Artist Jude Montague, ever interested in the history of radio and TV, has produced a lively and sometimes extraordinary graphic novel, detailing the beginnings of radio in Manchester. It’s a personal story, featuring (among a cast of dozens) her grandfather Sydney Wright and his wife Marjorie. Sydney was a cellist in a trio (playing in a Manchester picture house) who were recruited to take part in the second BBC broadcast from Metropolitan Vickers, which was the next broadcasting base after Marconi’s and named 2ZY.

It was a unique era – four years after the end of the unspeakable carnage of WW1, launching radio all over the country in a year that was, internationally, exceptionally creative in all the Arts, 1922 being an annus mirabilis for so many literary, artistic and social pioneers. A handful of these intrepid innovators broadcast live music, the first children’s programs, news, and French lessons, all from a tiny makeshift studio at an engineering works with a dominant, newly-built radio tower.

Montague has re-imagined her grandparents’ history in the context of the cultural history of the era, from the crackling of an aerial in 1920, and the birth of experimental wireless stations, to the first long distance ‘radio relay’ transmission, inaugurated at 2ZY and represented in Jude’s book with comparative sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the radio tower at Metrovicks. Her rapid drawings and text cover the pages in a random format, plentifully interspersed with dream sequences, word associations, vignette sketches of Manchester (a Lowry-like depiction of the entrance to Metropolitan Vickers covers a page, for instance), old train carriages, war tombstones (with a list of first names), a sequence of a woman chatting and cutting her hair into a bob (so significant for the flappers of the time), woman-to-woman conversations about the replacement of silk stockings and lingerie by exciting man-made nylon fibre equivalents, and the then thriving tailoring business in the North. At one stage the protagonists fly in a biplane – presumably a Vickers.

NO FEAR OF FLYING

It’s an unashamed, fascinating, and rather wonderful brain dump, arising out of Montague’s undeniable facility with pen, brush and design straight on to the page, and some cogent research. There are scans of newspaper articles and old photos at the back, which for me could have done with enlarging, as they look as though they might help to indicate the trajectory of the narrative, but only the headlines are big enough to read. Even the title has a generous assemblage of meanings – the ‘air’ as in broadcasting ‘on the air’, the network, the ‘air’ as in the surrounding culture, the ‘air’ as in the general Zeitgeist, the anxiety and exhilaration of creating a New Age. And there’s flying in the air too – a proliferation of owls, dreams of flying, and (when listeners started to write in to the station) a reference to a local story about a flamingo lost from the park. There are incidental chats about spiritualism, the opening of a box radiating the ‘energies’ of jewels (remember crystal sets?), the ‘crackle and the static of the air that waits’ – ‘so luscious – a spirit language’, all rapidly and copiously illustrated. And there’s a page on which the rows of Manchester terraces ‘seem to know a New Age is dawning’.

The introductions, by broadcaster and radio historian Paul Kerensa and musician Alan Hempsall, ex Manchester band Joy Division (now of Crispy Ambulance), are essential reading. They help to ground the reader in the narrative, which digresses so plentifully (sometimes wildly) through local and national culture of the time. The novel’s form, however, exactly echoes the content: it was the age of random and sometimes unintentional discovery, of burial of the past and celebration of the new, of an incorporation of science and technology into art (partly via the Futurists and the Vorticists) and the dismantling of representational tradition and the re-evaluation of Art itself. And if you get slightly confused about who’s who in Montague’s plethora of characters, and whether the illustrations are about imagined conversations or real social history, well then you’re into the moment of creation, as they all were.

What’s In the Air can be obtained from Montague Armstrong on 15 Kings Road (open Sats) any time, or online at montaguearmstrong.com. Book launch, readings, and presentations at Hastings Book Festival, 3 September

Due to be released in August is an album written entirely by pianist John Donaldson, founder of Jazz Hastings. We Were Together, I Forget the Rest, dedicated to his late wife Agatha Coffey, is an absolute joy. Surely one of the most underrated talents on the British jazz scene, Donaldson has assembled a fine octet and produced seven outstanding tracks that showcase both his own compositional prowess and the particular gifts of each artist.

Who knew how well the idiosyncratic vocals of Rebeka Edlund and the (now octogenarian, still indomitable) Norma Winstone would combine, for example? And then Rob Luft, clearly one of the UK’s foremost jazz guitarists, employs characteristic technical brilliance and tasteful restraint on each number. Drummer Jeff Ballard has long been universally in demand – listen to his work on Evening Song for example, alongside the joint vocals, and you’ll immediately understand why. Mason’s bass throughout is unobtrusively faultless. Iain Ballamy’s soprano sound, too, is exactly right – on Agatha’s Song, say, which maintains a lilting, piano-led 5/4 riff while the horn blows across it – haunting, free, occasionally ecstatic.

The tunes have style and sensitivity without over-complexity. The careful arrangements, which along with the rhythmic variety, lend novelty to every number, and the audible, almost-palpable, commitment of all the musicians, make this one of the most memorable jazz releases of 2026. While totally new, the album’s sound contains within it all the best of British jazz over the past fifty years. It’s also particularly well produced: balanced without sounding over-slick, carefully dynamic with dramatic interludes, enriched with melodic diversity and overall that elusive thing, swing.

You can find a sample on our website at tinyurl.com/47hb24j7. CD features John Donaldson (composer, piano), Iain Ballamy (sax), Rob Luft (gtr), Tom Mason (bass), Rebecka Edlund, Norma Winstone (vocals), Jeff Ballard (drums), Graeme Flowers (trumpet) Hexagonal Records, releasing August 2026. Production and artwork by Gregory Heath.

Joseph Stannard is an enthusiast. He loves music and he loves film. When he isn’t editing record reviews in a music journal, he is exploring the paranormal. “I’ve always been interested in the paranormal, the supernatural, and … weird music as well” he says.

While living in Brighton he noticed that a lot of music was influenced by horror, and that there were also a lot of horror films that featured experimental soundtrack music So he organised something called The Outer Church, a series of events which combined the two. They toured, in the UK and abroad, for about five years. He tried London but wanted to get back to the sea, and was eventually attracted by the rich occult history in Hastings.

Watching The Stimming Pool he realised that The Electric Palace, which appears in the film, was a beautiful Hastings venue, and began planning an event series to happen here. His event names come from the mind of Grant Morrison, who drew and scripted The Invisibles for DC Comics. It turns out in the end that the Outer Church and the Invisible College are actually two sides of the same organisation. Historically, The Invisible College was a name for the group of individuals, including Robert Boyle, who eventually founded The Royal Society.“It’s good to pay attention to synchronicities” continues Stannard. So, about his move from an outer church to an invisible college, he remarks “you could say I’ve moved from the ecclesiastical to the educational.” 

The Invisible Collage Vol I – puts together of some of the music he has assembled for the event (track list at the end of this article) 

The first event will show the film Body Melt (“there’s a lot of slime and gruesomeness, and it’s very splattery, very day glow”, he continues) directed by well-respected film writer Philip Brophy. Essentially the film has been called ‘the Substance before The Substance’ – though on a much lower budget – and features the horrors of Big Pharma, and Ian Smith (Harold Bishop from Neighbours) on a gun-toting rampage.

The evening will also feature live artists Trigger Objects and Dream Skills, both of whom make music that is thoroughly in keeping with this kind of film. “A lot of the stuff I put on is stuff I really love, and if other people like it, then hopefully it will bring out other freaks.” There is also of course a considerable tranche of avant-garde musicians in Hastings who might well be interested in this series of events, which with Stannard’s combination of enthusiasm and expertise, is sure to be a success.

The Invisible College will present as a special event at the Electric Palace Cinema on Sunday 16 August. For more details see electricpalacecinema.com. Mixtape tracklist as follows:

All these questions and more will be answered in the fabulously quirky one man show at the Hastings Arts Forum in St. Leonards on Sea.

A two-week show kicks off on 10 July with a private viewing with wine and snacks from 6pm to 8pm to meet Bill sporting a brand new, never seen before seagull T-shirt, designed and hand painted by the artist himself. It’s so new he hasn’t painted it yet!

The exhibition runs until 19 July at 20 Marine Court, St. Leonards. TN38 0DX

Soft-spoken and unassuming, Paul Wertico becomes, behind his kit, a force to reckon with. You can hear why he remained for many years the lynchpin of the Pat Metheny band, and why his lifelong list of awards, recordings, professorships, books, and compositions is unrivalled. Hence his lead, in a rapidly organised session on a normally quiet Monday night in Hastings, resulted in a superb one-off.

He flew in from Copenhagen, and along with acclaimed jazz/fusion guitarist Enrico Pinna, was joined by tenor/soprano maestra Josephine Davies, the Monk-like spare piano sounds of Joss Peach, and the mellow unflinching bass of local luminary Terry Pack – these last three work together as (most of) Pack’s Full Circle. Nobody knew what was going to happen, Wertico announced, but that was jazz: experiencing the moment.

Under his unobtrusive but definitive direction, his elegant fills, faultless time, intuitive dynamics, and technical brilliance, that moment rapidly expanded into two exceptional sets. Beginning with a pensive line from Davies, the music morphed into an exploratory guitar/bass alternating riff session. A subsequent blues-based number, in which Davies’ concentrated awareness and clarity absolutely shone, clearly drew the attention and response of Pinna and his guitar. Together the two emerged as a formidable duo lead – outstanding renditions of ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ (we all hope for that, don’t we? said the woman on my left) and ‘Willow Weep For Me’ – favourites which, in lesser hands than these, could have sounded trite (overshadowed by so many immortal renditions) but instead settled in, moved forward, developed, and transfixed a wildly enthusiastic, capacity audience.

The second half progressed seamlessly through free-improv to ‘Open Water’ (from Full Circle’s latest CD) and finally into the modalities of ‘Impressions’, foregrounding not only Davies’ unique, windswept soprano inventions, but also Pinna’s incisive, casually brilliant work on a supreme electric guitar that he had custom made from a vintage Steinberger (a firm specialising in minimalist, headless instruments) and which Pinna finished himself with dye and wax, pickups and other hardware. A completely original evening in all directions then – but that’s jazz: experiencing the moment…

So Jazz Hastings has moved to Barnaby’s with a definite, defiant, noise. The jazz musicians who have always played here because they love it now have a new outlet and potentially a double-sized audience. There are whispers that Barnaby’s may have to expand to the next-door building …

Paul Wertico played at Barnaby’s Jazz Lounge on 15 June, and went on the day after to The Jailhouse at Arundel. All a quick trip from Copenhagen, where until 27 June he is taking part in a three-week tour with The Doky Brothers, whose eponymous gold-winning 1996 album featured The Brecker Brothers and Curtis Stigers. Further information: paulwertico.com, Barnaby’s at barnabyslounge.co.uk, and many tracks on Bandcamp tinyurl.com/Wertico 

Hastings Castle will welcome The HandleBards to the West Hill on Friday 10 July for a riotous open-air production of Macbeth, marking a significant step in the Castle’s long-term ambition to become a regular destination for touring outdoor performance.

Amongst the ancient ruins, audiences are invited to bring blankets or low-backed chairs, and enjoy a playful Shakespearean production with a dramatic seascape backdrop. Perfect for an impassioned soliloquy or two!

The HandleBards are known for fast, funny, and environmentally conscious Shakespeare. Their 2026 Macbeth is performed by a 3-strong troupe touring the UK by electric van, bringing a high-octane, slightly chaotic version of the Scottish play to outdoor spaces across the country. Forget solemn tragedy: this Macbeth is full of mishaps, mayhem and mirth, suitable for all ages and apparitions.

For Hastings Castle, the performance is more than a one-off summer date. It represents the first full outdoor theatre production in the castle’s current events programme and, the team hopes, the beginning of many more. As the site continues to develop its role as an open-air events space, the arrival of The HandleBards points towards a future in which Hastings Castle becomes a distinctive stop for touring theatre companies, artists and audiences looking for performances in extraordinary places.

Ellie Westbrook, at Hastings Castle, said: “We are so excited to welcome the Handlebards to help us open this next chapter for Hastings Castle. Their work is dynamic, irreverent, interactive and does everything possible to bring theatre alive in the outdoors. We want to do more of this programming and see this event as a beautiful launchpad.”

The story may be familiar: three witches promise Macbeth the Scottish Crown, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth make one spectacularly bad decision, and things rapidly unravel from there. Foul deeds are done, plots fall apart and mysterious spirits appear. In The HandleBards’ hands, however, Shakespeare’s darkest play becomes a gloriously unhinged evening of theatre.

Venue: Hastings Castle, Castle Hill Road, West Hill, Hastings, Friday 10 July, 7pm–9pm, doors open 6pm. Tickets: https://www.handlebards.com/show/macbeth-hastings-castle/. Audience advice: Outdoor performance. Bring a chair or blanket and clothing suitable for the weather. The Handlebards’ 2026 summer season includes Macbeth and As You Like It, with Macbeth touring from June to September 2026.

Show takes place on 27 June next year. Early booking advised – the show is selling out everywhere

[Paul Wertico (drums), Enrico Pinna (guitar), Josephine Davies (tenor, soprano), Terry Pack (bass), Joss Peach (piano)]

Soft-spoken and unassuming, Paul Wertico becomes, behind his kit, a force to reckon with. You can hear why he remained for many years the lynchpin of the Pat Metheny band, and why his lifelong list of awards, recordings, professorships, books, and compositions is unrivalled. Hence his lead, in a rapidly-organised session on a normally quiet Monday night in Hastings, resulted in a superb one-off.

He flew in from Copenhagen, and along with acclaimed jazz/fusion guitarist Enrico Pinna, was joined by tenor/soprano maestra Josephine Davies, the Monk-like spare piano sounds of Joss Peach, and the mellow, unflinching bass of local luminary Terry Pack – these last three work together as (most of) Pack’s Full Circle. Nobody knew what was going to happen, Wertico announced, but that was jazz, experiencing the moment.

Under his unobtrusive but definitive direction, his elegant fills, faultless time, intuitive dynamics, and technical brilliance, that moment rapidly expanded into two exceptional sets. Beginning with a pensive line from Davies, the music morphed into an exploratory guitar/bass alternating riff session. A subsequent blues-based  number, in which Davies’ concentrated awareness and clarity absolutely shone, clearly drew the attention and response of Pinna and his guitar. Together the two emerged as a formidable duo lead – outstanding renditions of ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ (we all hope for that, don’t we? said the woman on my left) and ‘Willow Weep For Me’ – favourites which, in lesser hands than these, could have sounded trite (overshadowed by so many immortal renditions) but instead settled in, moved forward, developed, and transfixed a wildly enthusiastic, capacity audience.

The second half progressed seamlessly through free-improv to ‘Open Water’ (from Full Circle’s latest CD) and finally into the modalities of ‘Impressions’, foregrounding not only Davies’ unique, windswept soprano inventions, but also Pinna’s incisive, casually brilliant work on a supreme electric guitar that he had custom made from a vintage Steinberger (a firm specialising in minimalist, headless instruments) and which Pinna finished himself with dye and wax, pickups and other hardware. A completely original evening in all directions then – but that’s jazz: experiencing the moment…

So Jazz Hastings has moved to Barnaby’s with a definite, defiant noise. The jazz musicians who have always played here because they love it now have a new outlet and potentially a double-sized audience. There are whispers that Barnaby’s may have to expand to the next-door building … 

Paul Wertico played at Barnaby’s Jazz Lounge on 15 June and went on the day after to The Jailhouse at Arundel. All a quick trip from Copenhagen where, until 27 June, he is taking part in a three-week tour with The Doky Brothers, whose eponymous gold-winning 1996 album featured The Brecker Brothers and Curtis Stigers. Further information: www.paulwertico.com, Barnaby’s at barnabyslounge.co.uk, and many tracks on Bandcamp https://tinyurl.com/Wertico 

De La Warr Pavilion have secured To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates, as part of the Hayward Gallery’s touring programme. Yiadom-Boakye is one of the UK’s foremost contemporary painters. For this exhibition she has selected works critical to her way of seeing and thinking, inviting audiences to share a personal journey across different geographies and generations of artists.

Yiadom-Boakye is renowned for oil paintings of imagined subjects: assertive presences who seem to exist outside of any definable time or place. Her figures are hailed for both their technical mastery and their lingering, enigmatic quality. To Improvise A Mountain brings her own work into conversation with a range of historical and contemporary artists, illuminating her creative process. 

The inspiration for the exhibition is a fragment of poetry in Inamorata, part of the Cellar Door Sessions by the Miles Davis sextet, read by actor Conrad Roberts on Davis’ Live-Evil, innovative for both frantic, brilliant jazz/rock and ditto artwork: ‘Who is this music that which description may never justify?/Can the ocean be described?’ For Yiadom-Boakye, poetry’s ability to translate the intangible into images, and to think through rhythm and feeling, is akin to the act of painting.

The exhibition finds a resonance at De La Warr Pavilion, in the bold, open architecture at the edge of the land, implying boundless cultural possibilities. It’s an ideal setting for an exhibition that reaches across geographies, generations and forms.

Boakye says: “The decisions are governed by something I can’t really put into words. I’ve selected things that I love by dint of their poetry, their beauty, their refusal, their internal logic and, above all, their power. Whether through images, objects or actual text, each artist here invents the language they need and there is magic in it.” 

The exhibition invites audiences to encounter works that create emotional landscapes of intensity, intimacy, refusal, activism, and wonder. It features work by: Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Samuel Fosso, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert, Édouard Vuillard, David Wojnarowicz, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

27 June – 13 September 2026

An interview with local actor and Mixed Martial Arts specialist Francis Saunders

Q: Francis, you’ve had a remarkable journey. How would you describe your life in one sentence?

A: A life of fighting – sometimes in a cage, sometimes on a stage, and sometimes just trying to survive long enough to find my purpose.

Q: Before acting and filmmaking, there was cage fighting. What drew you to MMA [Mixed Martial Arts]?

A: I think fighting found me before I found it. Growing up, life was chaotic. MMA gave me discipline, structure, and somewhere to put all that anger and confusion. When I stepped into a cage, there were no excuses, no hiding places. It was just you, your courage, and your preparation.

Q: What did fighting teach you?

A: That toughness isn’t about throwing punches. It’s about getting back up when life knocks you down. The real fight starts after the crowd goes home. That’s true in sport, relationships, business, and life.

Q: You’ve spoken openly about a difficult childhood. How did that shape the man you became?

A: For a long time I carried pain, abandonment, and anger. But eventually I realised you can either become a victim of your past or use it as fuel. I chose to use it as fuel. The experiences that nearly broke me became the stories I now tell.

Q: How did acting enter your life?

A: As a child I escaped into stories. Television, films, books – I could disappear into another world. Acting allowed me to channel emotions I’d never really spoken about. On stage I found a voice.

Q: Many people know you from your theatre work. What do you love about the stage?

A: The honesty. You can’t hide in theatre. There’s no second take. It’s you, the audience, and the truth. When a room falls silent because people genuinely connect with what you’re saying, that’s magic.

Q: Your work often focuses on men’s mental health. Why?

A: Because too many men suffer in silence. We tell boys to be tough, but we rarely teach them how to be vulnerable. Projects like Monologues of Men exist because conversations can save lives. Sometimes hearing another man’s truth gives someone permission to tell their own.

Q: You’ve moved into filmmaking as well. What excites you about film?

A: Film allows stories to travel. A play might reach a few hundred people. A film can reach millions. I love finding stories that matter – stories about ordinary people facing extraordinary challenges.

Q: What has been your proudest achievement?

A: My sons. Without question. Careers come and go. Awards gather dust. Being a father is the thing I’m most proud of.

Q: You’ve had success in sport, acting and producing. What drives you now?

A: Purpose. Not fame. Not money. Purpose. I want to create work that leaves people feeling less alone than they did when they walked into the theatre or switched on the television.

Q: Looking back, what would you say to the young Francis who felt lost?

A: I’d tell him this: “One day the things that hurt you most will become the things that help other people heal. Keep going. Don’t quit. The story isn’t over yet.”

Q: Finally, what does success mean to you today?

A: Success is simple. It’s being able to look in the mirror and know you’ve stayed true to yourself. It’s having people you love around you. It’s waking up with another story to tell and another reason to keep moving forward.

I’ve fought in cages. I’ve stood on stages. I’ve made films. I’ve failed, succeeded, fallen apart and started again. And if life has taught me anything, it’s this: nobody is coming to save you. But that’s okay. Because you’re stronger than you think.

Quotes from Dean Stalham’s play God Don’t Live on a Council Estate

Application is free for a stall at the most atmospheric summer art event of the year. This year’s guest selector is Becky Beasley, Professor of Fine Arts at Goldsmith’s College, and an award-winning visual artist, mentor, educator and autism advocate. 

The Market, now in its fourth year, invites you to participate among the glass mosaic-lined columned bays and salt-worn structure that every August Bank holiday,transforms into a buzzing showcase of original art and creativity.The legacy of architect Sidney Little glitters in the glass fragments on the walls, and the Art Market is proud to honour his spirit of creativity, community, and bold thinking.

Applications are welcome from artists working 2-dimensionally, with paint, print, photography, collage, pencil, pen, or charcoal on any medium. Emphasis is also placed on physical works which can be hung or dynamically presented in the space against the iconic backdrop of the alley.

8 fully-funded places will also be available, open to artists who are either under 25, or who face financial barriers to participation. The free places cover the full cost of exhibiting. To apply, applicants should describe their situation in the ‘bio’ section of the application form. Free place applications are assessed separately by our selection panel. Successful applicants will receive exactly the same experience as all other exhibitors — a prime spot in one of the South Coast’s most extraordinary venues, on a day full of music, food, and thousands of visitors.

Deadline for applications: 28 June. All information shared is treated with complete confidentiality. Decisions are final. Applications from artists who are under represented in the arts are especially welcome. Application form: https://tally.so/r/VL4JYE, Event details: bottlealley.org/baam

Having comprehensively plumbed the theme with Seaside Modern (2021), Seafaring (2022), Undersea (2025), and this year’s C-list celebrity co-curated The Open: Odyssey, Hastings Contemporary now presents two more meditations on the inexhaustible ocean. Behind this is not a lack of curatorial imagination, apparently, but a redefinition of the institution’s mission in terms of sustainability. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and dismiss as fanciful any fears that we might therefore soon be seeing the best of Jack Vettriano’s baleful beach scenes in a soggy retrospective.

Argentinian-born Miguel Rothschild’s Undercurrents is the work of a technocrat with pretensions to religiosity. The main piece is From the Depths of the Sea, an ingenious cross-section of waves in motion made from a photographic print on fabric suspended from 400 lengths of fishing line. Its gentle undulations are quietly impressive, but a little cramped in the gallery space. It’s a cleverish miniature, on the scale of a model village, and the novelty soon wears off. More striking are a series of photographs. Undercurrents itself is a fiendish trompe l’oeil – quite impossible to photograph – that at times has the appearance of brushed steel and at others seems like a broiling oil slick. Ocean Crack and Black Sea II use broken glass to add vicious fault lines to images of waves, providing a clear sense of human scale and a wry but unironic commentary on human intervention. It’s all very cool, even cold. 

Brazilian-German artist Janaina Tschäpe is in tenacious Canute-like Conversations with the Sea – the individual against and inside of the eternal, philosophically facing down the forces of the natural world and anticipating the dissolution of the self in its endless waves. In Meeresatem (Breathing the shore) Tschäpe’s sea is an International Klein Blue primordial soup, the waves of which appear as the bold brush strokes of a revolutionary Maoist calligraphy cut and pasted to achieve some bombastic emotional sloganeering. Here people appear like the ghosts of the timeless drowned; or the sardine-can-squashed, small-boat-bound fugitives, fate uncertain as they head to the south coast’s unfriendly shore. These are haggard, hurriedly rendered faces stylistically reminiscent of the 1950s’ German politically radical Gruppe SPUR, whose visceral, convoluted gestures are repurposed as a Greek chorus to the monologue of an energised and gritty Nature. It’s okay (and fun) for the viewer to play spot-the-reference here: Tschäpe’s appetite has been described as that of a Latin American “aesthetic anthropophagite,” a post-modern cannibal swallowing a pick ’n’ mix selection of European ideas, then sardonically spitting them out like a ruminative tobacco or khat chew. The show is a nervy distillation of a myriad of complex ideas issued with knowing self-poise and kinetic brio. A metempsychotic mermaid is the subject of both the tangled Sereias and the video He drowned in her eyes as she called him to follow, a jerkily shot home movie the siren call of which escaped me. The Conversations themselves are 15 new works in response to Hastings, depicting what might be a high-speed swimmer, a flash of mackerel skin, a storm-tossed inflatable in sore need of rescue. They’re colourful, sometimes happily slapdash, and at times wasabi sharp. Go for the colours and their blue heavens high. 

Back on dry land the big guns are rolled out as Moore/Freud pits Henry against Lucian, the latter recently recast with lofty disdain as “a minor British artist” by The Guardian. It’s a modest exhibition with a handful of minor works by each artist. The central conceit is not persuasive and hangs by a thread on a silly photograph by the bulldog-like Bruce Bernard of Freud posing as a Moore sculpture. An attempt to bind the artists together via their interest in family is undercut by an explanatory panel which tells us Freud “is known to have had 14 children by 6 women.” Many of them sat for him as adults, eliciting the bizarre remark that “It’s nice when you breed your own models.” Thinking of his subjects first and foremost as animals, Lucian himself was simply an old goat. With a gimlet eye for the grotesque, the German-Jewish immigrant Freud slipped neatly into the slipstream of a quintessentially British sensibility. One might readily place him in a long if wavering line which starts with William Blake’s motley Swedenborgian doughboys and ripped, starkers Pentateuchal prophets, digresses as it ticks off the soulless scarecrows of the execrable Glasgow Boys and the overdressed waxen undead of the Pre-Raphaelites, plods onwards to Stanley Spencer’s liverish, boneless, bendy action figures, thence to the Atrocity Exhibition contortionists of Francis Bacon, all the way to Jenny Saville’s CSI-core punch-drunk, impact-play palookas.  Doleful faces loom out of necks like oxen led to an abbatoir. It’s ugly, deadly stuff, dark and unsubtle and utterly studio-bound. Freud’s portraits give off shrill parochialist vibes, a small dick energy which enacts a performative Britishness, insistently offering the bread and dripping cold comfort of baroque art world gesture in an attempt to evoke the existential. He can’t do hands. But The Guardian is surely mistaken: it’s hard to imagine the reputation of this flâneur of flabby flesh diminishing very much. He’ll always appeal to the bovine reactionaries and confused #whome? misogynists. Sale room prices actually indicate an ascendancy. 

Henry Moore’s work, even in this dreary company, seems transparently forward-looking, rather than looking back to Spencer or Rembrandt. By turns sensitive, provocative and disturbing, his familial groups are placed inside claustrophobic interiors in a way which suggests they are part of the very fabric. Two Women in an Interior is exemplary, with a woman apparently knitting herself: It’s a depiction of metempsychosis of a kind that lies at the heart of modernism, suggestive of the despair and wit and tenderness of Samuel Beckett, a poetic gag piece which confounds and alarms. Moore’s sculptures – here only a few small maquettes – are instantly recognisable and as instantly pleasing to the eye, the hand and the intellect as a chess piece. He moves beyond gesture – the explicatory actions of the body – to affirm the relation of things in general, the interdependency of objects and people, of shapes wrapped around other shapes. Of everything. If he seems to allude to Dada’s fascination with dolls and automata (De Chirico is surely a touchstone but Moore swaps dusty, empty sunlit streets for dim, cramped candlelit bomb shelters), he rapidly and elegantly transcends it so that his hollow men and women are forms which resound with meaning, singing of a vibrant interior life far removed from the lardy surface schtick of Freud’s gluttonous gurners. The absence of any three-dimensional work beyond the very few tiny models might make the show seem simply tokenistic, alluding to a mere idea. But it’s a great idea. One to carry into the town.

Exhibitions run till 13 September 2026, Wednesday to Sunday and Bank Holidays, 11 am to 5 pm. Hastings Contemporary, Rock-a-Nore Road, Hastings TN34 3DW.

A short film by Lindsay Jayne suggests we accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative

Drawing Life will be able to continue delivering art classes for carers and those they care for until mid 2027, thanks to funding from The National Lottery Community Fund.

Judy Parkinson established Drawing Life in 2015, offering free, regular, artist-led, creative sessions for people living with dementia and their carers. Now, a year after Parkinson extended the reach of this innovative project to unpaid carers and those they care for, whatever their health needs, she aims to build on this success. The art sessions work on many levels. They take place in art galleries – special destinations that set the tone. Some carers come on their own for some ‘me’ time, as do some cared-for people. When people start chatting, the art can take second place and the burden of caring is lifted, along with day-to-day worries, hospital appointments and broken nights.

“It is clear that carers benefit as much from our sessions as the people they care for and that classes are an invaluable social lifeline for people who find themselves isolated due to their myriad responsibilities looking after a loved one,” says Parkinson. “The quiet concentration we observe every time is a sign that stress and anxiety are put aside for a few precious moments.”

The relaxed sessions take place every month at Hastings Contemporary and De La Warr Pavilion. One of a talented team of artists leads each class and brings different ideas and approaches, taking inspiration from gallery shows or sometimes from invited guests including local VIPs, musicians and models.

Parkinson emphasizes that no artistic experience is necessary and all materials, tea and biscuits are free of charge, as well as the chance to view the current exhibition.

M (18) with severe autism is brought to the classes: His carer is enthusiastic. “We absolutely love the sessions, and I get respite in a way other activities don’t offer. For whatever reason, M is much calmer at Drawing Life– which is testament to what the sessions provide.” The classes have been a game changer for a wife and carer for Brian, with dementia: “It’s nice not talking about what’s happening in your confused life. We had a great time and afterwards we walked along the seafront and felt like human beings again.” Brian hasn’t missed a class all year.

Drawing Life works in collaboration with several organisations, including Care for the Carers, Association of Carers, Rother and Hastings Voluntary Action groups, but funding is vital for the work to continue. Class dates are on the Drawing Life website drawinglife.org To book places at the classes please contact Judy Parkinson, info@drawinglife.org

John Donaldson, pianist, composer, and founder of Jazz Hastings, will launch an exceptional CD in September, featuring Donaldson, Rob Luft, Rebecka Edlund, Tom Wilson, Norma Winstone, and the amazing Jeff Ballard. Here’s a preview:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdu8zqmI5hM

Jazz Hastings will also relaunch in September, at its new venue Barnaby’s Lounge. Watch out for further details soon.

Over the bank holiday weekend an unusual festival took place. Curated and arranged by the development education centre (DEC) 18 Hours, and called Good Grief: A Festival of Love and Loss, it consisted of a series of artistic, cultural, and sports events that collectively reflected on the nature of grief. It’s new to Hastings, though not the first of its kind. Begun in Brighton in 2020 during the pandemic, it aims to take grief and bereavement into the open, to encourage conversations and support those grieving in isolation. Since then, it has grown into a nationally-recognised festival bringing together researchers, healthcare professionals and counsellors, artists and communities. Well-organised, publicised and attended, it was a great credit to the promoters.

The festival program consisted of some 19 different happenings, from a Walk of Remembrance through talks by experts in the neuro-physiology of grieving, wellbeing, and therapeutic environments. There were musical and performance events (some participatory, some individual), running, films, and a final multi-media, cross-cultural event incorporating a short procession.

We explore here two excellent shows from this unique occasion – the art exhibition at Electro Studios and Bev Lee Harling’s Hey Good Lookin’ – and two other events which, while not strictly part of the Festival, could have been inspired by it. One of these is an art exhibition due to open at Kino Teatr on 13 June, previewed here by Nick and Helen Pelling. The other was an event at Mike Willis’ Norman Road shop on 24 May, a poetry performance that was, for a number of reasons, unique. 

Her story, for the festival, was much more immediate. She was writing it at the same time as grieving the loss of her father – “so I was really writing through it” she explains. She continues “I was trying to get to the heart of our relationship, and what it means when you almost start saying goodbye to somebody before they’ve left, as they change.”

“Then,” she adds, “there’s the element of the tree”, which was in her mind the whole time she was developing the performance. It is, indeed, an inspired idea. The tree at the centre of the performance was designed by “total Hastings treasure” sculptor Leigh Dyer. Harling’s father owned and worked in a foundry on IvyHouse Lane, and Dyer’s sculptures are made in metal, so he was often at the foundry. The lovely boat that rises from the shingle on the beach, the stainless steel octopuses and snakes in George Street at Butler’s Gap holding the chess pieces, and the gates by the Print Works, are all his work.

TREE OF A LIFE

He planned the shimmering tree round a contour, making an initial drawing that followed Harling’s shape, holding her violin. Across and between its main branches, different instruments were placed – keyboards, strings that could be bowed. All wonderfully integrated so that she could use them to accompany herself in song, or at various places in the narrative, or put her arms round it. “He knew my dad, he absolutely understood him, so he was able to understand my vision [for the tree] from a personal point of view.”

Together with her partner, exceptional and versatile musician Frank Moon, and Dyer’s sculpture, Harling has succeeded in creating, around the tree, a compelling narrative that interweaves her own recollections of the last few months of her father’s life, and re-imagines his own reminiscences, in both song and performance. There’s a particularly poignant scene where she (or perhaps her mother) dances with him – represented by an empty suit jacket – and there are songs that he knew, songs that he liked, and stories of his former life in the East End of London.

I wondered whether this work fitted into a particular theatrical genre. She works with a coach, Morris (Mo) Cohen, whose specialism is autobiographical theatre. But she doesn’t feel that this label covers the show as a whole. It doesn’t. It’s a truly composite work of art – the superior music, the visual direction, the narrative, the tree as reflection of herself, the undeniable authenticity, all make for something beyond categorisation, indefinably a world in itself.

MUSICAL ROOTS

Because Bev Lee Harling is so integrally a part of the Hastings music scene it’s perhaps less recognised how successful she has been nationally as a touring musician. Further, that she has made a whole series of impeccably produced and quite beautiful albums and EPs, beginning with Impossible Human in 2006. Or that she has a degree in jazz. Also, she grew up in the Music Centre system here in Hastings, when “at the time, it was absolutely thriving. Anyone could learn an instrument, and you could go to orchestras and go on tours.” There was a centre on Croft Road where the East Sussex Music Service would arrange for promising students to play with the Philharmonic Orchestra, and for them to travel to play in the Albert Hall.

There was no musical tradition in her family, but for her own inspiration she credits her much older sister, who begged for a violin when quite young. Bev could then grow up hearing music at home, with her sister sometimes teaching her things on the piano. She studied classical music but had the feeling that she “wasn’t quite classical enough.” She also didn’t think, after completing her university course, that she was quite a jazz musician either. Having played the violin since she was five, I suspect she manages to be both with ease, but her vocal style and her instrumental expertise and her ability to tell stories through music, make her unique.

She is quick to praise everyone involved: Frank Moon for the sound design, Jonathan Richardson for the lighting, Mae Dewsbery for production support, Mo Cohen for the coaching, Leigh Dyer for the tree, and 18 Hours for the Good Grief Festival and their support, plus St John’s Church, The Stables, and the Arts Council for financial help.

“We all experience grief in some way or another,” so with Hey Good Lookin’ she has succeeded in producing, from the stage, an environment which the audience can all understand. “We all have stories, and we all have the potential to be able to share these stories with other people, to have a meaningful connection … every time I do one of these shows, so many people want to talk to me afterwards, and they have incredible stories, and maybe that’s the only time they get to share them.” Somehow her presentation gives people permission to respond: a rare gift.

Bev Lee Harling performed Hey Good Lookin’ at St John’s Church Hall, Brittany Road, St Leonards on Saturday 23 May. Another performance is scheduled for the annual Hastings Storytelling Festival in October at The Stables Theatre, date to be confirmed. 

Hastings-based punk skiffle bar band Fear of Last Orders will be recording a new live LP on Friday 12 June, publicly, at 1200 Postcards on Queens Road. They invite all fans of live music to join them and be part of the action, and have made it clear that they welcome heckling, dancing, drinking and anything else legal that adds to the traditional barroom vibe at the heart of their live show.

Since forming over two years ago, Fear of Last Orders have established a loyal following, who have bought into their unique mixture of punk, pub rock, skiffle and rockabilly. Their first on-line release last summer was a love song to Hastings Pier, ‘The End of the Pier’, in support of the campaign to save the historic structure and bring back its glory days. Earlier this year, their first vinyl release, In the Last Chance Saloon, showcased four original songs, introducing a wider audience to their mix of high energy bangers and tales from the wrong side of the tracks.

The band’s manager, Arthur Hastings, said: “We want to capture all the energy of a Fear of Last Orders show on record, and invite our fans to be part of the whole shebang. We have been packing out venues across Hastings and this is an opportunity to thank our loyal supporters for being such a wonderful bunch.”

Band member Geoff Martin also recently launched a novel, They Smelt of Pubs. It’s set between London and Brighton, while the protagonist also looks back to the time of the Rock Against Racism festivals in East London and the rise of two-tone and The Specials. There’s a scathing honesty about the book and the injustices suffered by its (initially a little shiftless) protagonist – the brawls and the intrigues at the night-club security end of law enforcement against a drug gang, a fit-up for armed robbery, bent coppers, and pursuit to near death by neo-Nazi criminals. It’s written in an internally audible, completely authentic narrative style, and in itself is a little piece of South Coast history.  “It’s widely accepted that the first working class novel was Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthopists,” states Martin. “That book was written here in Hastings. More than a century later I’m proud to help keep the tradition of working class literature alive in the town.” 

They Smelt of Pubs and all recordings are available from record shop Pressing and bookshop Printed Matter on Queens Road. Live recording takes place on 12 June at 1200 Postcards, Queens Road, Hastings. The fun starts at 7 pm.

Hasting’s vibrant jazz scene is set for a powerful dose of energy as Matt Ridley’s Antidote take the stage for a special live performance. Led by acclaimed bassist and composer Matt Ridley, Antidote has earned a reputation for its dynamic blend of contemporary jazz, intricate rhythms, and expansive improvisation. Ridley has performed across the UK and internationally with a wide cross section of artists, most prominently the Darius Brubeck Quartet (who performed at Jazz Hastings a couple of years ago, see review at https://www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/articles/culture/arts/its-about-that-time/) of which he has been a member since 2006. As leader of Antidote, he has released two critically acclaimed albums. This session will feature music from the band’s celebrated recordings as well as brand-new material, showcasing Ridley’s imaginative writing and the ensemble’s razor-sharp interplay. Antidote promises an evening that is both boldly creative and deeply engaging.
“Performing this music live is where it truly comes alive,” says Ridley. “We’re excited to share fresh ideas, take risks, and connect with the audience in real time.”

Join Antidote for an unforgettable night of boundary-pushing modern jazz on Tuesday 2 June at EHSAA, The Stade

Rob Luft and Elina Duni have been making music together for about nine years, resulting in a near-perfect harmonic rapport. Their choice of numbers is truly universal – from Kosovo through Albania, France, and Switzerland to Tin Pan Alley, the American outlands and Hollywood, with the lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby, written by influential Polish composer Krzysztof Komeda. This is contemporary jazz at its finest: consistently creating and recreating, recognising sources, but transcending musical and geographical boundaries.

This performance was part of an extensive European tour promoting their latest album – they hurried down to Hastings between Germany and Poland, and it’s a tribute to this club that they chose to break their journey to come here. It’s a great album, but nothing compares to the magic produced by the live show.

Luft’s versatility has few limits. As a band member he has enhanced such diverse outfits as those of John Surman, Avishai Cohen, and Corrie Dick, and he has also recorded a work of his own with the BBC Concert Orchestra. Of nine released albums, this is the second showcasing the duo. He has a fine, fluid fretboard technique unusually sensitive to dynamics. On a Gibson electric, he makes the most of his effects pedals in a process with which he seems almost casually at ease, so that the audience hardly notices it going on. His adroit changes in volume and style, though, always leave space for Duni’s vocal command and dexterity.

Her voice is stunning: warm without being cloying, effortlessly on pitch, an authentic jazz vocal. She knows how to decorate and scat with discernment, never allowing the descent into over-showy bathos that vocal improvisation occasionally induces. Clearly, she is also an accomplished linguist: she moved easily between English, Italian, her native Albanian and her adopted French, plus Kosovan, Russian, and Iranian.

While some of the English numbers – Irving Berlin’s Reaching for the Moon for instance – elicited a definite middle-eastern modal feeling, I’ll Be Seeing You (from their 2023 album) while remaining faithful to the original, is beautifully unlike any other version you’ll ever hear, Luft providing a stylishly understated but perfect solo break. A tribute to the groundbreaking jazz of the American Beat era was Mal Waldron’s heartrending Left Alone. Gainsbourg’s Couleur Café was also a surprise, airily elegant and given a samba treatment. Local, nationally-acclaimed reedman Jason Yarde joined spontaneously into the final number, guesting on soprano.

This exceptional evening was dedicated to Julian Norridge, journalist and TV producer, who, in his retirement, among other local musical activities, had a long-running association with Jazz Hastings, but died in March this year.

Rob Luft and Elina Duni played at Jazz Hastings, The Stade, on 5 May.

French’s bar in Robertson Street is all exposed brick, chandeliers and cocktails, offering an intimate atmosphere. A couple of weeks ago that atmosphere was augmented by a literary audience keen to hear six writers read their own work. Something about the cosiness of the venue and the informality of the presentation – James Young and Helen Black’s introductions encouraged a responsive audience – created an unexpected air of good-humoured self-exposure.

As an opener it was suggested that we talk about personal experience with someone nearby but previously unknown to us. As an exercise It helped to set up an intimacy, a unity – not just what’s your name, where do you live, but can you remember a significant change in your life?  The stories that followed supported that unity, through the strong impression of authenticity: largely told in the first person, each came across as the teller’s personal experience. I have no way of knowing whether this is fact or not – I mean James Young’s father may not have cut the tails off successive litters of puppies, and Helen Black may not have had an embarrassing biological experience, and Tom Forde may even not have bonded with his girlfriend over the effects of different coloured house paint. But everyone’s contribution felt honest and heartfelt and direct, and it was a splendid evening. 

James Young has run successful courses in Hastings for a number of years – Hastings Creative Writing now has permanent quarters in Trinity Street – and he also organises these story-telling, yarn winding evenings (as ‘The Yarn’ – previously The Storytelling Club) once a month. Helen Black is a Hastings-based storyteller and comedian who recently delighted audiences with her one-woman show at The Stables. 

I’ll definitely go again. I might even read a story and who knows, it may or may not be true. 

Readers for the evening were: Grace Latter, Tom Forde, Jenny Swingler, Paul Coomey, Helen Black, Rebecca Marshall, and James Young. For more information see Instagram: the_yarn_storytelling and Hastings Writers Workshop at hastingswritersworkshop.com. 

The name of Henry Normal is well-known to audiences that frequent literature festivals, Radio 4, and late-night TV comedy. Normal is also responsible for a raft of quality comedy output from Baby Cow Productions, including such gems as Philomena and episodes of The Mighty Boosh, Marion and Geoff, and Alan Partridge. This is the latest of 17 poetry collections. Though performing country-wide, he is a cherished member of our local creative crowd.

Tim Barlow is also known and appreciated in the local community, in which poetry occupies a surprisingly prominent position. This is due in part to his own promotion of a popular monthly open mic session A Load of Poets, usually at 1200 Postcards in Queens Road. His work was included in the recently-published sell-out collection, Poet Town. The first published collection of his own poems is entitled A Manufactured Thrill.

Both collections are, of course, written to be read aloud in public. Broadly, they rhyme, are not more than a page or two long, and are designed to be spare. The majority of poems speak directly from the author’s mind: there’s no displacement, no conscious objectivity. The format does not instantly imply depth.

But both books are propelled by humour, and humour is usually layered. It’s not easy to understand a double entendre, for example, without living within the culture that enables it. So it was interesting to read through both these books, once for entertainment – they’re both hugely enjoyable reading – and then again to appreciate how the verse works.

BARLOW AND CONFLICT

Tim Barlow’s poems, despite the carefully casual language and whimsical rhyme, carry at the heart of nearly all of them a kind of anger: the anger that comes from the necessity of compromise; the tension perhaps between what’s desirable and what’s respectable. Of the British pub, for example, he says he “found within the hostelry’s embrace/my unquiet, wand’ring soul’s true resting place”. The intentionally old-fashioned phrase recalls Victorian poetry, Dickens, Christian hymnology, perhaps Conan Doyle. The ‘hostelry’ inherits some of its connotation from coaching inns in the 14th century. And this inn is active, embraces the subject and his soul, cocoons him from the outside world.

While all this is implied in his description of the pub, Barlow goes on to protest at an unnamed ‘they’ – the government, the authorities, the world of capital? It isn’t usually specified – “beware! Of killjoy rulers up there… they tax us and dictate precisely where/a citizen may smoke a cigarette”. The conflict appears again and again in his poems as part of what, on the surface, is light humorous comment. There’s a (highly justified, imho) condemnation of the rise of Artificial Intelligence (which isn’t nearly as cosy as people seem to think): “so beware of AI, my brothers and sisters; /it will ravish us virtually to the pulse of transistors… and one day, perhaps, civil partnerships/will take place between humans and microchips.” Not by accident is this book called The Manufactured Thrill.

Then there’s the excellent poem ‘Shrinkflation Christmas’ in which brand-named goods (always funnier than generic ones) are endowed with verbally corresponding characteristics – Matchmakers are like matchsticks and “Snickers have been snicked”. All funny, and all true. “They’re ripping us off… but for you and me/it’s an economic shafting”. Again the unnamed enemy, capitalism in this case, is lurking and thwarting.

NORMAL AND CONTEMPLATION

Henry Normal’s poems are often briefer, aphoristic, equally full of references to common artefacts and popular culture, but less conflicted. Some are light and witty – a whole series of ‘Epitaphs’ for example depends entirely on verbal cross-references. A favourite of mine is ‘Epitaph for a cruciverbalist’ – “Here lies my neighbour/A crossword puzzler of great renown/He was one across/but is now six down”. But there are probably 50 or more:a clairvoyant who now knows exactly what’s coming next, and a florist who once cut flowers but now pushes them up.

Clever and witty, but there’s an underlying preoccupation with the nature of Death. Throughout Normal’s poetry runs a contemplative thread that doesn’t so much rail against the dying of the light as see the whole thing as an inevitable intimation of mortality. In one way or another both poets refer frequently to the aging process: they compare, through self-reference, the idealistic rage of youth to the grudging acceptance of later mid-life.

Both collections are quintessentially British – it’s difficult to see how either author’s work would translate into any other language, dependent as it is on the beautifully unstable nature of spoken English, in which any 8-year-old can appreciate the mechanism of a knock-knock joke. Both sets of poems revel in the twists and turns of verbal dexterity, of meaning, of intertext, of subtext, of joined-up thinking, while retaining at their core a reluctantly-tempered idealism. They are small gems of commentary within their particular economic, social, and political sphere. Go out immediately and get them.

Henry Normal: A Quiet Promise and Tim Barlow: A Manufactured Thrill, both published by Flapjack Press, are available online and at all good bookshops. Also see instagram.com/aloadofpoets, henrynormal.com, and timbarlow.co.uk 

Sonatas for violin and piano were never my thing, really. But I dare say I have watched and listened to more of these in the past four years in Hastings than at any other time in my life. And each time, the breadth and complexity, the intensity and originality of their structure has become clearer.

It hasn’t just been violin sonatas either. Starting with the Oxford Lieder sessions at Fairlight Hall, which were fascinating, and something I had enjoyed before, I began to appreciate the interaction, the conversation, between instruments. A friend who went with me to one of the piano concerto concerts recently – someone who had never been before, but is musical and listens – said: “I didn’t realise, till now, that it was all about questions and answers.”

So the Lieder series, which lays emphasis exactly on the questions and answers – the relation between the piano and the voice, the piano not only reflecting the melody but also the lyrics of the songs – was a revelation. Going back to the violin sonatas, watching string ensembles and quartets, I began to get a glimmer of why the string quartet is often held, in musical circles, to be one of the most difficult tests of a composer’s skill. It is often considered a composer’s highest achievement: to write an intelligible, complex, and emotional conversation between four stringed instruments, each with a similar timbre.

Watching Max Baillie and Alasdair Beatson play such demanding music showed me how the formal creation of a composer can be realised, in performance, through the deep understanding of two master musicians. They clearly admire each other’s musicianship, and the rapport between them was almost palpable. They were able to play the conversation: impeccable timing throughout, and each piano entry and each violin entry were positive, definitive, indicating firmly the trajectory of each following phrase.

MAKING IT NEW

“Make it New!” was the Modernist watchword of the years from approximately 1918 to 1930. It leaked across the Art world, in the visual arts, the literary, and the musical. “I am essentially a polyphonist and not a connector of pretty chords,” Enescu has been quoted as saying, though his sonata is intentionally reminiscent of the folk music of his native Romania. Kurtag, famous teacher and the composer of extremely short, intense pieces, is still alive at 100 years old.

Baillie and Beatson put together an erudite programme that reflected a progress in twentieth century music while saving Beethoven’s Kreuzer Sonata to the end. “Beethoven was a difficult man,” explained Beatson (rather laconically), and the bad-tempered, bad-mannered Ludwig dedicated this fast, intricate and impossibly difficult piece to a violinist who flatly refused to play it. Nevertheless, Beethoven, the ‘Magnificent Rebel’ wrote music that formed a point of departure for every other music for the next three hundred years, and he was not only the greatest rebel of his time but also the greatest genius. So the evening ended with a piece that contained, in its radical departures and endless invention, perhaps the origin of all the others.

Predictably, I loved it all. Some of it was unfamiliar to me, and I have listened to all the pieces again since. However wonderful the soloists on a recording though, for classical music you have to be there for the real thing, the micro-expressions on the faces of super-talented musicians, the exchanged nuances of mutual musical understanding, the shared lift at the start of a phrase, the obvious, beautiful, wordless conversation. There’s nothing like it. 

Max Baillie and Alasdair Beatson played Enescu, Boulanger, Martinu, Kurtag, and Beethoven on 10 March at Christ Church. Details: stlconcerts.co.uk/event/max-baillie-alasdair-beatson

Tucked away in the Rooftop Gallery of De La Warr Pavilion is a small but intriguing exhibition underlining societally-nurtured patterns of violence, emotional imbalance and trauma against women. Curated and co-ordinated by Veronique LePlat, it is a set of striking textile-based and annotated montages with accompanying disturbing stories from the lives of the all-female artists.

There’s a scarf that tells of intractable male prejudice against female-to-female relationships and some embroidery embodying love and forgiveness. A patchworked dress and a childlike desire to always wear dresses and to drink out of dainty china is contrasted with the surrounding terrors of war. Then there’s a story of ‘Violet’s Hat’, a memoir of the injustice of century-old ‘treatment’ for postpartum depression. “How much do we really understand,” asks maker Yvie Andrews, “what women go through, what they willingly try to manage, and how much still remains invisible and undervalued?”

There is an interesting piece of embroidery by Patricia Scanlan, the unfinished threads hanging down: she calls it Home. Emma Paige has produced a patchworked, caged matryoshka, as a symbol of cultural friction: “Beyond the surface of shared value lies a complex network of enforced behaviours, roles … that dictate how we should move, feel and exist within the domestic sphere.”

There’s a journey over an apron, a patchwork banner, and a textile piece called No Pattern which started out as a waistcoat and became, through time, something else more global and symbolic. It highlights a “broken relationship with femininity, something constrained by parental coercion and control”. Curator LePlat’s own piece is a denim jacket, also emphasising that as children we face embedded patterns of control and implied violence.

It’s a huge range of explosive topics to address in quite a small space, but worth going up to have a look and certainly to read the very illuminating accompanying texts.

You can also visit the website at alluswomen.weebly.com to see the history of the project and also to take part.

Hastings International Piano competition had sponsorship to offer free places in the early stages for everyone who wanted to wander in off the street to watch geniuses vying for a place in the finals. The other morning, I arrived to watch Khadizha Israpil play, with extraordinary assurance, the most challenging suite by Hindemith. It isn’t exactly easy listening. If it were a painting, it would be one of those that you just know are great but would find too disturbing to hang on your living room wall. Full of angry discords, passionate non-sequiturs, determinedly unexpected and unfinished arpeggios, and some occasional almost-sweet wistfulness, the piece has a marked overall trajectory and, given its complexity, a surprising unity that by the time it gets to the restatement of the melody, you almost think you understand it.

But you don’t, not really. The performer has clearly grasped it and wrestled with all its anger and contention and searching and shouting and eventual compromise. If she doesn’t win, I’ll be surprised, but then she is the first competitor I have seen so far, and I’m prepared to be surprised all day.

What strikes me about this near-incredible competition is not just the organisation, the logistics of getting the orchestra and the soloists in place and scheduled, the musical brilliance, the expertise, and the generous sponsorship. All these things are required for the organisation, and it seems that the standard of musicianship and the number of entries now increase year on year.

Beyond that, what strikes me is how international an event it is. How the music of very great composers brings people together from everywhere. Entrants, judges, sponsors, and audiences alike come from Ukraine and Ireland, Cyprus and Japan, Zimbabwe and South Korea. The designated concertos are written by Austrians, Germans and Russians, but played without regard for cultures or continents because the only important thing is that they express emotions common to all humanity. Without being too sentimental, it seems to me that if everyone spent time listening to this music, played by these special musicians at the peak of their ability, there would be less world conflict, less emphasis on the differences between cultures and nations, and more on what brings us together. Maybe for some of them, there is an idea that they are representing their country, as though they were Olympic athletes; much more likely is that they themselves don’t give that a thought.

Great music does that. Exceptional visual Art does that. Supreme literary writing, in any language, does that. “That’s what it’s for, an escape,” said the pleasant woman in the next seat to me. But I don’t agree. These things are not an escape from life, but a window on how life could be. Beethoven’s and Mozart’s concertos have been played consistently for almost 300 years, and certainly, listening to the lovely phrases of Beethoven’s 4th, you can hear all the characteristics of subsequent popular music, all the harmonies we have internalised and taken for granted for most of our lives, the bounciness and the joy of a pop song, the despair of the minor-key ballad, the flattened blue notes of jazz music.

How much the pianists make the music speak for itself must, I suppose, be part of the criteria for judging. Many of the criteria would be so technical as to be beyond the reach of the everyday listener, audible only to the fine-tuned excellence of the judges’ ears. Most of the competing players are so good that their ego disappears into the perfection of their technique. Similarly, looking into a Donatello sculpture or a Botticelli painting is looking, not at how clever the artist is, but how perfectly that artefact becomes its own universe. Or, Middlemarch is actually what the News of the World used to say about itself: all human life is there.

The competition winner was Ryan Zhu from Canada, just 22 years old who plays with the assurance, grace, and depth of a seasoned virtuoso, and also won the Leeds Piano competition a couple of years ago.

That’s another Hastings International Piano competition over for another two years but you can catch all of the performances on the YouTube channel, strongly worth repeated watching. It doesn’t seem a minute since the last one, and the dedicated team behind it keeps it alive through school and institution outreach, concerts, and now a YouTube channel. Great for Hastings, but great for the hope of humanity..

Hastings International Piano: hastingsinternationalpiano.org. For the live stream enter Hastings International Piano into the YouTube search. Day 1 of the final: youtube.com/watch?v=TZZBqYx6UXI

Wolfe has that gift of good songwriters: an ability to make lyrics sound like conversation, and vice-versa. I’m not sure that it’s a technique you can learn, but there are a few people with a genuine ability to live their personal life in song. At the same time, arguably from Nick Drake onwards, there seems to have been something nihilistic, fatalistic, running through contemporary lyrics.

Talking of Nick Drake, there seem to be few modern singer/songwriters that don’t acknowledge a debt to him, and I’m sure Alex Wolfe would too. Drake’s death was clearly a tragedy, but it’s the kind of tragedy that seems indelibly entwined with modern song. Themes of death, suicide, pointlessness, run through the lyrics and the actual lives of musicians like Tim and Jeff Buckley, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Chester Benington, Michael Hutchence and many more.

DEAD MEN SINGING

Wolfe’s final song Talk (a performance which held the audience mesmerised) goes further: ‘We love the dead men singing on our radio, romanticise their fears/but we can’t talk about the kid next door, who killed himself last year,’ is a statement about society as well as a plea for the intercommunication that most of us crave but rarely achieve. Wolfe’s own musical survival technique is to objectify, in song, personal emotions that would otherwise be unbearable. This is his strength – so the paired works The Toughening and The Softening on the new album, are about grief and loss but also about being told to be other than what you are, to suppress emotion, and addressing the disconnect between how you feel and how you think you ought to behave: ‘I almost drowned myself in a bathtub rather than admit I was scared.’

The concert last Saturday, in Christ Church St Leonards, was the official launch of Everythinglessness. His music sensitively addresses issues such as masculinity and mental health. Despite the nihilism there is, in most of the numbers, an ultimate gleam of hope. His lyrics, like the best poetry, address the existential through the personal.

DRAWING PEOPLE IN

It’s a fine album, accomplished, authentic, and well produced, and the whole of Saturday’s performance was similarly well-planned. Wolfe plays electric and acoustic guitars and a mandolin. A string quartet were on stage, four very talented women who all also have clear admiration for Wolfe as an artist. His voice and instruments are perfectly tuned; he addresses his audience with an egoless directness and clarity that draws people in. He knows, in other words, how to sing. He communicated with, and held, this most diverse, wonderful, multi-generational example of Hastings audiences.

Wolfe’s long-time friend Spencer Jones was the support act; many people clearly did not know he was going to be there so he kindly explained why he was. (I recognised him but couldn’t think where from, until today when faithful Wikipedia reminded me that he played William Kempe in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow, one of the wittiest and cleverest series ever produced on TV, in my opinion). His stand-up routine is unique – he does a lot of voice work with a looper and introduces, towards the end, a vibration plate. He invites the audience to present soup recipes and ladles out imaginary soup, which he refers to as imaginary soup. He also introduced a large talking home-made COVID virus. Altogether, very interesting and unexpected, and the audience enjoyed the whole thing.

More and more I see one-off, world-class performances of everything in Hastings, in the unique environments of our churches and secret venues in ancient houses and the back rooms of pubs. This was a home-grown concert – Wolfe lives part of the time here and part in London. Local musicians are named in the album credits. Once again I feel lucky to be living in the middle of this joyfully creative environment – despite any cultural Angst, Art is life-affirming.

Alexander Wolfe officially launched his latest album, Everythinglessness, at Christ Church St Leonards on Saturday 24 January. More details, dates, and teeshirts at alexanderwolfe.co.uk

Robert Mitchell inhabits a musical sphere which John Fordham, writing in The Guardian 14 years ago, called ‘private’. His albums from 2008 onwards corroborate this view in several ways. The Greater Good, with trio Tom Mason (bass) and Richard Spaven (drums), could probably be classed as a meditation on modern popular music: there’s an extreme spaciousness about Mitchell’s approach to a melody and often, like Thelonious (‘Sphere’) Monk, he will imply a chord with one or two seemingly random, but actually judiciously placed, notes. That album contains an off-the-wall version of Wayne Shorter’s (already off-the-wall) Dance Cadaverous, which is one of those jazz tunes that puzzles you on first hearing but which thirty years later you hear and understand as seminal to a whole genre. (Playing along with Shorter was pianist Herbie Hancock in his more abstract phase, before he became a Head Hunter). Mitchell’s version of this particular danse macabre pays tribute to the melody, takes liberties with the time signature and chords, but retains an authentic testament to the modern jazz tradition. Also within that tradition is a stunningly deconstructed and reassembled version of original trip-hop band Massive Attack’s Teardrop.

Mitchell’s 2011 album The Embrace (same trio) features a version of Alberto Balsalm (minus the second l, which perhaps contravenes the trade mark rights of the shampoo – who knows?). Same riff as the original by Aphix Twin, which has subsequently been classed as ‘intelligent dance music’, but Mitchell’s signature exploratory style renders it other-worldly. There’s an early drum-and-bass hit too, 4Hero’s Third Stream, the original of which contains a notable solo by Chris Bowden on soprano saxophone, given, by Mitchell, a similar deconstructive treatment. Notably on this same album is Schumann’s Traumerei (a piano tune everyone knows even if they don’t know what it’s called or who wrote it) which Mitchell takes beyond itself and its perfect, well-worn melodies to some other dream sphere.

LEFTITUDE

The Glimpse, an astonishing, left-hand-only, solo album from 2013, contains (appropriately) Leftitude, which subsequently named a piano festival Mitchell produced, which was an alternative, in name and form, to the Latitude Festival. It’s probably a bit of leftitude which has prompted the display of left-handed brilliance which we are promised as part of Mitchell’s solo visit here. There’s another classical piece too on that album, Mompou’s Prelude No. 6 (pour la main gauche). Mompou, who lived in Barcelona and died at a great age seems under-recognised; listen to some of his searingly lovely preludes, like Jeune Filles Au Jardin, and you’ll wonder why.

Zeitgeist, with cellist Shirley Smart, is a mutual exploration which seeks to extend the role of improvisation in the classical tradition (part of Mitchell’s background: he currently holds a professorship of Jazz Piano at Guildhall). A more recent collaboration is with coruscating multicultural, multi-genre, multi-instrumentalist Zayn Mohammed, who along with playing electric guitar in a kind of Hendrix-inspired, energy-fuelled jazz extension, is equally gifted on oud, sarod, ud, rebab, and ney. The duo, and their album, are called Little Black Book – a title which perhaps refers to Mitchell’s political approach to music but which is also a tribute to the universality of the jazz approach. Mitchell also writes poetry, some of which he recites on this album and some which we will hear on the night. Thus Little Black Book as a title has multiple connotations: comedic, romantic, notational. Black signifies what it is, the Blackness of Jazz as American music, the Blackness of a culture, of a movement, of a race.

Besides making eleven hugely varied albums, Mitchell has collaborated with a who’s who of international music, including Billy Harper, Greg Osby, Courtney Pine CBE, Alicia Olatuja, Orphy Robinson, Steve Coleman, Phil Ranelin, Omar Puente, Ernesto Simpson, Dayme Arocena, Jason Rebello, Basement Jaxx, Dub Colossus, Daniel Casimir, Joshua Redman, and Jacqui Dankworth MBE.

This concert will be a unique opportunity to see Mitchell display all his creative diversity. His solo performance at Christ Church St. Leonards. will include original music, improvisation, left-hand-only music, poetry and works by legendary composers of all genres. Expect to see a master musician and improviser at work, in Hastings’ beautiful Christ Church St. Leonards.

Sunday 3 January 2026 at Christ Church St Leonards. Time 7.30, doors open 7 pm, Saturday 3 January. Tickets on the door £12, or in advance only from Reg Hendrickse – call on 07510 887174. 

Erica Smith, founder of Hastings Creatives, is herself a maker. The evening of 1 December (particularly stormy) was an opportunity to display her recently-finished quilt and hear the poem that it illustrates, David Cain’s dedication to a friend who died from AIDS during the days when there was no alternative but the loss. The event was a commemoration of World AIDS day and a fundraiser for the Terrence Higgins Trust.

The poem is a memorandum to an absent friend who, aware that he was dying, did not want to be remembered as a square on a quilt. So he wasn’t, not exactly, but the fact that he didn’t want to be remembered, was remembered. Complicated? A little. It’s reproduced on this page.

It’s the kind of poem you can think about for a long time: its abbreviated shape (almost a gravestone or memorial), its odd line endings, its architecture, its philosophy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, it’s a ‘little machine’–its physical form is as important as its content. For one thing it’s written in capitals – each character has equal importance and weight, and to some schools of poetry this represents a kind of typographic democracy, or socialism. Next thing – the lines are interrupted, like the life, or perhaps all the lives, it commemorates. And while it is one actual person writing about another, once the poem is on the page, any poem’s ‘writer’ is not necessarily the poet themselves – in fact the poem forgives ‘you’ not ‘me’. And because the poem is about something the subject definitively did not want, it becomes, indirectly, a testament to his particular personality. But it’s a poem, a stage removed, so by definition it has a more general application.

A good quilt is, in a way, a historical anomaly, an example of an almost lost art. In the age of AI, when whole people can be reproduced by a click or two, and artists like Grayson Perry can make swathes of brilliant and relevant computer-generated quilted and collaged images, a completely handmade quilt is a rarity to be treasured but which also has a significance over and above its visual value.

Traditionally quilts are heirlooms, made collectively to commemorate a family event or, significantly, a political event like the abolition of slavery. In the American 18th and 19th centuries they were often associated with hardworking families such as Quakers or Amish. In Britain wealthy families used to employ many female villagers to make them so that they could be passed down as a testament (usually of the wealthy family, however) to the next generation. These could take years to make, even by groups of women, and their commissioning, the design, and the works therefore now stand as political acts representative of liberal class discrimination, ‘philanthropy’, uneven wealth distribution and (in hindsight) exploitation.

An artefact such as Smith’s quilt, made from donated recycled material, is thus a representation of and a memoir to a small literary work, which in turn refers to the larger tragedy of the early AIDS epidemics – it’s estimated that before maintenance drugs were developed, there were some 40 million deaths. Further, the quilt’s structure incorporates the original source of the materials, all the donors, their association with the maker, and more. It’s lined largely with cut-up old bed sheets dyed red, the colour of blood. It took Smith just a year to create, by re-stitching and transforming a single poem, this permanent representation of a literary, historical and political event.

David Cain and Erica Smith staged an informal conversation about their friend, his illness, and their own collaboration. Local poet Oli Spleen also recited his poem, ‘Death Rattle’ written from personal experience, first of learning he might die from his exposure to AIDS, then the wonder of learning that he would, after all, live. That poem ends where life begins. 

World Aids Day was on Monday 1 December 2025. The ‘To Remember’ quilt and poem were exhibited at Unit 2, Norman Road, on 6 and 7 December 2025 as part of the S.L.A.P (St Leonards Art Party) exhibition. 

The 1913 Armory Show in New York was an exhibition which brought to America, for the first time, the Modern Art that we now see as seminal: Matisse’s Blue Nude, Duchamps’ Nude Descending a Staircase, Fauvists and Cubists of all kinds. It was largely ridiculed and rejected by representatives of the innate ultra-conservate American culture, but one or two inspired collectors recognised that these contemporary and mainly European trends were the shape of Arts to come; hence a couple of decades later, American museums in New York and Chicago came to house some of the most iconic modernist works of the early twentieth century.

Among the visionaries was the then 13-year-old Betty Parsons. Inspired by what she saw as ‘the world she wanted’, she enrolled in an Art School, married, fled to Paris, and divorced, and was subsequently disinherited by her wealthy and conventional parents. Returning to America after the Great Depression and moderately well-known as a painter and sculptor, she became a gallery manager, then curated a collection in her own gallery, opening in Manhattan in 1946. Incredible as it now seems, she was the only dealer who would represent Jackson Pollock; a little later she showed, against the tide of popular opinion, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Rauschenberg and others.

INVISIBLE QUALITIES

She is still possibly better remembered as a dealer and collector rather than an artist, but alongside this commercial activity she actively painted and sculpted throughout her life. Having begun by painting in a largely figurative, impressionist-influenced style, soon after opening the gallery she rapidly became interested in representing not that which was apparent on the outside, but the emotional qualities inherent in her surroundings, the ‘invisible presence’ in a situation. This change went hand-in-hand with her long involvement with the meditative organisation Subud, which emphasises an idea of spiritual guidance received from the Great Life Force.

In 1960 when Parsons was already 60 and had travelled a great deal, she worked in her beach-side studio to capture the ever-shifting interplay of light and colour in this environment, which was far removed from the world of the commercial gallery. She attempted to render on canvas the ‘invisible truths, that are in our bones, like the earth and the sun and the sky.’ She began at this time to make sculptures from found objects – a commonplace enough technique now, but this was 1965. She painted pieces of discarded, weathered wood with bold forms and colours influenced by her extensive travels, and the results are whimsical, sometimes strange, but extraordinary. She painted, sculpted, and wrote poetry consistently until her death in 1982.

THE CURRENT EXHIBITION

You can view the evolution of her work for the first time in the UK, here at the De La Warr Pavilion. Carefully curated by their head of exhibitions, Joseph Constable, the exhibition is arranged to cycle through her body of work, to elucidate the ‘sheer energy’ and the quality of ‘life itself’ which she was always at pains to capture. Apart from the vivid colours, there’s humour and a deceptive simplicity about many of the works, but shown over the two floors of the De La Warr gallery they indicate an unusually consistent approach, a dedication to her stated principles, and a sometimes irresistible spontaneity.

The American Art world is overtly commercial, and American artists have recognised this: in a curious contradiction, the work of the Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning for example) was intended to be anti-establishment, to challenge commercialism by focusing on raw emotion and expression, but has resulted in some of the most highly-valued art works in the world. Thus occurs the interesting and largely inevitable process of monetisation that eventually surrounds, and institutionalises, artistic attempts to escape from the capitalist treadmill. People like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein simultaneously satirised and embraced this culture. It happens with music too: while the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK began as the ultimate societal protest, the band have sold almost 2,500,000 albums. Never mind the bollocks, that’s good money in anyone’s terms. Betty Parsons may have been privileged, but that privilege placed her in a unique position to remove herself from everyday commercial necessities and to explore her perception of the purely spiritual.

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy is on show at the De La Warr Pavilion until 18 January 2026 dlwp.com/exhibition/betty-parsons

There’s a rare band coming to Jazz Hastings in December, one which reveals just how far the Jazz world extends, both musically and internationally. The trio is led by Fabian Willmann, a Berlin-based saxophonist, and is the first session of a European tour including dates in Hastings, London, Edinburgh and Belfast, then back to Germany for eight more.

The band is both inter-generational and international, with an unusual mix of musical backgrounds and styles. The other players are Arne Huber and Jeff Ballard. Huber plays bass, and over the past fifteen years has recorded a stack of albums both with his own quartet and with other ensembles as co-operator or ‘sideman’. His quartet has appeared at various European jazz festivals (including London). He has won a number of European Jazz awards and is currently head of BA Jazz at the Jazzcampus (University of the applied arts) in Switzerland.

Jeff Ballard is well-known and-vastly respected by UK and American audiences alike. The band is an interesting development for him. An extremely talented and original drummer, he has been in demand for years, touring with major jazz artists – Brad Mehldau, the late Chick Corea, Avishai Cohen, Larry Grenadier (as part of the trio Fly), Joshua Redman and too many more to mention. He was also on the road extensively with Ray Charles, back in the day. A marvellous drummer of seemingly unlimited versatility, he has a string of awards to his name. Among his musical interests he lists ‘modern creative’, a developing genre that relates back to Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, perhaps somewhere between jazz and the avant-garde. Other well-known proponents include Bill Frisell, Kamasi Washington, the late Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd.

Fabian Willmann, the instrumentalist and composer who leads the trio on tenor saxophone, is also its youngest member. He met Jeff and Arne in Basel at a student music convention, and after playing together a few times and talking over drinks, they formed a trio. The line-up presents certain challenges – there’s no piano or guitar or chord instrument, so the melody on each instrument is exposed. But Willmann is happy with this approach, and the harmony is implied rather than stated. “I guess I am trying to make a constant stream of music where all the players are equal, super-aware. Being open to anything that can happen.

“It’s sometimes very different from what was in mind to start with!” Writing a melody, he tries to ‘reduce it as much as possible’. “It might be just eight bars of a melody and a few chords,” he continues. “There’s a lot of putting it together in your mind. I can’t really write a drum part for Jeff that’s going to be better than what he comes up with himself.”

They’ll be playing tunes from their latest album, Freedom, but also airing a number of more recent tunes not yet recorded. It will be a night to remember.

The Fabian Willmann Trio perform at JazzHastings on Tuesday, 2 December, at EHSAA on the Stade. Doors open 7.30, music 8.30.

“Competitions”, once said the great composer Béla Bartók, “are for horses, not artists.” Flamboyant pianist Glenn Gould has said that he regards piano competitions as ‘blood sports’. Chopin loathed them (but notoriously felt ‘asphyxiated’ and ‘silenced’ before all his performances). There have been various critical articles (notably in the New York Times some years ago) telling of some shady self-interested commercial practices on the judgement side, and letters and blogs from competitors who feel that such events pigeonhole everyone’s playing into a particular, approved style.

It was, therefore, a fascinating and instructive privilege to attend an excellent presentation by the four jurors forming the Hastings International Piano Competition for an insight into the whole process. Vanessa Latarche, Anthony Byrne, Ian Fountain and Carole Presland – all notably gifted musicians and teachers – proved themselves hyper-aware of the inherent pitfalls in judgement.

HEIGHTENED POPULARITY

Vanessa Latarche, Artistic Director of the Hastings competition, announced that this year there were 356 entries, only 100 fewer than for the renowned original Leeds event. The prizes are considerable – a package of money, guaranteed concert dates (at least one at the Wigmore Hall), and performances with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (one of the finest in the world, and they love coming to Hastings) – in all worth about £35,000. A game-changing, career-launching award.

The heightened popularity is partly due to the patronage of eminent pianist and polymath Sir Stephen Hough, and partly due to the rewards on offer. But it is also maybe well-known on the classical music scene that these particular judges go out of their way to be fair. Before this final assessment, they listen in full to all the contestants’ entry videos. To avoid bias, they ensure that if they have personal knowledge of any entrant, then that video is immediately passed to someone else.

ELIMINATING MATERIAL ADVANTAGES

The judges are also mindful of the fact that not everyone has access to a beautiful grand piano or superior video equipment, or a conveniently empty concert hall. The consideration and weighing of this factor (essentially the advantages of wealth and class) is one of their major challenges. On the other hand, one or two contestants sent in videos of themselves playing beautifully, but in their slippers – the equivalent of Taylor Swift appearing in a demo video with her hair in rollers.

The judges are looking at the entries for something that jumps out at them, a special thing, the pianist’s own voice perhaps. “We play who we are”, remarks Anthony Byrne. Pianists are not judged on a pre-existing idea of ‘the best’ interpretation of a piece. Sometimes, adds Latarche, she is surprised, and educated, by a contestant’s unexpected rendering of a musical section well known to her. This kind of humility must be a key factor in the success of the event. The panel consistently try to put aside their personal preferences and instead form a view of how compelling and assured the contestant’s own version of a piece is.

The pianists are judged on their personal style, their physical performance, and their taste in selecting the two pieces they present, as well as their technical excellence. It’s all essential: they need the resilience to withstand the dedicated, often gruelling life of a concert pianist: they are assessed for evident strength in their performance, the potential ability to front a major orchestra and rivet the musicians and the audience alike. A couple of mistakes don’t matter (Arthur Rubinstein is the standard example here) – the ability to ride through them, does.

FUNDS AND FACILITIES

Hastings, like most of these kinds of events, is fortunate to have patronage. Funds are raised from a variety of sources, and pianos lent or donated by Steinway. The owners of Fairlight Hall, Sarah and David Kowitz, support the arts in Sussex and nationally through The Fairlight Arts Trust and the Kowitz Family Foundation, and are the principal sponsors of this event. Their philanthropy, the availability of Fairlight Hall for events, and the judges’ level of skill, discernment, and objectivity, has led to Hastings International Piano becoming one of the leading competitions in the world of classical music, known for creating not horses for courses, but artists for the Albert Hall.

Pianist and Composer Paul Gunn returns to The Stables Theatre to play his unique multi-genre music combining Baroque, Classical, Latin and Rock influences.

He is joined this time by Brazilian percussion wizard Jansen Santana, and classical cellist Yvonne-Marie Parsons fronts the band.

She has recently been touring with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and also playing in London’s West End show Moulin Rouge at The Piccadilly Theatre. So if you are looking for something fresh, unique, with strong melodic and rhythmic qualities, this is for you.

Quarterly Arts magazine Ingénue has written, of Paul Gunn’s latest concert, “… echoes of Frank Zappa, Chick Corea, and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. An outstanding piece of music that transcends boundaries and styles.”

The Paul Gunn Trio play at The Stables Theatre and Arts Centre at 7.30pm on Friday 14
November. Tickets £13.50 / £8.50 for under 18s from stablestheatre.co.uk. More information
and samples at paulgunn.net.

The vagaries of the Art world are wondrous strange. The ‘Rokeby Venus’ by Velázquez– so named because it was first brought to England by a prosperous Yorkshireman to hang in his neo-Palladian pile, Rokeby Park – is probably better known for having been slashed by a Suffragette in 1914, than for being among the most sinuous and sensuous (not to say lecherous) paintings of a female form.

The Suffragette slasher was known as Mary Raleigh Richardson, who said later that she did it because of ‘the way men visitors gaped at it all day long’. The act remains one of the more radical by the women who, just over a century ago, fought (even died) for the right to be treated as thinking citizens, who could reasonably decide whom they wanted to represent them in government. It has become, like women chaining themselves to railings and throwing themselves under horses’ hooves, symbolic of the movement, of a truly radical change in the position of women in this country.

It is absorbing, therefore, that in a new biography of Mary Richardson, local author Helena Wojtczak reveals her not as a stalwart political campaigner and long-time party activist but rather as a wealthy dilletante who readily changed her name from Perkins (probably to avoid the stigma of a court conviction for theft, which is documented), and henceforth maintained an extremely casual relationship with the truth. ‘After being immersed in studying Mary for over two years’, writes Wojtczak, ‘I am persuaded that it was not solely a yearning to choose between [male] parliamentary candidates that drove her to commit acts of destruction.’

DEBUNKING THE MYTH

Meticulously researched, illustrated and annotated, it’s a splendid debunking job. The author’s stated opinion is that Richardson (who later joined Mosley’s fascist party), though the perpetrator of many acts of violent protest, was not quite the principled heroine she later claimed. Her often-quoted autobiography, Laugh a Defiance, was a tissue of lies: her original motivation was probably attention-seeking and a ‘craving for excitement.’

The act of destruction of a publicly-owned painting is made to seem, in retrospect, impulsive and a little disingenuous rather than a carefully-considered act of rebellion. Not one of Richardson’s anecdotes of the movement ‘dovetails with primary source accounts’ and most of them are ‘a mixture of truth, distortion, embellishment, uncorroborated assertion and chronological inaccuracy or impossibility.’ Indeed, Richardson’s stated reason for the act, the release of Sylvia Pankhurst from prison, had actually been achieved before she entered the art gallery.

So far, so fascinating. But this book does not seek to denigrate the ultimate achievements of the Suffragist movement: on the contrary. Wojtczak relies on various trusted sources to document the events surrounding the various arrests of Mary, of Sylvia Pankhurst, and several other militant women. It’s harrowing: women were beaten up in demonstrations, treated on (frequent) arrest as common criminals, brutally and painfully force-fed in prison. A radical subgroup, the Young Hot Bloods, nevertheless escalated the protest action to arson and other acts of extreme violence.

LEGACY OF THE SUFFRAGISTS

In spite of the severity of the movement, many of the newspaper comments were patronising and belittling in the extreme – H. G. Wells, for example, called their activities, including those of Richardson, ‘skylarking’. Women in this country who feel that ‘politics don’t concern them’ may wish to consider exactly what it took to enable them, as women, to make such a choice in the first place. It should also not need to be restated that what they call ‘politics’ is not something apart but is present in every aspect of our lives, down to the cost of a pint of milk or a loaf of bread.

Though matters have progressed, there is still a deeply ingrained cultural inequality between men and women. It’s present in our advertising and in the assumptions behind much of our language. It’s rampant on social media, encouraged by the popular press, ratified by the more regressive media outlets. But whatever their personal vagaries, Suffragists made a groundbreaking change in the position of women in this country.

Available from Bookbuster,
39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE and other local bookshops or direct from hastingspress.co.uk 

Sometimes it’s  difficult to know where to even begin talking about music which is so good that it takes your breath away quite literally, and unexpectedly.

Photo: Peter Mould

It’s quite clear that Ewan Bleach absorbs everything he hears, and he plays like Sidney Bechet. He can sing. He composes by casually improvising something, then he transcribes it, arranges it and orchestrates it wonderfully well, so that his superb ten-piece band can render it faultlessly, proudly unimpeded by amplification or other technology. He has curated an album where every instrument has a solo break and a chance to shine, and it all sounds so good.

If he isn’t quite world-renowned, then he ought to be. Though he is in constant demand and performs every night of the week, he’s in a world that is too full of nurtured, celebrated, hothoused, but essentially mediocre, musicians. True talent, originality, and technical excellence such as that of Bleach and his Fleeting Paradise Orchestra, seem to have a harder ride in today’s environment. A bit of a musical wild child, emulating the jazz life yet thoroughly grounded in classical theory, he found the jazz course at Guildhall disappointingly cerebral. “It didn’t feel right…it just seemed like a game to show off how intellectual you were.” 

This unfortunate image sometimes puts potential audiences off jazz too – and I have myself walked out of more than one dire gig at supposedly groovy clubs in East London, where the audience of retro-beatnik intelligentsia pretend to be enjoying something awful.

Good jazz, though, inevitably fleeting, never quite the same twice, is some of the best music there is. Eventually, listening back through Billie Holliday, Ellington, and Bechet, Bleach found out where his heart lay. Dance music:his band play at weddings and anniversaries as well as performing in concert halls all over the country. And here we were in Henry Ward Hall watching this guy who is steeped in music and musicology, effortlessly fronting a band who can clearly play anything that’s put in front of them, and a lot that isn’t. The brass instruments all looked to be well vintaged, with that mellow, slightly fluffy, spit-ful sound that you don’t get from a bright modern horn. 

I’d say more about all the musicians and the tunes, the style, the panache, the arrangements, but I don’t have the space or the time before this goes to print. So readers, please be content with this paean, and instrumentalists, the list below. Ewan Bleach’s Fleeting Paradise is not as ephemeral as the name makes it sound, and I expect they’ll be back here again. But meanwhile if you’re ever in King’s Cross or Rotherhithe, don’t hesitate to see them – they’re world class, and they’re wonderful.

The Fleeting Paradise line-up was: Ewan Bleach – clarinet, alto sax, vocals; William Scott – clarinet, tenor sax; Mike Soper trumpet; Tom Dennis – trumpet; Cameron Scott – trombone; Tom Law – flute & saxes; John Kelly – guitar, banjo; Max Baillie – violin/viola; Colin Good – piano; Louis Thomas – bass; Joe Dessauer – drums

Indirectly quoted, from David Doyle’s excellent  article here: syncopatedtimes.com/ewan-bleach-jazz-aC-rave-scene-but-with-live-music. Bleach’s own website: ewanbleach.com St Leonards Concerts events: stlconcerts.co.uk

Along with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, W. B. Yeats’ Second Coming must be one of the most-quoted poems of the past hundred years. Things Fall Apart is the title of Chinua Achebe’s post-colonial allegory of the mutual destruction of different cultures; Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem tells of the tragic reality behind the San Francisco hippy dream. Things Fall Apart was used as a title for The Sopranos’ penultimate episode, signifying the disintegration of Tony Soprano’s New Jersey mob world, pre-figuring his death.

In contrast to Yeats’ slouching blank and pitiless beast, the beasts in Isabel Rock’s current Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold exhibition are the ones which, in a rather accurate scenario, would be the ones to dominate what remains of the planet after humanity has finished piling it up with indestructible muck. Over the past two years she has created an extraordinary series of endlessly instructive works where the beasts take over. Unlike Wall-E or The Day of the Triffids though, there’s no hopeful ending, no projected re-assembly. Mountains of slugs move in to digest beautiful flowers, intent on destroying their own private paradise; crocodiles eagerly devour streets full of pasta (more, more, more!); giant rats drive rusting sports cars, and an enormous pig relentlessly slurps up what remains of a once-civilized town and its inhabitants.

HUMOUR WITH INTENT

Humorous, a bit bonkers, but with a serious clarity of intent. “I really like art that’s funny,” Isabel says. “So much art is dry and humourless. Especially with subjects like this, you need the humour to get people to engage with it.” Rock cites Hogarth as one of her favourite artists, and it’s easy to see why. Think of Gin Lane with its emaciated beggars, falling babies, collapsing buildings, hanging corpses. And Hogarth also does a nice line in puns: ‘Kilman’ distiller, ‘S. Gripe’ pawnbroker. But his message was clear: if you’re going to subdue hoi polloi, do it with good British beer rather than no-hope-heavily addictive cheap chemical spirits.

In Isabel Rock’s world, though replete with similar puns and desperate bodies, the theme is less local, more universal. In her world there isn’t a human ruling class: humanity has, by its own actions, imploded and been sucked into a black hole. What will be left to feed on the detritus? Slugs, of course. These insidious and deeply unpleasant beings already appear in disturbing droves after rain, make their way through small gaps in old houses to produce slimy tracks on kitchen carpets, frolic in uneaten cat food overnight, and lay waste outside to hostas, delphiniums, foxgloves, and a host of erstwhile edible vegetables. We keep these minibeasts at bay and we keep them small, but left to themselves, uncontrolled, with an infinite food supply, who knows what size they will grow to, what power they will attain?

CROCODILE TEARS

In a poor outskirt of Rio de Janeiro I once saw a large pond filthy with plastic containers, waste food, discarded engine parts, and choking strings of weed. In the middle of it was a huge living alligator, circling about sluggishly, raising and lowering its head to snack on whatever was nearby. Once a plastic bag stuck to its head as it raised it out of the water. It wasn’t captive; it had chosen the position. People circled and cycled about the area, going about their business or pleasure, ignoring the animal but keeping their distance. The sight has stayed with me these ten years.

Isabel Rock chose crocodiles for their visual impact (and she likes drawing them) and they clearly symbolise power to subdue and conquer. Spaghetti Crocognese is a representation of the old story Strega Nona’s Pasta Pot, [the assistant starts the process, but doesn’t know the magic word to stop the pasta being made, and it begins to fill the village, the town, the world] which, Rock muses, “deeply influenced me. There’s something about the madness that can happen, that’s kind of fun. A lot of what I draw is based around eating, and I want to try to get that feeling in people of, a little bit funny but a little bit gross. That visceral reaction.” And, viscerally, the crocodile encircles the streets full of pasta while in the middle is a growing black hole into which everything will eventually be sucked.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

Her description was a reminder that this is art with a definite message. It is informed and inspired by Rock’s own activism; her prizewinning competition entry is an almost full-sized model of the cell in which she was detained on remand, after being arrested for climbing a gantry at the Just Stop Oil demonstration on the M5. This is assembled in a corner room at Hastings Contemporary, and comes equipped with a looming 8-foot papier-maché slug, motionless but slightly disturbing, lying on the top bunk. There are drawings in the cell – of her cell-mate Molly, also an activist. And “this is Phoebe” she goes on, “who threw the soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.”

That was also a Just Stop Oil protest, and reminiscent of another act by a Suffragist activist more than a hundred years ago, when Mary Richardson slashed a priceless Velázquez canvas with a knife, as part of the long and extreme campaign to give women in the UK the right to vote (Interestingly a local writer has recently published Richardson’s biography, and a review will appear soon in this newspaper). The suffragists, much hated at the time, achieved something which we now take for granted. In a hundred years, I wonder, will we take it for granted that the continued burning of oil, making and use of plastic, excess of consumption, production of immortal waste, is leading to our own self-destruction? Or will it already be too late?

While art-with-a-message sounds slightly worthy (a bit like discovering that your favourite musician or actor wants you to give all your worldly goods to the Scientologists – L. Ron Hubbard has a lot to answer for), there is nothing remotely preachy about Rock’s drawings. The giant crocodiles, rats, and pigs dominate, abuse, and destroy the many smaller, scared, naked human beings. The intricacy, the detail, the narrative qualities inherent in her work are on a par with those of Grayson Perry, whom Rock also admires. “The difference between me and Grayson Perry” she says, “is that he draws people with clothes on. I like them naked, so it takes away the elements of class and status.” In her post-apocalyptic world the class and status belong to the gloopy slugs and the insatiable animals, and a big vain crocodile called Shirley who has grown five human legs (complete to the top, with bright pink vulvas) and prinks about on infeasibly high-heeled shoes. Comical, yet bleak.

LIFE’S MESSY CHAOS

Reflecting on the sheer practicalities of producing an exhibition like this in two years, I ask about the length of time it takes her to produce these graphically detailed representations of the inside of her head. We are in front of an exact depiction of a goddess, which is drawn directly from the mosaic goddess in Saint-Phalle’s Terra garden in Tuscany, which itself references both the mosaic fantasies of Gaudi and a previous 16th century park. It’s rare that Rock draws from life, but “there are a lot of references here. I’ve put Judy Chicago’s heads here – I like drawing dinner parties as well [there is another drawing of all the women in her cell block at lunch, naked, with the odd person cascading from the balcony]. I don’t know if I put them in exactly on purpose, but I really wanted to give a nod to powerful female artists. [And] the messy chaos of life.” Pointing to a particularly complex corner, she says that she started one during lockdown and completed that part, then came back to it two years later. In all, most of the artworks take her about a month [!] to do, this one “perhaps two months altogether.”

Perhaps two months, for something so compelling. That’s how she has been able to put together this most complex, elaborate, themed show, over less than two years. On a par with that of the best artists, her work borders on the obsessive, and she is admirably clear about what she wants to achieve. To get the detail that she craves, she works in ink rather than paint. Not satisfied with mere acrylic ink delineation, she has given many of the works added depth and a kind of three-dimensionality, by collaging drawings on top of drawings.

Many of the works depict centres that really cannot hold, like the black nothingness and the slugs’ paradise and decaying streets and erstwhile pavilions, and flowers subsumed into empty coke cans. Yeats’ poem symbolises the second coming as a great slouching lion/man, an overwhelming, inevitable force intent on the destruction of the Bethlehem of belief. It makes sense that it was published just after World War One, forty million or so senseless deaths leaving an ominous gap, filled ultimately by Hitler’s rise to power. Yeats’ poem can therefore be read as a premonition. Rock’s premonition here is an implosion, an inversion of the expected order, a grotesque kind of Animal Farm in which rats, crocodiles, slugs, and yes – pigs — do slouch, the Beast is a giant macrophagous crocodile. Bethlehem is too far to wade through what is left: oblivion will come sooner. and the black hole beckons. Not for nothing is one of Rock’s drawings entitled The End of Everything.

Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold shows at Hastings Contemporary until 15 March 2026. The artist’s story videos that accompany it are at youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=1uLvGSU6wp0&t=4s and others. Exhibition details and gallery opening times are at hastingscontemporary.org/.

Walking along a rather quiet stretch of St Leonards seafront the other day in the warm greyness of late September, you may have been surprised to hear a loud, Hendrix-type bass guitar riff and a voice announcing the art and music of Lewis Floyd Henry. Ruby’s Rooms has a penchant for exhibitions that involve unique troubadors – you may remember Xed Le Head’s wonderful mandalas earlier this year. 

There are artists whose personal appearance and demeanour say nothing about their work. You’d pass them in the street thinking they might be accountants – then you discover that their work hangs in the Royal Academy or adorns the side of an airport building. There are others who comprise in their person their own complete art form. Lewis Floyd Henry is one of these. 

The Hendrix vibe modifies a bit once you meet him, except for the mass of locks held under a head-tie. His guitar is a rather smart double-neck electric, an instrument usually favoured by virtuosos such as John McLaughlin, Eddie Van Halen, and the extraordinary Yngwie Malmsteen (crazy name, crazy guy! – ed.) who put his name to the Fender version.

Lewis Floyd has the Japanese Arbiter version. As a long-practised street musician, it’s convenient for him to have the bass and melody guitars as one entity. He expertly uses four different foot pedals, and puts a bass riff on a loop while he plays rock-style grooves over the top. And it’s super-loud – one of his several albums is helpfully called One Man and His 30-Watt Pram. I’ve seen him and his kit down here in the middle of town and also on the corner of Tottenham Court Road, and he never fails to draw a crowd. It’s odd to hear him in Ruby’s Rooms’ rather genteel, living-room type surroundings, but there’ s nothing genteel about his songs and lyrics. As a fiercely updated version of the traditional one-man band, he’s notable. Billed as ‘The One Man Rock-and-Roll Machine’ he has played not only in the streets of London and Hastings but in an assorted variety of pubs and rock venues across Europe.

His paintings adorn the walls, and they are good. Like many radical artists he trained at Central St Martins, and he has that essential quality that good artists have – the ability to compose a view as though that were the only way it should be seen. The style is graffiti-influenced (he was once or twice imprisoned for tagging in South London where he grew up), but the subjects, rather surprisingly, range from picturesque urban streets to harbour boats to views of Antibes. This context becomes clearer when you see that he cites, as his influences, artists and printmakers from HR Giger and MC Escher to Salvador Dali and Vincent Van Gogh, and that he divides his time between here and Dover.

He loves his style – his unashamedly post-hippie appearance, which involves a patchwork jacket which he told us belonged to his grandmother (who must have been a groovy woman). The head-tie is clearly necessary to keep his hair from falling over his face while he sings, and his foot-pedalled drum and home-produced speaker are adorned with his name in circular patterns. So he’s the complete package, with an appealing authenticity; he’s also his own best publicity agent.

Lewis Floyd Henry is showing and playing at Ruby’s Rooms, Eversfield Place, St Leonards. More information can be found at lewisfloyd-henry.squarespace.com, and on most social media platforms, particularly Instagram.

The new three-artist exhibition at Hastings Contemporary has much to recommend it, both in imaginative curation and artistic excellence. The large room occupied by local artist Sophie Barber’s paintings sets out her homage to the artists who have inspired her, and at the same time to her home environment, which she has never left. Claes Oldenburg’s eleven-foot synthetic green ice-cream sculpture is incongruous enough in any gallery. Here, reworked on a vast floor-to-ceiling painting which Barber produced in three tall panels, adding the caption ‘Claes ice cream melts at Pett’, it is a little overwhelming. It’s funny, but at the same time reverential. That’s true of her other paintings: of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and Hockney’s sunflowers which, in turn, acknowledge the genius of Van Gogh. So in this gallery’s unique plain setting, we look through Barber’s eyes at four generations of artistic inspiration. 

In the room next door is a satisfying contrast. Michael Landy, RA, has produced the most delicate, perfect drawings of plants. They match in detail and accomplishment the most excellent botanical drawings (I suppose I’m thinking of Marianne North here), but they also include the root structure. If he didn’t manage to finish these intricate drawings in one day, then to keep the flower from wilting, the roots would have to be preserved overnight in either soil or water. The other important thing is that these small framed perfections are of flowers that we usually think of as weeds – common daisies, vervain, sweet Alison. There are other, more unexpected, drawings too – if you’re going, I won’t spoil the surprises, but they’re all excellent.

Isobel Rock’s work takes up the upper floor, and I will be lucky enough to be able to talk to her about it next week, so more will appear in our next issue. Enough to say here that it is the most intricate work, of a breadth and detail worthy of a Grayson Perry or any other artist who has the gift of a childlike eye for detail without any kind of polite filter.  Rock spent time in prison for environmental activism, and one of the exhibits is a reproduction of the cell in which she produced some of this work. The only other cell I’ve seen reproduced as an art work is that of Ai Wei Wei, also a political prisoner. Rock’s cell, though stark, is a little more benign and doesn’t have the prison guards watching over her while she eats, just packets of sweets on a shelf. 

But her work is remarkable: funny, often absurd, detailed to an extreme degree. There’s a bird’s eye depiction of a lunchtime in her cell block, but with naked prisoners sitting round a table or falling from the balcony. There’s a room full of slugs enjoying themselves (after the end of the planet as we know it) at ‘SliggyWiggys Emporium’, which looks a little like Brighton Pavillion. Under the sea, alligators colonise a pagoda while a cruise ship sails fruitlessly over the top; slugs guard the gates of paradise while poor, thin, naked human beings queue up outside. It’s fantasy, but at the same time apocalyptic: there are echoes of old Dutch masters in some of the compositions, of earlier medieval paintings of Hell, in the despair. 

Hastings Contemporary shows Sophie Barber, Michael Landy and Isabel Rock until 15 March 2026. Details and times at hastingscontemporary.org/event-category/exhibitions

The Stables has, for the past few months, given a series of piano recitals, mainly by the well-established British pianist Margaret Fingerhut and various of her pupils. Forty or so years before Xhosa Cole, she was also selected as a Young Musician of the Year, and she has had an impeccable career as a soloist and teacher.

Fitting, then, that the final concert in The Stables series was by one of her pupils: a Hastings-born, unassuming prodigy named Phillip Leslie. It was a rare privilege to hear him perform. The programme was, in his own words, “quite difficult”. In fact, like the other young pupil, Daisuke Yoshida, this pianist presented us with astonishing renditions of fiendishly complex pieces, which even their composers found challenging.

The first piece, Mozart’s second sonata, is perhaps not known for its difficulty, though obviously not in easy pieces territory. However, Mozart ,under the hands of Phillip Leslie, is Mozart as you have never quite heard him before. Like a handful of other great pianists, Leslie makes you hear the eternity and the modernity in everything he plays. This Mozart, far from sounding baroque, sounded quirky and intangible, fast and furious or slow and lyrical, and rendered us unusually aware of its adventurous harmonic leaps and pauses.

Full of drama, love, and passion, the second piece by Schumann is clearly a favourite of Leslie’s. We experienced in the three movements a splendid, dramatic rendering, the pianist expounding the glorious contrast between the romance and the tragedy, the gravity and the passion, the ultimate peace. Full of angels and demons, and again, an individual interpretation which perhaps illuminated the character of Schumann, whose own long anguished quest for inner peace finished tragically in a sanatorium at the age of just 46.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition, apart from numerous orchestral adaptations,has frequently made it into unexpected genre territory: Ralph Burns arranged it for jazz orchestra, a whole album by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, was devoted to it, and it somehow became audible in the middle of a Michael Jackson rock medley. Tangerine Dream recorded the Promenade in 1994; Segovia arranged The Old Castle picture for classical guitar. It’s therefore a composition that absolutely lends itself to genre crossover.

This afternoon, however, we were treated to the original piano solo work. If Leslie’s playing is augmented by his own clear mental vision, in Pictures this is obviously already written into the score, so it seemed a natural choice for his interpretative style. I was moved to tears as each painting – The Gnome, The Old Castle, The Unhatched Chicks, and so on – was musically realised, with the promenades in between, and the final walking out into the open. Leslie is master of the expressive musical pause, so particularly important to the sense, drama and continuity of this well-known and brilliant suite. All together an exceptional recital, by an exceptional musician.

There will always be more musical events in this town than I have space to write up in this fortnightly, and it is a privilege to be able to see so much exceptional talent in a relatively small space. The eclecticism of its musical output echoes the eclecticism of the local residents, and I for one can be thankful that I live here.

VK: I first heard of you as the instigator of the St. Leonards Concerts music series. What gave you the idea, and why? How long has it existed?

MB: My first concert in St Leonards was right after gatherings were again legal following Covid, June 2021. I remember walking out in front of an audience of 80 people, and what an amazing feeling it was to be stepping on stage again! Almost everyone I’d made friends with over my first lockdown year in St Leonards was there, and for most of the audience it was the first show they’d been to in over a year. My friend, incredible musician Laura van der Heijden and I played a real blinder of a piece, the Kodaly Duo, a rhapsodic, Hungarian odyssey for violin and cello. To be able to programme the music myself and invite friends and colleagues down to this beautiful place felt like something to build on.

VK: How is St Leonards Concerts funded?

MB: The series has had a small amount of sponsorship, but it’s mostly funded by ticket sales, including paying the musicians. I haven’t been able to pay myself much so far, but that should change as I hope to attract bigger audiences and find further sponsorship. I’m getting great feedback about the events and, as well as attracting new audience, there’s a loyal following growing – so I feel long-term positive.

VK: Do you have administrative staff?

MB: Not yet! It’s still early days, but I’m working on building a local team of people who will help me manage the events. I do have a bit of help, some from friends and some I’ve paid for, but at this stage the administration is still a mostly a one-man-band. Running around setting up venues/ recordings/ticket lists/door staff etc while trying to do a dress rehearsal can be pretty hectic! I’m having to learn new levels of multi-tasking!

VK: How do you decide on content, performance and performers?

MB: This is the fun part! Often I’ve brought programmes that I’m playing elsewhere for a repeat performance. Two of my three bands have visited, as well as other people I work with regularly in other settings. But as things develop, I’m enjoying the chance to explore tailor-made performances. I play a lot of classical music and I want to create the sort of listening environment where audience members feel like they can have an intimate experience, really led on a journey and captivated by a dynamic performance.

I think context is often a barrier to an engaging experience, along with some of the more artificial concert conventions, so I’m trying to make things inclusive and relaxed. For example, with the bigger concerts, I always arrange the chairs in a wide crescent around the performers. It’s a simple change, but it makes a huge difference. As to the music, I have a long list of amazing people and programmes I want to perform as part of the series… watch this space!

VK: Are you national as well as local?

MB: I’m constantly on the road. I play across the UK and Europe. In February and March I’m playing concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway as well as closer to home in the UK. Setting up St Leonards Concerts is partly about being able to play closer to home.

VK: How do you find rehearsal space?

MB: As the Fritz Brothers we rehearsed in my living room! For the recital I did with pianist Ljubica Stojanovic, for example, a local couple kindly made their lovely piano in their front room available. We mix and match.

VK: What’s your opinion of the current local classical music scene?

MB: It’s buzzing! It’s exciting that there is so much going on, and there are loads of great players around and audiences up for going to shows.

VK: Does St. Leonards Concerts do outreach work?

MB: Not yet, but it’s definitely on my radar as something to do in the future. What I would like to do is to bring more younger people and those without classical music or much live music experience to St Leonards Concerts. Sponsorship will also enable me to set up ticket schemes that will subsidise tickets for those who are struggling financially – and I’ve already made contact with a few local organisations, The Refugee Buddy Project for example, and a local school. Access and education are both on my mind as the series grows. I’ll also be looking for partner organisations.

VK: From your website and seeing the Fritz Brothers on only their third outing, it’s clear you are an exceptional musician, intensely versatile and cross-genre. Who do you think influenced you and who do you admire the most?

MB: I grew up in a musical family. My father is a cellist and was a big name on the British classical scene as I was growing up. He’s been a huge influence, but I’ve also looked for inspiration among non-classical musicians. There’s an amazing Romanian Gypsy fiddler from the 1930s whose music and playing I love: Georges Boulanger. The style is quite different from conventional classical violin playing, but actually, there’s loads of overlap. Also my teacher Ivry Gitlis, who died just a couple of years ago aged 96. His maverick lineage includes some of the great musicians of the 20th century, so I’m lucky to have learned from a true legend.

VK: Tell me about your musical education?

MB: I did my A levels at a musical vocational school, set up in the 60s by the legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin. I was precocious, always had an individual style. I won some prizes and scholarships, but real virtuosity has come more gradually to me than some. I’m still fascinated by the violin and how to play it. I don’t think that will ever leave me and will help me always develop. My mother is German. When I was growing up in England, this was still something to be ashamed of because of the WW2 associations and xenophobia from other kids at primary school. Now I’m proud to have dual citizenship with Germany and to be part of Europe. It also helps a lot with touring, post-Brexit, not needing a visa.

VK: I marvelled at The Fritz Brothers. Do you front other ensembles yourself, as well as doing studio work? Do you also play in the orchestra here?

MB: I played with the Hastings Philharmonic last year as soloist for Tchaikovsky’s epic violin concerto. I do regular studio work in London, film scores. I played solo on a big one recently but I’m actually not allowed to say the name of the film!! My regular groups are all chamber music, where leading roles interchange. I like to let rip, have my moment to shine, but I also love the interaction in chamber music.

VK: Is jazz your first love? The arrangements for that band were mostly yours, I think? Are all the arrangements and solo breaks written in, or are you as accomplished an improviser as you are an arranger?

MB: We arrange everything ourselves in Fritz Brothers. Improvisation is very much a part of what the band does. I’m picking up from jazz playing I did as a teenager and learning it afresh – daunting when you have the likes of the mighty Ewan Bleach as your band mate… but I’m loving the process! To me, jazz violin only really makes sense in an old style of playing – sweet and lyrical – and this is what we try to capture in Fritz Brothers. What Fritz Brothers does is mix the music of Rachmaninov and Chopin and other great classical tunes with this old jazz style, particularly Gypsy-jazz and old Swing.

VK: What are your French influences? Do you play jazz on viola as well as violin? How do you find the comparison?

MB: I loved jazz as a kid for sure. But I never listened to jazz fiddlers and, dare I say it, I’m not such a Grappelli fan. I feel like he plays too many notes, too noodly. His bandmate Django [Reinhardt] inspires me much more with his cheeky, rhythmically-concise style. And of course the great horn players like Lester Young, Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane were high on my listening list. South African Jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim was another big figure growing up. I’m not inclined to play jazz on viola – you really need the extra brilliance of a fiddle for that style, and for the higher registers. The viola will get lost in that context.

VK: Do you have an outlet for your own compositions?

MB: Yes I do – my group, Lodestar Trio, plays some of my music, and I occasionally direct ensembles where I play my own material as part of a wider programme. I also have a duo called Sonnen, with electronic musician Vahakn Matossian, where all the material is our own.

VK: All your musical associates have some level of virtuosity. How did you meet The Fritz Brothers, for instance? And are you all from eminent musical families?

MB: Bass player Misha Mullov-Abbado certainly comes from an illustrious lineage of top classical musicians. I’ve known clarinet and sax player Ewan Bleach for years – actually we played in a rowdy Ska band at festivals through our 20s. I met Frank since moving to St Leonards, and John I know through Ewan as they work a lot together. What makes them brilliant is that they are all skilled improvisers as well as great in written repertoire. I met Frank in a St Leonards garden, jamming in the summer sun! They are some of the best players I know in any field, and part of the aim of the St Leonards Concerts is to bring the kind of performances you would hear at top stages in London or Europe to the doorstep of concert-goers in St Leonards.

VK: Are the other Fritz Brothers involved in St. Leonards Concerts?

MB: I do the programming for St Leonards Concerts, and each concert is so far a stand-alone performance of a band or particular programme. But within each project there is a collaborative input amongst the musicians.

VK: How old are you, If it’s not a rude question?

MB: I just turned 42. Fresh-faced I’m told! Must be the winter sea swimming…

St Leonards Concerts Diary

Next Concert: Sunday 26th March, 5pm, Christ Church, Silchester Street, St. Leonards.

Haydn’s 7 Last Words of the Cross – a truly sublime piece for string quartet performed as part of the Easter calendar with special guests.

• You can make bookings via the St Leonards Concerts website and find details of other concerts to be confirmed.