarno ballroom (later Lexington Avenue or LAs) on

Ferensway, where he remained until retiring the band in 1967 in the face of an onslaught

from much cheaper, and far louder, local pop groups and disc jockeys. Although scarcely

remembered before the advent of Youtube, in its day the Kirchin Band was held in high

regard. Alan Plater remembers them as “...for a while one of the wildest outfits around,

operating in the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band tradition.”10

As a result they had been much in

demand to accompany visiting American jazz musicians. Singer Billy Eckstine, touring in the

UK, was moved to pronounce on stage: "As most of you know, I once had a band of my own

with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, amongst others whose names may be known to you,

but, I must tell you that I have been standing in the wings for every single show this week

without missing one of their spots, and never in my life have I heard such a band. It is very

difficult for me to believe that they are not American let alone that they are not coloured;

ladies and gentlemen please, your applause for what I sincerely believe to be one of the great

bands in the world today, to be ranked alongside Duke, Count and Dizzy; I give you the

Kirchin Band."11

Featured drummer and arranger was Ivor’s son, Basil Kirchin (1927-2005), a professional

player since the age of 14, who had returned to the family fold after a successful career with

the likes of the Harry Roy Orchestra and the Ted Heath Band. He was twice named as

Melody Maker magazine’s Jazz Drummer of the Year, and had recorded at the Abbey Road

studios with a young producer called George Martin. Basil decided to travel the world in the

late 1950s, living in the USA, Europe, India (in an ashram – a decade before George Martin’s

most famous collaboration made it fashionable) and Australia, all the while experiencing and

documenting different cultures and expanding his musical horizons. Sadly, much original

Kirchin Band material, and all of Basil’s early documentary and pioneering work, in the form

of reel-to-reel tapes, was lost when his belongings were dumped into Sydney harbour due to a

crane malfunction while off-loading the ship he had just arrived on.

He returned to England, married and lived for a while in Switzerland, but eventually came to

Hull to rejoin the family music business. However, a range of radical ideas also saw him

creating original compositions ranging from horror movie sound tracks (The Abominable Dr

Phibes 1971) and producing a library of what he called ‘soundtracks for unmade films’,

recordings for the de Wolfe music publishing company using session musicians including the

young Jimmy Page and local guitar hero Mick Ronson. In addition to all this was the out and

out experimentation of his ‘Worlds within Worlds’ project (1971-73) where he mixed

slowed-down and manipulated natural sounds on magnetic tape, long before the advent of

digital sampling, setting these alongside free improvising musicians such as saxophonist

Evan Parker and guitarist Derek Bailey. Working with record producer Keith Herd at

Fairview Studios in Willerby, East Yorkshire, Kirchin continued composing and

experimenting into his seventies, living quietly off Hessle Road, Hull until his death in 2005.

“Basil was an extraordinary musician who led an extraordinary life,” recalls Herd. “He was

hugely influential on me and countless others.”12

The lengths he would go to in order to

capture a singular sound included getting a large DIY store to close early so he could record

the unusual noise made by the wheels of a particular shopping trolley.

“People of any age should know never to give up,” Kirchin told the Times in 2003, before

offering a statement which stands for all he was, and still is. “I just want to try and leave

something for young people who are starting in music and looking for something – as I’ve

been looking all my life.”13

Largely ignored during his later career, his remarkable body of work had subsequently been

rediscovered after being released in CD form on Trunk Records from 2002, and his influence

is acknowledged by contemporary musicians, including Brian Eno, and bands such as Nurse

with Wound and Broadcast.

In 2017, jazz promoters J-Night will commission Abstractions of the Industrial North a new

piece of music by Mercury Prize nominated Manchester based jazz trio GoGo Penguin. The

advanced publicity states: “The piece will be also be inspired by Basil Kirchin, who died in

Hull in 2005. Basil Kirchin is the forgotten genius of post-war British music. British pioneer

of musique concrete, leading light in the free jazz movement, a film composer who inspired

Bernard Hermann and according to Brian Eno, the founding father of ambient.”14

A festival will take place at Hull City Hall celebrating the work of Basil Kirchin in February

as part of the Hull City of Culture 2017 celebrations.

https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/mind-on-the-run/

John Fox & Sue Gill

By contrast to most of the artists, performers and organizations discussed here, John Fox and

Sue Gill were both born and raised in Hull before moving on, after completing higher

education elsewhere, to co-found Welfare State in 1968. Described by the Guardian

newspaper as: "Britain's foremost alternative performance and installation collective"15

, and

by themselves as ‘Engineers of the Imagination,’ they were famous for their large-scale

community oriented, celebratory productions involving street theatre, pageants and rites of

passage ceremonies, performing throughout the UK and abroad.

Their earliest manifesto, produced in 1972, proclaimed: “An Entertainment, an Alternative

and a Way of Life. We make images, invent rituals, devise ceremonies, objectify the

unpredictable and enhance atmospheres for particular places, times, situations and people.

We are artists concerned with the survival and character of the imagination and the

individual within a technologically advanced society.”16

Founded at Bradford School of Art as a consequence of a drama programme led by the

controversial teacher and stage director Albert Hunt (1928-2015), Welfare State was initially

based in Leeds and then operated for several years from an open air site in Burnley, Lancs.

They lived and travelled around in trucks, trailers and caravans from 1973 until 1979. The

company became Welfare State International with commissioned work undertaken in

Australia and Japan. In 1979 they settled in Ulverston, Cumbria but continued to tour

extensively, eventually acquiring a permanent arts centre, the Lanternhouse in 1999.

John Fox stepped down as Artistic Director in 2006, while Sue Gill retired from her post as

course leader for WSI's groundbreaking MA in Cultural Performance created in partnership

with Bristol University, at which point WSI ceased performances as a travelling company.

Over this period of time many hundreds of members, volunteers and participants came under

the influence of WSI, often moving on to form their own experimental theatre and

community performance groups across the UK and much further afield. Liz Pugh and John

Wassell, founders of Walk the Plank, the directors of Hull Freedom Festival from 2013-

2015, are both ex WSI alumni. Nearly half a century on from their first formation, Liz Dees,

creative director of Hull Carnival Arts articulates the debt she owes to WSI: “What I have

read and heard about Welfare State is how hugely influential they have been on many

individual artists, and how their legacy has given rise to numerous long established creative

companies, who carry forward the ethos and passion for the outdoor performative arts. Some

of those companies that have directly influenced our work are IOU and Walk the Plank. I

believe Welfare State helped to transform the outdoor arts sector into a thriving and exciting

genre to operate within, giving rise to more large scale happenings being permissioned and

also cultivating a hunger for such work with artists and audiences alike.17

Speaking at the culmination of 37 years of work, John Fox summed up the achievement of

WSI, and also summarized what had gone wrong in his opinion: “Our track record

demonstrates that an applied vernacular art is possible...{but}...The arts tightrope between

celebrity and surrogate social work has become untenable. All our intentions of 1968 -

access, disability awareness, multigenerational and multicultural participation - are

established; now, though, they come before the art.18

John Fox and Sue Gill never wanted to be part of the art business, having to plan years ahead

for funding or seek corporate sponsorship, which they feel puts the careers of arts

administrators before the vocation of artist, destroying creative imagination in the process.

Frequent clashes with authorities over health &safety issues or ideas of political correctness

have produced, in their opinion, ‘a culture of smug inertia.’

“The final straws? The day we were told we needed a "hot work" permit for a bonfire in a

field. Had we swept the floor and were the overhead sprinklers working? In Cumbria we call

that rain.19

They believed that the rejection, by a board of administrators, to allow an artist’s collective to

take over the Lanternhouse project was a signal to move on, stating: “This utopian political

artwork fell foul of consultant creep, a fixation for control through hierarchy and incredulity

when faced with wild ideas.”20

“We're flying off to generate different cultural patterns where provocation, lateral thinking

and feral poetry are the norm. Where art is indeed "a way of life"”21

Together John Fox & Sue Gill, now both well into their eighth decade, operate as Dead Good

Guides, http://www.deadgoodguides.com/ publishing books on, as well as performing

alternative ceremonies and celebrations of life and death. John Fox was awarded an Arts

Council of England Life Time Achievement Award in 2006, and an MBE (which he

reluctantly accepted) in the 2012 honours list, ironically the same year that the Lanternhouse

project in Ulverston lost their Arts Council funding and folded with the loss of several full-

time posts.

Although Welfare State presented their first ever street theatre show as part of the Selby

Festival in 1969, performed at Hull Arts Centre in 1971 with a touring satirical variety show

‘The Sweet Misery of Life Show’, and as part of ‘Fanfare for Europe’ a nonstop performance

on North Sea Ferries from Hull to Rotterdam in 1973 (which also involved Genesis P-Orridge

among others), they were never invited to undertake a commission in Hull throughout their

38 year history, despite John Fox and Sue Gill maintaining strong local links and family ties

with the area. The nearest they got to the city of their birth was when WSI were

commissioned to devise ‘Trawlers at Peace,’ a large-scale outdoor community spectacular

staged in October 1993, based around the old Grimsby fish docks and commemorating the

role of the North Sea fishing fleet during the second world war.

Genesis P-Orridge & COUM Transmissions

Neil Megson attended Hull University in 1968 to study Social Administration & Philosophy

but left after one year having been frustrated in his desire to transfer to a degree course in the

English department. However, in the course of that first year he won the 1969 Needler Poetry

Competition (judged by Philip Larkin...that man again!) and began a radical magazine,

‘Worm’ which was banned by the Student’s Union after three issues when instructions for

producing Molotov Cocktails appeared in print. He moved to London, briefly joining the

radical Transmedia Explorations commune but stayed only a few months.

Following a ‘mystical experience’ during a family holiday in Wales, when the word ‘Coum

appeared to him together with a phallic logo, Megson was back in Hull by 1970 to form the

commune and artists collective COUM Transmissions on Transmedia principles. The

following year he changed his name by deed poll to Genesis P-Orridge. Among the early

members of the experimental music and ‘happenings’ group was Christine Carol Newby,

born and raised in East Hull, who also changed her name, first to Cosmosis, shortened to

Cosey, and finally to Cosey Fanni Tutti. Occupying a succession of squats in disused

warehouses, one of which had to be accessed through a long polythene tunnel, COUM

became the communal home to an assortment of local counter-cultural figures, including

artists, musicians, poets, fashion designers and underground magazine producers. Mike

Bradwell of Hull Truck recalls that one group member “...married his dog Tremble in a

secret ceremony in Beverley Minster. The most popular local band ironically called

themselves Nothinev(e)rappens...”22

They were a psychedelic folk/rock band, well ahead of

their time by local standards, which included another member of the COUM commune, poet

Douglas Houston (1947-2013) on saxophone. Before breaking up in 1972, they had been

managed by Barry Nettleton who ran the short-lived Brick House arts lab venture and later

took over the administration of Hull Truck Theatre. Vocalist Steve ‘Snips’ Parsons went on

to some success with the band Sharks and with Ginger Baker in Baker/Guervitz Army.

An anonymous article appearing on the WeirdRetro website recalls COUM’s early

experiments:

“They started performing in pubs and clubs around Hull, usually to the utter shock and

bewilderment of audiences. Under the banner of "Your Local Dirty Banned", they borrowed

from the 60s counterculture, and were influenced by Dada artists in particular the Fluxus

network. Their shows were improvised cacophonies on broken instruments and whatever they

could find to make noise. They began to involve audience participation in their performances,

gradually moving from being an anarchic musical group, to a performance art collective.

One time purposely turning up to play a gig without any instruments at all. As others began

to hear of them and gravitate towards the creative maelstrom that was tearing down the

barriers of the art establishment, they came to the attention of the media and art world

beyond the dull downtrodden streets of Hull.”23

COUM Transmission’s work was certainly provocative and confrontational, and a move

toward impromptu street performances soon attracting the interest of police and local

authorities. Despite this, the group were allowed access to BBC Radio Humberside studios

and received a grant from Yorkshire Arts to develop their Dada-inspired work which they

now regarded as performance art. They organised events, published books and continued to

take their brand of improvised music and anarchic mayhem into pubs and clubs, often with

riotous results. Following a police raid on The Gondola, a Hull club where they were

performed ‘Riot Control’ in 1971, and the subsequent closure of that venue, COUM were

unofficially banned from the city’s music venues. However, the Brick House came to their

rescue and they presented, ‘Fairyland Powder Puffs’, later the same year which both raised

their profile and returned them to notoriety with arrests by the police and an obscenity charge,

later dropped before a prosecution was scheduled.

Coum Transmissions: Performances and Actions 1970 -73:

Thee Fabulous Mutations, St Peters, Anlaby, Hull, UK.

Clockwork Hot Spoiled Acid Test, Hull University Union, UK.

99 United Sacks, Albert’s Jazz Club, Hull, UK.

Broken Equipment, Hull University, UK.

Disintegration of Fact, Granny's Parlour, Hull, UK.

Riot Control, Gondola Club, Hull, UK.

Absolute Elsewhere, Streets of Hull, UK.

Fairyland Powder Puffs, Brickhouse, Hull, UK.

Caves of Montalbaan, Hull Arts Centre, UK.

Skin Complaints, Streets of Hull, UK.

Edna & The Great Surfers, St.Georges Hall Bradford, UK.

Coum Orgee Number 1, Alien Brain, Hull, UK.

Exorcism of Shit, Afro Club, Bradford, UK.

I'm a Robot, Alien Brain, Hull, UK.

Christ Whitemas, Streets of Hull, UK.

Infra Red Bucket, Hull Arts Centre, UK.

This Machine Kills Music, New Grange Club, Hull, UK.

Kissing, Alien Brain, Hull, UK.

Copyright Breeches, University of Kent, UK.

‘'Prison Sell, COUM on the streets of Hull for RAP.

Dead Pedestrians, Canterbury Streets, UK.

Miss Teen Princess. Streets of Hull, UK.

Festival of Night, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK.

Anal Coumfidence, Streets of London, UK.

Bullnecks, Holy Trinity Church, Hull, UK.

Wagon Train, Hull Streets/ Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK.

Coum to the Rescue. Streets of Hull, UK.

Thee Alien Brain & Mass Panic, Hull Arts Centre, UK.

Spartacus Defused, Bradford Arts Festival, UK.

Melissa Pouts, Streets of Hull, UK.

Welcoum Home Tim, Alien Brain, Hull, UK.

Drakularse Tower, Beverley West Wood, UK.

Thee Business, Streets of Hull, UK.

‘'Yorkshire Artists’ Collection'’, Fanfare for Europe, Hull Arts Centre. Group show..

Ministry of Antisocial Insecurity, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK..

Winston Spencer Churchill, Hull Arts Centre, UK

Glass with Care, Streets of Hull, UK

Colliche Pastage, De Lantaren, Rotterdam, PAYS BAS

Baby of Europe, Lijnbaan, Rotterdam, PAYS BAS.

Copy Dementarla, Open Theatre Festival, Louvain, BELGIQUE

Babys Coumpetition, O.S.A.C. Oxford University UK.

Infantile Launchpad, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK..

Ministry & Colliche, Swansea University Festival. UK.

The Biggles Saga, Bretton Hall College, Wakefield, UK.

The Revolutionary Spirit, COUM with KIPPER KIDS at Louvain University,

Belgique.

Thee Marriage of Fizzy Paet, Manchester Art Festival. UK..

Decoumpositions, FLUXshoe, Midland Group Gallery, Nottingham UK.

Landscape Painting & Actions, Reading University, UK.

Stick Em Up, Surrey University, UK.

Kingston-coum-Hull, Hull Arts Centre, UK.

Tiring of constant police attention, P-Orridge & Tutti left Hull in 1973, moving to Hackney

in London where they continued performance art activities as COUM Transmissions, while

the increasingly organized and considered music element of their work establishing itself as

Throbbing Gristle from 1975. With hindsight they are now regarded as a significant and

influential proto-punk band. P-Orridge and Tutti continued to court controversy, particularly

with the ‘Prostitution’ show of 1976. Held at the ICA in London, the exhibition documented

Tutti’s work as a stripper, fetish and glamour model. Even the radical performance art world

was disturbed by their physical and sexual excesses, and they were rewarded with the

ultimate kudos, at least from their point of view, by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn who

declared them to be “wreckers of civilisation” in the House of Commons. The subsequent

high profile coverage by an outraged, prurient tabloid press was swiftly and gleefully

incorporated into the exhibition and their future publicity.

P-Orridge and Tutti had ended their working relationship by the early 1990s. She remained in

London working solo as a performance artist and as a musician with her partner Chris Carter.

P-Orridge, after travelling extensively, settled in New York in 1993 with his wife, ‘Lady

Jaye’ Breyer, where the couple embarked on what they termed “...the ‘Pandrogeny Project’;

influenced by the cut-up technique, the duo underwent extensive body modification to

resemble one another, thus coming to identify themselves as a single pandrogynous being

named ‘Breyer P-Orridge’.”24

Breyer died in 2007. P-Orridge continues to work in New

York, holding a retrospective celebrating over 40 years of his/her art at the Andy Warhol

Museum in 2013.

Mike Bradwell & Hull Truck

Mike Bradwell came to Hull in 1971 in order to establish a small drama company in "...the

last place on earth anyone in the right mind would go to found an experimental theatre

troupe."25

Hailing originally from Scunthorpe, Bradwell had enrolled at East 15, the school

that had sprung out of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop. After completing his training

there, he performed with the likes of Ken Campbell as ‘the reluctant escapologist’ in his

legendary Roadshow, and with director Mike Leigh, playing a part in his first feature film

‘Bleak Moments’ (1971). Taking advantage of the cheap accommodation available in Hull,

he placed an advert in TimeOut magazine that read: ‘half-formed theatre company seeks

other half.’ The first incarnation of Hull Truck lived on one floor of a large house on Coltman

Street, signing on the dole “...the DHSS did more to subsidize arts in Britain than the Arts

Council ever did...”26

and using their ‘office’, the telephone box on the street outside, to

begin hustling for work. "I wanted to make theatre about the kind of people we were and the

kind of people we knew” Bradwell recalls: “There were not many plays being made that

reflected the problems, tribulations and politics of our generation. So we created plays."27

Cast members would be directed by Bradwell to devise a fictional character for which they

would create a complete life history, often existing as that person for the duration of the

research and rehearsal period, each working independently, until it was time to throw the

characters into a complex, usually communal or shared student house situation, from which

an improvised play would evolve. Touring new work was the main objective, and their first

van (the original Hull Truck) cost £35. They acquired most of their props and costumes from

rubbish skips.

The company's early existence was precarious. There were numerous changes in personnel.

Music always played a significant part. Indeed, cabaret shows, local band gigs and children’s

theatre provided much needed financial support and public exposure for the main purpose in

hand, the serious business of devising new experimental plays. The natural, earthy dialogue

and subject matter of this work, dealing as it did with the current preoccupations of young

people - sex, drugs and rock’n’roll - often caused offence, enthusiastically fanned by the local

press in the touring locations where they were due to appear, but, as is so often the case, the

Hull Daily Mail’s ‘peddlars of filth’28

label only served to generate local audiences and

enhance Hull Truck’s growing national reputation. Small grants from Yorkshire Arts

supplemented their budget. Bradwell also led a drama workshop as part of the Hull Regional

College of Art elective studies programme, producing several shows including a controversial

‘Marat/Sade’ at the Ferens Art Gallery in 1973. The breakthrough came in 1974 when they

took their new play ‘The Knowledge’ to the Bush Theatre in London. It ran for three weeks,

and they subsequently returned to the Bush with every new production for the next decade.

With an Arts Council bursary they reached the position in 1975 where they could afford to

appoint a full-time manager, local music promoter Barry Nettleton (who had briefly run The

Brick House, an arts lab and underground music venue on Baker Street in 1971), and Hull

Truck found that they had became a prominent force in British alternative theatre.

Bradwell decided to leave the city in 1982, claiming that: “Hull Truck had come a long way

in ten years, but we had certainly lost most of the pioneering zeal of the early days...We may

still have been regarded as a fringe company, but we were the acceptable face of the fringe,

and as such were perilously close to becoming the Establishment.”29

The company he

founded, having taken over the old Humberside Theatre on Spring Street in 1983, flourished

under his eventual successor John Godber. Popular plays such as ‘Bouncers’ and ‘Up 'n'

Under’, though a long way from Bradwell’s original raw and uncompromising vision, earned

them Olivier Awards, Los Angeles Critics' Circle Awards and commercial success.

Responding to a Terry Wogan interview with Godber in which he stated that he just wanted

to do plays that his mum and dad would like, Bradwell’s last word on Hull Truck and the city

that saw its inception was “I never went back.”30

After 26 years in creative control, Godber

resigned his role as artistic director of the company in 2010, the year after Hull Truck had

moved into its new £15m purpose-built theatre on Ferensway.

In fact Bradwell did return in 2012, together with many of the early company members, to

present a low-key, one-off production, “Original Truckers” at the new Hull Truck in the small

studio theatre to celebrate their fortieth anniversary, an event which proved so successful that

it had to be extended for a second night.

Hull School of Art & Design

A strong, creative presence in the city of Hull since 1861, the local art school has undergone

many changes in name and direction since its original remit to provide teachers, skilled

craftsmen and product designers for a flourishing and rapidly expanding Victorian city. From

its strict design school origins to the School of Arts & Crafts in the 1930s, through to the

Faculty of Art & Design Studies under the aegis of the University of Lincoln until 2004, it

has in its time been co-opted into a regional College of Higher Education, a Polytechnic and

the short-lived University of Humberside. The institution currently functions as the Hull

School of Art & Design, part of the Hull College Group based at Queens Gardens.

With specific regard to the area of Fine Art, the early 1970s saw an expansion of the

traditional disciplines of painting, sculpture, ceramics & print-making to embrace the

emerging practices of experimental film, performance art and what would eventually become

known as installation work. This development was reflected in activities throughout all but

the most traditional art schools in the U.K. To cite if I may a personal example, my own

graduation show in 1975 (the first year that the art college in Hull awarded BA degrees in

Fine Art & Graphic Design), included examples of abstract painting, 16 mm film, a

choreographed dance piece, and an installation with live interaction entitled “Percussion

Cubes for Four Performers,” staged at the Humberside Theatre, which included elements of

sculpture, sound and movement. My (to all intents and purposes self-appointed) supervising

tutors were a film-maker, Dr David Woods; a contemporary dancer & choreographer, Jeanne

Oldfield; and a musician, the drummer & pioneer of free improvisation, Eddie Prevost. I

mention this merely to illustrate the breadth of vision that was being generated in fine art

practice at this time, and the enthusiasm with which these new ideas were being embraced in

many, if not all quarters.

In 1983, the School of Fine Art in Hull appointed Rob Gawthrop, a film graduate of the

Royal College of Art and previous visiting lecturer, as a full time tutor in fine art film. Over

the next two decades, Gawthrop became Time-Based Media course leader, and eventually

Head of Art from 1999 to 2004. He amalgamated the new disciplines into a degree subject in

their own right, and in 1999 was able to introduce an honours level course for students

interested in developing the practice of sound art. At the time, Hull provided the only art

school in the UK where such a specialism existed. The Phonic Art BA course ran for four

years, attracting staff and students from as far away as Norway and Germany, until Gawthrop

parted company with the University of Lincoln in 2004.

Jez Riley French

Born in 1965, Hull resident Jez Riley French is fascinated and passionate about the infinite

detail and expanding vistas of life around us, its sights and sounds, often overlooked or

hidden. His creative output focuses on elements such as audible silence, active listening and

stillness. Jez has been exploring his enjoyment of detail, simplicity and emotive response to

places and situations for the past three decades using field recording, photography and

intuitive composition. His artistic contribution is recognised the world over and an audio

work was commissioned by Tate Modern for installation in 2013.

Using intuitive composition, field recording, improvisation and photography, Jez has been

exploring his enjoyment of detail, simplicity and his emotive response to places and

situations for over 3 decades. Alongside performances, exhibitions, installations, Jez lectures

and runs workshops on field recording and the act and art of listening. He also curates the

‘engraved glass’ label and the ‘a quiet position’ series of online releases /forums exploring

the broad ideas surrounding field recording as a primary art of sound / sound art. Recent work

includes commissions for Tate Modern (UK), Artisphere (USA) and for organisations in

Italy, Iceland, Japan, Spain and the UK. A section of his piece for Tate Modern was also

chosen to be part of the ‘500 years of British Art’ series at Tate Britain. In recent years Jez

has been working extensively on recordings of surfaces and spaces (natural and man-made)

and has also been developing the concept of photographic scores. He is particularly

associated with the development of extended recording techniques, including the recording of

structural vibrations, contact microphone recording, ultrasonics, infrasonics, internal

electronic signals via coil pick-up's and recordings made with hydrophones. Amongst his

works are pieces capturing the sound of the dolomites dissolving, ants consuming fallen fruit,

the Tate Modern building vibrating, the infrasound of domestic spaces around the world,

glaciers melting in Iceland and the tonal resonances of natural and human objects in the

landscape. His microphones have been used during filming and recording for David

Attenborough’s latest BBC series, “Planet Earth II”

In addition to his own work, Jez organised a series of concerts entitled “Seeds & Bridges”

which ran from 2006 to 2010. Using various local venues including pubs, clubs, galleries and

churches, often selected for their acoustic properties, experimental musicians and sound

artists from around the region, or of national and even international repute received the

opportunity to perform their work in Hull. http://jezrileyfrench.co.uk/

In 2017 as part of the Hull City of Culture celebrations, Jez Riley French has provided a

soundtrack to be performed and manipulated for orchestra and chorus, to be relayed

throughout the year on the Humber Bridge where: “The deep sounds of the bridge are captured

by Hull-based sound artist Jez Riley French and performed by the Orchestra and Chorus of Opera

North, all experienced through headphones...The Humber Bridge takes centre stage as Opera North

turns this iconic structure into a living, breathing piece of music composed by Norwegian trumpeter

Arve Henriksen and collaborators Jan Bang and Eivind Aarset...The walk across the bridge is

transformed by glorious music and otherworldly soundscape to become both an epic journey and an

intimate whisper in your ear.”31

Other Musics/Open Performance Group/Hull Film Collective 1982-85

In 1980 an attempt was made, possibly not for the first time, to start a Musician’s Collective

in Hull. Provided with a platform by Humberside Theatre manager Jon Marshall to perform

in the foyer and bar on Saturday lunchtimes under the title ‘Other Musics’, a nucleus of

players with interests beyond commercial rock and pop music used this opportunity to

develop their more experimental projects. Early participants included jazz-rock fusion band

‘Jackpot & The Bandits’ led by keyboardist/composer Martin Glover (1952 -2005); a free

improvising trio, ‘ECT’ comprising bassist Dave Ellis, guitarist Pete Cox and saxophonist

Andy Tomlinson; and a large, rambling street band called ‘The Windbreakers’, inspired as

much by the outdoor music of ‘Welfare State International’ (whose musical directors had

included jazz composer Mike Westbrook and improvising saxophonist Lol Coxhill), as the

anarchic, orchestral music-debunking, art school antics of the infamous Portsmouth

Symphonia. The Windbreakers, directed by Dave Ellis, comprised a nucleus of around half a

dozen regular performers, mostly brass and wind players tackling everything from

renaissance dance tunes to African township jazz and collective free improvisation, but was

essentially available to anyone with an open mind and an unplugged, preferably weatherproof

instrument who felt they had something to contribute.

Other Musics’ weekly live sessions came to an end with the closure of Humberside Theatre

in 1981, but the name was revived in 1983 when Dave Ellis and Lee Moodie began

promoting experimental music performances in the city art galleries. Initially funded by

Lincolnshire & Humberside Arts, and with venue costs met by the Hull City Council Leisure

& Recreation Department, the programmes were rapidly expanded to include examples of

experimental cinema and performance art. Arts Council funding for regional touring projects

provided a supply of artists and musicians, often from among the membership of the London

Musicians Collective, while Rob Gawthrop, recently appointed film lecturer at the Hull

School of Art, would programme examples of experimental cinema, frequently featuring the

work of fellow members of the London Filmmaker’s Co-Op.

With this modest source of subsidy assured, at least for the time being, ‘Other Musics’ in

Hull soon began to forge links with like-minded groups operating in Leeds and Sheffield to

offer an informal touring network of gigs. This also encouraged an exchange of ideas and

performing opportunities among local and regional experimentalists. As a result,

representatives from the regions were invited to participate in the guitarist Derek Bailey’s

Company Week 1988 International Festival of Improvised Music at the I.C.A. in London.

Bailey’s biographer, Ben Watson writes: “In 1988...Bailey announced that Free

Improvisation was healthier outside the metropolis...(he) sought to expose the musicians he

had encountered in ‘places as different as Grantham and Chatanooga...’”32

A large group of

musicians from the USA, Holland, Germany, Iceland and various regions of the UK were

invited, including “...bassist David Ellis from Hull, who’d been improvising since sitting in

with the People Band in the late sixties and playing gigs with Eddie Prevost and Lol

Coxhill...Hull was also represented by trumpeter Martin Jones, a trad jazz entertainer...who

was ‘corrupted’ into avantgarerie...”33

Several of those involved in Company Week 88,

including Ellis and Jones, were also members of the Improviser’s big band ‘Feetpackets’, led

by Sheffield-based saxophonist Mick Beck, which undertook three ACGB sponsored tours

and released a CD, ‘Listen’ (1989), the first album produced in this format on Martin

Archer’s Discus label.

At the same time as ‘Other Musics’ was becoming established, Rob Gawthrop had also

started to organize a film-makers collective. Meanwhile, a group of final year students on the

Fine Art course at Hull College of Higher Education with a mutual interest in producing live

work had formed the Open Performance Group. In February 1984 the first of an annual series

of experimental art festivals took place in Hull, organised by OPG members. Based at the art

faculty building on Queen’s Gardens and called ’60 Hours’, student work in film,

performance and time-based media was presented during the day, and a series of public

performances took place at the Posterngate Gallery on three consecutive evenings in

collaboration with ‘Other Musics’, concluding with memorable performances by saxophonist

Lol Coxhill (who stopped playing in order to shave his head at one point) and Leeds based

pianist Jack Glover at the Hull School of Architecture.

Later the same year informal meetings began, initially arranged by the filmmakers group in

order to address the specific lack of regional funding for their area of activity. In the light of

recent collaborations, Dave Ellis from Other Musics and performance artist Karen Rann,

representing the Open Performance Group, were also invited to join these discussions.

Members began working closely together, formulating principles and applying for finances

for sustained creative development. Thus were sown the seeds of a live art and time-based

media collective, with the first group event being held at the Ferens Art Gallery in November

1984.

Hull Time Based Arts 1984 – 2006

Hull Time Based Arts was formally constituted at an inaugural annual general meeting which

took place on 16 July 1985 at the Posterngate Gallery. The Annual Hull Experimental Art

Festival continued under the aegis of HTBA, initially in collaboration with the HCHE Arts

Faculty Research Committee, and co-ordinated by Dave Ellis until 1987. This event attracted

student submissions from across the country, with evenings of professional work funded by

either Lincolnshire & Humberside Arts or ACGB Regional Touring Networks, and presented

in the city galleries. With substantial grants from the ACGB for educational and research

development being made available from 1987, HTBA was able to bring international live art

work to the city for the first time with a visit from Australian group ‘Told by an Idiot’ in

1988. That same year a salaried part-time co-ordinator post was created, the position going to

Mike Stubbs, where he remained, eventually as Director, until 1999.

After holding regular meetings in cold, draughty studios or the function rooms of various old

town pubs for a number of years (the bar staff of Ye Olde Black Boy on High Street would

book HTBA in as the Hull Time Base Darts Team), the first office premises were acquired at

Number 8, Posterngate in 1988. This enabled serious long-term planning and programme

organisation to commence. As a result, twenty-three HTBA events were scheduled that year,

more than the total number held over the previous three years since the group’s inception.

From that point on regular film and video screenings, contemporary jazz, free improvisation,

electro-acoustic and world music concerts, exhibitions and commissioned performance art

pieces became HTBA’s regular stock-in-trade.

As a rule these took place in conventional spaces such as theatres or municipal art galleries,

but provocative open air performances engaging the general public became an increasing

feature, work regarded as dangerous and ‘political’ by the local press and on one particular

occasion provoking the ire of Hull’s Lord Mayor who removed his chain of office in order to

remonstrate with the performers as an ordinary member of the public. Jo Millett writes: “This

piece was called ‘Monument’(1989) but then became known as Throwing Stones in the Town

Square. The work was part of the Hull Festival whose theme was the French revolution.

There was a call for participants to take part in a one week workshop. ‘Monument’ was made

by Man Act to commemorate the {200th anniversary of} the storming of the Bastille. They

performed with rocks in the square, throwing them down. The local newspaper the Hull

Daily Mail took umbrage saying “Hull’s furious Lord Mayor Councillor John Stanley

watched on in disbelief as street artists hurled rocks on to the newly re-paved Queen Victoria

Square. The stones were smashed on the pavement beside the statue and on the steps of the

underground toilets. The Mayor tore off his chain of office to launch a bitter harangue at the

performance artists, for what he called ‘wanton vandalism’.”34

Despite, or perhaps because of these occasional high-profile run-ins with authority, HTBA

continued to thrive. Various other outdoor public events were permitted to take place in and

around the city centre, including Queen Victoria Square, and arts funding increased

exponentially year by year. The Posterngate building provided secure accommodation for a

growing collection of loan-able media equipment and video editing facilities. 1989 saw a

name change, to Hull Time Based Arts Limited, the organization having become incorporated

as a secondary co-operative, membership requiring a one-off payment of one pound as a non-

refundable share.

Commissions in collaboration with the annual Hull Civic Festival continued with members of

HTBA serving on the organizing committee. 1990 brought a series of local school-based

workshops and a performance on Victoria Pier by environmental sound artists (and sonic

playground builders) ‘Echo City’. The following year Paul Burwell brought the ‘Bow

Gamelan Ensemble’ to the same location for a return performance (this group had made their

first pyrotechnic appearance in Hull at the Ferens Art Gallery promoted by Other Musics in

1984). Dave Ellis, who co-ordinated both these events, would continue his active association

with Hull Time Based Arts until the early nineties. In 1992 the first ROOT (Running out of

Time) Festival in collaboration with the Ferens Art Gallery (which now boasted a unique

dedicated live art space) took place throughout November. This international showcase of

live and time based art would continue annually until 2002. Mike Stubbs resigned his role as

Director of HTBA in 1999, many of the responsibilities having already been taken over by

Gillian Dyson who had been appointed to the role of Project Co-ordinator in 1996. By this

time the organization had moved to extensive new premises at 42, High Street. Known as

TimeBase, it comprised the ground floor of a riverside warehouse in the historic old town

near to the museum quarter, with space for public exhibitions, film & video projections,

installation work and small-scale live performances, in addition to audio/visual editing

facilities, office and administrative space. A comprehensive survey of HTBA’s “becomings”

and output to date was published in 1997 entitled ‘Out of Time’ and edited by Andrea

Phillips. Gillian Dyson remained in post until 2000 when the revived role of director was

taken on by Kathy Rae Huffman, who was in turn succeeded by Walter van der Cruijsen in

2002.

The eleventh and final ROOT International Festival took place in 2002. The following year a

considerably reduced three-day event, The LAW (Live Art Weekend) was held from June 27

-29 including visiting artists from Scandinavia. However, by this point HTBA, always more

highly regarded outside the city than within, was fast becoming a victim of its own

overreaching ambition and was indeed running out of time. Van der Cruijsen’s resignation

barely two years after his appointment had already been preceded by that of HTBA chairman

Rob Gawthrop in 2004, who had occupied the position almost continuously since the group’s

inception two decades earlier. He was succeeded as chair by Isabelle Tracy, who, together

with a hastily assembled committee of directors representing the various interests at stake,

had the unenviable task of overseeing the demise of HTBA. Arts Council England had

decided to cut annual funding to the organization by seventy-five per cent in 2005, (by 2004

it had amounted to nearly £250,000) resulting in the redundancy of all nine salaried

employees. ACE explained: “...we identified that HTBA was going through difficulties in

terms of scale, how it was structured and whether it delivered or not. In our view increasingly

it wasn't."35

In total HTBA had presented over a thousand performances, exhibitions, installations and

film/video screenings in Britain and Europe, as well as commissioning more than 250 new

works over a twenty year period, and provided support and a valuable creative environment

for local, national and international artists to produce thought-provoking, experimental work

in the city.

Ferens Art Gallery Live Art Space

In building a new art gallery for the city of Hull (opened in 1927), local industrialist,

politician and philanthropist Thomas Ferens (1847-1930) provided adequate space and

acquisition funding for a growing permanent collection of art to be kept on regular display.

In 1989, work began on a long-overdue major extension of the gallery that would allow these

collections to remain on view whilst also accommodating a programme of visiting

exhibitions. The extension provided three new galleries, a new cafe, additional offices and an

auditorium, effectively doubling the gallery's public display space. The auditorium became

known as the Live Art Space, with sound system, drop down screen and projection booth,

capable of accommodating up to 200 visitors for events on a banked, retractable seating

array.

The need for such a provision had come about from the initiatives provided by Other Musics,

and later Hull Time Based Arts, who had been using the existing gallery space for evenings

of experimental sound works since 1983. However, the proximity of ‘old masters’ on the

walls had often caused concern, particularly with regard to some of the more messy and

exuberant live art performances scheduled. The Posterngate Gallery in the old town had also

provided exhibition and performance space under the aegis of Lincolnshire & Humberside

Arts who based their north bank operations there between 1977 and 1988 when it was taken

over by the Museums Service while the gallery extension work was taking place at the

Ferens. Artists’ studio space was also made available on the upper floors, used by the founder

members of Hull Artists Association from 1982 until they moved into their own building on

the High Street. Other venues pressed into service for the growing interest in presenting live

art included the Hull Library Film Theatre, and the Mortimer Suite of exhibition rooms to the

rear of the City Hall.

With the formation of Hull Time Based Arts in 1985 resulting in an increasingly healthy

programme of events and festivals, the need for a dedicated indoor space was becoming self

evident. The first live art curator was Mark Waddell, appointed in 1990, and regular

performances of experimental work continued there until the millennium, by which time the

hire cost had become prohibitive.

Paul Burwell and the Kingston Rowing Club

Described in his Wikipedia entry as “...a British thaumaturge and percussionist, influential in

the fields of free improvisation and experimental art,”36

poet, musician and performance

artist Paul Burwell (1949 – 2007) first visited Hull in December 1984, together with his long-

term creative partners Anne Bean and Richard Wilson, at the invitation of ‘Other Musics’.

They staged an incendiary performance by the Bow Gamelan Ensemble in the centre court

of the Ferens Arts Gallery, which culminated in an encore inadvertently provided by the local

fire brigade who responded right on cue to an alarm call after smoke detectors set themselves

off elsewhere in the building.

Burwell did have a previous connection with the city, his father’s family having lived for

generations in the Holderness Road area. With strong theatrical and music hall links, William

Burwell and his wife, dancer Brenda Culley from York, had moved to London where he

eventually became head of BBC Television Centre’s props and set design department. Born

in 1949, Paul Burwell was educated onboard HMS Worcester, a 19th century wooden frigate

turned into a naval training establishment which was moored at Greenhithe. He subsequently

attended Ealing College of Art (where drummer John Stevens ran music improvisation

workshops) and the Royal College of Art where he obtained an M.A. for his work in

Environmental Media. Active as a jobbing drummer from leaving school, Burwell, who was a

founder member of the experimental London Musicians Collective, also took lessons from

big band player Max Abrams which gave him a solid grounding in many jazz and popular

music styles.

Following a performance by the Bow Gamelan Ensemble at the Ferens Art Gallery in 1984,

Burwell became a regular visiting lecturer at Hull School of Art & Design and received

several commissions to produce work locally via Hull Time Based Arts. These included the

organisation’s first major ACGB funded Performance in Education commission ‘Drums

Along the Humber’ staged in 1987 with the assistance of students from the School of Art &

Design. In 1991 there was a second performance by Bow Gamelan on Victoria Pier as part of

the Hull Festival, and in 1999 he produced and directed a large-scale outdoor pyrotechnic

event on the River Hull to celebrate the opening of the annual ROOT Festival at HTBA’s

new premises on High Street.

In 2000 Burwell was awarded an Arts Council England ‘Year of the Artist’ bursary, together

with local artist Alistair ‘Harry’ Palmer, which enabled them to purchase the old Kingston

Rowing Club premises on the banks of the River Hull. This comprised a two-storey club-

house, suitable for living accommodation and administration, a large boat shed which became

their studio and performance space, all contained in a fenced-off and secluded half-acre of

land located in a remote wooded corner of the expansive Oak Road playing fields. “Strictly

speaking Hull Boathouse was not a public space, but a private one”, says Jo Millett

“...however Paul Burwell’s open attitude meant that it was effectively {public} as anyone

could go in for one of the events.”37

The relationship with Palmer was short lived, but not

before several community projects had been initiated. Burwell would reside at the KRC for

the last seven years of his life, turning it into a thriving alternative arts space with room to

devise new works, develop programmes, stage many multi-media events and outdoor

performances and generally encourage experimentation. Burwell’s long-term collaborator,

performance artist Anne Bean, commended his open (non) curatorial approach: “Kingston

Rowing Club in Hull had “an open policy where astonishing, straight-from-the-soul work has

occurred continuing some of the spirit of spaces such as London Musicians Collective,

London Film-Makers Co-op and X6 Butlers Wharf. In far too many ‘professionally’ curated

shows one sees the heavy fingerprints of the ticked boxes, which although treated with a

degree of irony, are actually strangling many of the most brave and innovative gallerists.”38

Several freight containers were added to the permanent structures on site, one housing an

extensive collection of percussion instruments from around the world, while the largest,

complete with turf roof, served as Burwell’s remarkable library of books, recorded music and

personal archive material. Using his own reputation as a performance artist, Burwell would

invite many of his renowned peers to put in an appearance in Hull. Visiting performers of

national and international repute mixed readily with local artists and musicians. The Oak

Road area’s residents were also drawn to the spectacular, often pyrotechnic celebrations, and

Burwell quickly established himself as a well-known, if frequently volatile, local character.

Following his untimely death in February 2007, the site was maintained by a dedicated group

of Burwell acolytes calling themselves the Legal Squatters, essentially led by sound/computer

artist Brian Gilson who also cultivated the enclosed area of land surrounding the buildings,

referring to this project as the Kingston gRowing Club. Despite occasional events and

performances still taking place and small businesses setting up on the site over the next few

years, legal wrangles over actual ownership were never satisfactorily resolved. In addition,

Burwell’s boatshed project has always been subject to unwanted attention from anti-social

elements and the local vandals eventually won out, the last surviving building being

destroyed by fire in 2014.

Hull Art Lab

Out of the ashes of HTBA, albeit briefly, came Hull Art Lab. It was the brainchild of Rob

Gawthrop (having by this time parted company with both HTBA and HSAD), together with

Norwegian sound/ performance artist Espen Jensen and film-maker Ruth ‘Bob’ Levene. In

2004 they acquired a recently vacated potato warehouse scheduled for demolition, on a short-

term, annually renewable lease. The inaugural event actually took place at a well-known

night spot, The Welly Club, on October 11, 2004. A strong Scandinavian element featuring

performances by Ultralyd from Norway; Teig Mowry Hedlund with Elektro Diesel aka Chris

Gladwin and Espen Jensen; and an impromptu freely improvised set provided by the trio of

saxophonist Frode Gjerstad, bassist Dave Ellis and Paul Burwell on drums.

Situated at 53, Humber Street in the former fruit market district, Hull Art Lab was established

as an artist-run organisation to enable and facilitate the development of contemporary art

through a diverse program of events, residencies & exhibitions to challenge, surprise,

question, inspire and entertain. Emphasis was placed upon innovation, risk, artistic integrity

and the creation of new work.

HAL might well claim in retrospect to having inadvertently spearheaded the revival and

renaissance of the area as a creative community, but sadly the project did not survive long

enough to take full advantage of its location. Running for just over two years, HAL closed in

2007 when insufficient funds were made available to renew the lease and produce a

programme of events. Had the project survived for just another year they would have been in

a far better position to negotiate a longer tenure. The three originators left the city, Gawthrop

to Falmouth, Jensen to Oslo, and Levene to Sheffield.

Although scheduled for redevelopment as part of the River Hull Corridor programme,

Humber Street was ‘saved’ to all intends and purposed by the banking fiasco of 2008 when

property developers pulled out and the scheme was put on hold. Artists moved into the

warehouses and office spaces, suddenly available at temporary, ‘pepper-corn’ rents, setting

up studios and galleries which in turn attracted pop-up shops and cafes. The area had really

started to buzz by 2010. A bar and live music/theatre venue called ‘Fruit’ opened, a Museum

of Club Culture was established by artist Mark Wigan, a recording studio made an

appearance, and annual events such as the Hull Folk Festival and ‘The Sesh,’ small-scale at

first but quickly expanding, began to take place in various venues and open air stages in the

Humber Street area, on the marina and riverfront.

The Hull Art Lab warehouse building was finally demolished in 2014 in order to

accommodate the new Centre for Digital Innovation.

Conclusion

It has been a relatively simple matter to pull together the threads of individuals, groups and

organizations that have carried the torch of ‘edgy’ art in Hull over a forty year period

between 1970 and 2010 as they largely fall within my sphere of involvement and experience.

It is only right that much of this activity should be celebrated during City of Culture 2017 but,

mindful of John Fox’s warning that nostalgia dulls reality, I am increasingly aware that, if

this tradition is ongoing, then I am perhaps not the best placed person to report and comment

on it. Advancing years and niggling infirmities, combined with the inexorable, if long resisted

interchange of narrow waist and broad mind, mean that I don’t get out so much as I should

these days. This survey opens and closes with two very short-lived ventures, The Brick

House and distinctly retro-sounding Hull Art Lab, which none the less both embodied the

spirit of high-risk, edgy experimentalism.

In an era when the creative arts in all their manifold forms are facing severe threat from

Government cuts and under investment, the future looks bleak in terms of developing, not

only a future generation of original thinkers and makers, but also an informed and involved

audience for anything other than high profile, popular celebrity-led, crass commercialism.

Only satire looks like to could be having a field day over the next few years.

New developments in Hull along the lines of ventures such as Hull Time Based Arts, Hull

Art Lab or the Burwell Boatshed project, seem thin on the ground at present I am sure I will

be reprimanded for many deserving omissions, but to my mind at least one enterprising group

of ex-art students deserve mention. They have got together to run the Ground Studios &

Gallery in an old shop and offices on Beverley Road. With studios on two floors upstairs, the

ground floor exhibition space is already being used for film shows, poetry readings, music

improvisation workshops and live art performances.

With regard to the spoken word, Hull’s one-off ranting poet and performance artist, Yol,

continues his righteous agitation and berating of conformity in a loud voice, currently

involved in transatlantic collaborations with avant guitarist Miguel Perez, Yol is “... making

noise alongside text/performance/visual art. He believes you can get a tune out of anything,

he just prefers not to.”39

Meanwhile the numerous, more conventional local poetry groups

such as ‘Away with Words’ and ‘The Imaginary Garden’ are opening up, with varying

degrees of acceptance or reluctance, to experimental performance poetry as well as the more

inevitable rap and hip-hop influences.

Computer artist Brian G. Gilson is currently exploring a sub-genre of digital art that he calls

"audio-graphical composition" - time-limited works that use interactive generative graphics

to control digital audio synthesis. One thing he thinks might be interesting is that this

approach opens up the possibility of creating works for interpretive performance.

The city’s two most long-standing dedicated practitioners on the broad canvas of

experimental music, John Stead and Jez Riley French, continue to plough their distinct,

respective, often solitary furrows, Stead as electro/acoustic composer in the modernist avant-

garde tradition http://www.cix.co.uk/~wooler/, and Riley French predominantly active in the

arena of sound art and field recordings. Among a younger generation of experimentalists,

SquareWaves is an improvising collective of Hull electronic artists. Originally brought

together by a compilation album showcasing their talents individually, they are now

exploring what they can make together.

With Hull City of Culture 2017 now upon us, the past achievements of COUM

Transmissions, HTBA and the work of Basil Kirchin are being officially celebrated.

However, the legacy of John Fox & Sue Gill, Mike Bradwell and Paul Burwell have (so far at

least) not been ‘officially’ recognized, although Ground Gallery will host a weekend of

Burwell/Boathouse related events in April, curated by Brian G. Gilson. This can be seen as

part of an already burgeoning fringe representing that aforementioned idiosyncratic sub-

culture - perhaps best described today as City of Hull’s Culture - present for many years

before 2017, and hopefully remaining active and evolving for a long time afterwards.

NOTES

1 Dunn, Douglas (ed.): ‘A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull’ Forward by Philip Larkin p.4. Bloodaxe Books,

Hexham 1982 2 Burwell, Paul: “To Hull & Back”. Interview with Dave Ellis broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM 2004 3 Millett, Dr Jo: “Over the horizon: residues of critical art practice in the public realm” Unpublished lecture notes. Falmouth University March 2015 4 Ibid. 5 Fox, John: ‘Eyes on Stalks’ p. Methuen, London 2002 6 Bradwell, Mike: ‘The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre’ p. 119. Nick Hern Books,

London 2010 7 Plater, Alan: ‘Doggin’ Around’ p .62. Northway Publications, London 2006

8 Ibid. p. 62

9 Ibid. p. 62

10 Ibid p. 43 11 http://henrybebop.co.uk/kirchin.htm 12 Herd, Keith 13 Kirchin, Basil: Interview. Times Newspaper 2003 14

J-Night: http://www.prsformusicfoundation.com/grantees/new-music-biennial-gogopenguin/ 15 Guardian Guide November 2001 16Fox, John: Op Cit p. 17 Dees, Liz: Email correspondence with Dave Ellis. September 2016. 18 Fox, John: ‘Eyes on Stalks, not Bums on Seats’ Article. Guardian Newspaper. 4 January 2006 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/jan/04/theatre. 19 Ibid 20

Ibid 21 Ibid 22 Bradwell, Mike: Op Cit p. 119 23 http://www.weirdretro.org.uk/the-wreckers-of-western-civilisation-coum-transmissions.html 24 Partridge, Christopher: ‘Esoterrorism and the Wrecking of Civilization: Genesis P-Orridge and the Rise of Industrial Paganism’. p. 200 Acumen, Durham 2013 25 Bradwell, Mike: Op Cit p. 115 26 Ibid p. 117 27 Ibid p. 115 28 Ibid p. 132 29 Ibid p. 193 30 Ibid p. 197 31 https://www.hull2017.co.uk/app/uploads/2016/09/H2017_PRESSRELEASE_MADEINHULL.pdf. p.5 32 Watson, Ben: ‘Derek Bailey and the Story of free Improvisation’ p. 256 Verso, London 2013 33 Ibid p. 257 34 Millett, Dr Jo: Op Cit. p. 35 Ibid p. 36 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Burwell 37

Millett, Dr Jo: Op Cit 38

Ibid. p. 39

http://www.tegleg.co.uk/yol.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradwell, Mike: The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre NHB, London 203 Coult, Tony & Kershaw, Baz (eds.): Engineers of the Imagination: The Welfare State Handbook Methuen London 1983 Ford, Simon: Wreckers of Civilization: The Story of COUM Transmissions

Black Dog London 1999 Fox, John: Eyes on Stalks Methuen London 2002 Plater, Alan: Doggin’ Around Northway London 2006 Phillips, Andrea (ed.): Out of Time: Hull Time Based Arts 1984-98 HTBA Hull 1997 Watson, Ben: Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation Verso London 2013 Exhibition Catalogues TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell (DVD & Newsprint) Matt’s Gallery Dilston Grove,

London September 2010 Published Notes and Journals

Hull Arts Centre Group: Application for Grants” 1967 Hull Arts Centre Group: “The Living Arts” 1969 Hull Arts Centre Association: Information Bulletin March 1970 Humberside Bystander: “A report on the Work of the Lincolnshire & Humberside Arts Association” July/August 1973 Prospice: “Hull Art Scene” 1969 p.40 Unpublished Notes

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