Hastings’ blues supremo Roger Hubbard will be in concert once again at the Kino-Teatr, Norman Road, St. Leonards, Friday March 3 at 7.30pm. He’ll be playing his own songs and performing  either solo or with accompaniment from Richard Studholme on bass guitar and Bruce Allen on drums. The support act is Yoshika Colwell.  Modestly, Roger says it’s an event “not to be missed” so book early.

Tickets from Kino-Teatr, 01424 457830 or ticketsource.co.uk/kinoteatr/t-ealjjey

Brethren Fritz

An evening of music with an all-star line-up is on offer from St Leonard’s Concerts. Led by violinist Max Baillie and clarinet player Ewan Bleach, the Fritz Brothers (named after Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler) will feature virtuoso guitarists Frank Moon and John Kelly, and bass player extraordinaire Misha Mullov-Abbado. 

Sunday 12 February ,7:30pm Crown House, 57 Marina, St Leonards.

Two Equals Three

We are reliably informed that if you visit Hastings Arts Forum on the St Leonards seafront from mid-February to mid-March, you’ll find an exhibition in two parts by South Coast Artists (SoCo) which is “vibrant and thought provoking”. The theme of the shows is THREE and, somewhat confusingly, it’s divided into two parts “because of the theme’s popularity amongst the membership”. THREE Part I runs from 14-26 February. THREE Part II runs from 28 February – 12 March, Tuesday – Sunday, 11.00am-5.00pm.

All at the Gallery, 20 Marine Court, St Leonards . www.hastingsartsforum.co.uk.

57 Varieties

Beans On Toast, aka British folk singer Jay McAllister, will play Hastings as part of his Back on The Road tour. Wikipedia tells us that McAllister hails from Braintree, Essex, and “rose to prominence out of the UK folk scene in 2005. His songs often centre around the topics of politics, drugs and love”. 

15 March, The Brass, 18 Havelock Road, www.beansontoastmusic.com.

Carroll Concert

Join Liane Carroll and friends for a night of jazz and good company. She will be joined by Naomi Pohl, the General Secretary of the Musician’s Union, for this fundraiser in aid of Hastings and Rye Labour Party’s candidate Helena Dollimore. It’s sponsored by The Musicians’ Union and they promise a fantastic night. All welcome.

Thursday 23 February 2023 7.00pm-10.30pm Sussex Rooms, White Rock Theatre.

Plagued

The Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra invite you to Join them for an exciting performance of Cavalli: Musiche Sacre (Music from a time of plague). It is brought to life with physical theatre elements by the children’s choir, HPO Songbirds, and HPO Singers, accompanied by the specialist early musicians of Ensemble OrQuesta Baroque. Written in the mid-17th century, Cavalli’s Musiche Sacre is full of variety, imagination, and experimentation.

Saturday 25 February 7.30pm Christ Church, St Leonards Silchester Road

In my rather dusty vinyl collection is a 1970 album titled How Blue Can We Get? It contrasts the burgeoning white British blues scene at the time with that of black American musicians. There are the likes of Peter Green and the sadly departed Christine Perfect, opposite Otis Rush and Larry Johnson. I recalled Jo Ann Kelly being featured, and so I was delighted to see her credited in Joe Snelling’s fascinating documentary of Roger Hubbard, Home Lovin Man.

At the end of the 1960s, Jo Ann loaned her front room to Roger to do an audition for the enigmatic Nick Perls. Originally an audio engineer, he’d scoured the US for early recordings of black bluesmen and remastered the original 78s for re-release on vinyl. Now he was seeking British musicians who could cover those same classics, and asked Kelly to be a sort of talent scout. She immediately recommended Hubbard. Perls brought an enthusiastic Larry Johnson along to hear him and promptly signed him to his Blue Goose record label. A two-day recording session resulted in Hubbard’s first album, Brighton Belle Blues. At the close of 1970 Hubbard was just 20 and seemed to have made the crucial breakthrough into a musical career, with a record deal and the offer of dates in New York’s clubs and coffee houses. 

Roger in his workshop today
Pictures courtesy Lucky Day Films

But there were problems. He didn’t much like the way his voice sounded on the album and had no say in the cover picture cover which he hated. “I looked like a girl and couldn’t identify myself with it,” he says, “so I didn’t go out and promote the record”. And then he pulled out of the New York tour. “I was a bit scared and I just let it go… I wasn’t confident enough at performing.” 

As the film makes clear, it was a decision he regrets to this day. But it coincided with the breakdown of his marriage, and a dark period exacerbated by experimentation with LSD. So Hubbard left Brighton and moved to Hastings, formed a new relationship, and supplemented his meagre musical income working as a furniture restorer.

The documentary is filmed largely in Hubbard’s workshop, and anyone with an interest in carpentry and traditional tools is in for a double treat, as he lavishes attention on a chest of drawers in between playing his inimitable finger-style and bottleneck blues. The legendary Muddy Waters once said of him, “Roger Hubbard is as good as any blues player in the UK or the United States,” and in this documentary, director Joe Snelling has collected several eminent musicians and bluesmen to flesh out that view. Andy Newmark, Kevin Brown and Ray Book Binder all testify to Hubbard’s extraordinary talent. And they try to explain why, and how, he’s failed to gain the wider recognition he so obviously deserves.

Jon Cleary originally from Cranbrook in Kent, who has played with Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal and BB King perhaps puts it best: “Professional musicians have to obey the laws of commerce. Trying to steer a clear musical path is hard to do. It’s not for everybody. Some people have more musical integrity than a desire to get into the music business. Roger has a lot of musical integrity.” 

Most agree that Roger Hubbard’s resonance today is quarried from the 50 years he’s been gigging in pubs and clubs – generally around Hastings. “Every single experience he’s had in life is being expressed in that playing,” says Glastonbury mainstager Kevin Brown. Hubbard himself seems to agree: “It helps to have a bit of life experience and probably helps to have a lot of bad times as well, especially if you are writing in the blues vein.”

Even when, as the film shows, opportunity came knocking a second time just a couple of years back, it seems that he was unable – or unwilling – to grasp it. Promoters ZYX Music offered him a contract to distribute his albums in Europe. But first he had to organise and promote his own tour dates. Brexit and lack of an agent rather squashed that, and in any event, he feels they confused the blues with rock. “It’s a shame, they tried to pigeonhole me. I’m not a showman.”

True perhaps, but what a player and songwriter he is. One of his influences is the great Delta bluesman Robert Johnson who, legend has it, sold his soul for exquisite musicianship. One can only speculate what Roger Hubbard may have exchanged for his abilities – self-confidence and self-contentment perhaps. “There’s still a lot of sadness in my life … there’s still unresolved stuff emotionally. That’s the well I draw from”.

• Home Lovin Man: The Story of Roger Hubbard is available on youtube
www.rogerhubbard.co.uk
• Latest single ‘Don’t Take Your Love Away’ can be streamed here

Legendary on the music circuit, Roger Hubbard has dazzled audiences for decades with the inimitable sound of his home-made electric resonator, ‘The Hub’, and his venerable old National Steel guitar. Under theSun, his latest self-produced album, on which he plays almost all the instruments, offers something different. Hubbard says: “Over the last couple of years I’ve come to conclusions that are not shared by most people”.

Lovers of Hubbard’s undoubted musicianship and song-writing will discover plenty to enjoy. He offers fine Country Blues grooves, inspired riffs and solos, alongside faultless fingerstyle, thumb-picked Broonzy-style playing. 

The title track is unmistakeably Hubbard – swamp-drenched, beautifully played on The Hub, with typically languid, yet precise phrasing.  On The Tide has Turned,he’sjoined by daughter Sadie on fiddle for an Irish-tinged country ballad. Caught Up in the Gameis similar but with a strong Southern-Mex flavour. However, the polemical nature of this album begins to bite and some listeners may recoil at sentimentalised tales of women who fell foul of the Covid-19 restrictions. Wisely, Hubbard holds his beliefs in check and most later tracks are more generalised complaints about an oppressive Establishment and the trials of the jobbing musician. Times are Getting Toughis an old-fashioned Depression-era, Country Blues lament about poverty.

Mandolin and slide back To the Ends of the Earth, an anti-government protest song, with muted references to Covid and lockdown – though a declaration that “fact-checkers are toeing the line” jars somewhat. A companion piece, Do not Fear,relates to his daughter’s opposition to vaccine passports in Ireland.  I’ma Man of My Own Opinion, “ a jaunty, reflective song” features a nice change of pace, its old-fashioned feel enhanced by great picking on his pre-war Martin acoustic. Hoodwinked and Cheated, a song of regret, with mournful arpeggiated ‘cowboy chords’ over a tasteful slide accompaniment, describes the agony of musicians seeing their livelihoods evaporate during lockdown. Again, Hubbard makes it a song beyond Covid.  Deal with the Devil comes straight from the Delta. A Robert Johnson-inspired insistent slide figure hammers away throughout this unpretentious pared-down song, beginning: “I can’t work, they won’t let me sing…”

Let Everybody Knowis more problematic. Whilst featuring a quite beautiful, laid-back riff, held together by an understated bass groove and muted tabla of which JJ Cale would have been proud, the lyrics are hyperbolic. “They’re coming for the children and they intend to do some harm”, claiming that parents were being advised to inject them with an experimental drug.  Freedom Convoyis a standard Country ballad about the Canadian Covid 19 trucker protests. It portrays the drivers as heroes and would find playtime on any Alabama radio station. Drawing the album to a finale is homesick ballad, Good Things. Sparse, simple, piano-backed, it has a great tune and is gloriously low-fi, lyrically strong and the most relatable song on an album which, as Hubbard predicts, will divide his fans. 

After the opprobrium received by Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, perhaps Hubbard is courageous in standing up for his beliefs and there is much to enjoy in this album, though he’s hardly challenging an orthodoxy of power and repression – think Victor Jara – murdered onstage by Pinochet’s goons, or Guthrie and Seeger suffering intimidation and jail, or even Dylan and Baez practically writing the soundtrack to the Peace Movement.   How you view Under the Sundepends where you stand on masks and jabs, and how ready you are to enjoy the tunes without worrying about the words.

Werner Herzog once said that “the documentary film is simply fiction films in disguise.” Certainly, the recent Kino Documentary Film Festival showed that the genre can unspool itself in endlessly different forms. Across five days, the cinema on Norman Road, showed eight films, all of which had strikingly different filmic personalities. If you looked at the collection of films one after another you would find yourself thrown into diverse human stories unfolding on the streets of Santiago or up a Holy Mountain or down in the mud of the Somme. 

Santiago Rising
CREDIT: Marcella Via

It would be invidious to select a star film in the eclectic mix but certainly this reviewer was forcibly struck by several. At a guess I would assume that few people are familiar with the name George Butterworth. The film All My Life is Buried Here shone a rather poetic light on this man, who was a notable collector of English folk songs and pastoral composer in the period just before the Great War. His most idyllic piece, The Banks of Green Willow, seemed to suggest that he was marked out for reputational greatness of the kind that his contemporary, and friend, Vaughan Williams went on to enjoy. Speaking to director Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz, it was evident that he had developed an obsessive desire to give the almost forgotten Butterworth at least a moment of posthumous limelight. The passionate directorial commitment shone through in the film which beautifully, if briefly, revived the man, particularly in the grainy images of him Morris dancing with friends in a delightful Edwardian garden. It was hard not to sense the shadow of war in the flickering monochrome. The cinematography was quite brilliant: the recurring cut to lonely poplar trees swaying in a breeze was particularly affecting. Butterworth, like so many others, was struck down, and into eternal silence, on the Somme. 

The death of innocence also flowed through the veins of The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. This really was an extraordinary piece, swerving back and forth in time. The film told the story of Bjorn Andresen, who played the shimmeringly desirable teenage boy in the 1971 film Death in Venice, by Visconti. In between clips from the film, we were jarringly confronted with Andresen as he is now: a rather broken, distant man, roaming around in a black gothic overcoat. His role in the film had made him an object of desire in the increasingly sexualised culture of the 1970s. Seemingly, fame and sudden sexual objectification – what Andresen calls “an overdose of attention” – caused all manner of deep psychological wounds. But, we were also let into other secrets in his subsequent life, including his mother’s suicide and the death of one of his children, all of which combined to leave an enveloping sadness at the film’s close. 

Olga Mamonova and director Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz

The documentary on the life of Roger Hubbard, by Rye film maker Joe Snelling, had a kind of double-edged feel to it: tinged with some regret but also a strong sense of celebration of one of Britain’s finest blues guitarists. Hubbard is a brilliant exponent of the blues syncopated picking style – so much so that Muddy Waters, in 1971, rated him “as good as anyone in UK or USA”. The film revealed that his debut album of that year – Brighton Belle Blues – met with so much critical acclaim it effectively opened up the chance for him to tour the U.S. But, for reasons the film leaves a little unclear, Hubbard never went. Maybe his devotion to the blues outweighed his appetite for fame. Or maybe he saw too clearly the ugly side of the rock rat race. But, as that film paints so beautifully, despite the lingering sense of what might have been, his talent now has only grown. In the after-film performance he showed why his style has made so many people detect an authentic strain of the old music’s melancholy joy. His right-hand technique is sharp and rhythmically complex and, the now rather smoky voice, adds to the sense that the sound has come out of a deep immersion in the blue stuff. It was an impressive combo of biopic and mini concert which undoubtedly entranced most present. 

More explosive in content was the powerful Santiago Rising: a visual account of the estallido or social outburst of the Chilean people against spiralling everyday prices and corruption in 2019. The now local filmmaker Nick MacWilliam, by his own admission, found himself in the eye of the Santiago storm by a kind of “perilous luck.” The film must be seen to be grasped but what is clear is that the uprising was a kind of subversive carnival centred on the Plaza Baquedano: an almost joyous revelling in the power of people to briefly ‘turn the world up-side down.’ Although it must be admitted that carnival occasionally boiled over into looting and torching of train stations. The documentary bears witness to the way the regime, under the billionaire President Sebastion Pinera, unleashed martial law and cracked down ferociously on the protestors whilst simultaneously masquerading as the defender of ‘public tranquillity.’ Some were killed, thousands were arrested and hundreds suffered head and eye injuries. I am not clear whether much was achieved beyond some vague promises about constitutional reform, but the film is a testament to the potential of people to rally together. Not a revolution; but perhaps a trial-run for one. We shall see.

The Festival also offered other filmic gems, such as Robin Lutz’s M.C. Escher, about the life of the Dutch mathematically inspired artist. Jen Rainin’s Ahead of the Curve documented the livewire life of Franco Stevens who created America’s first successful magazine explicitly for lesbians. Faith I Branko is an extraordinary story of a love affair between a Serbian Roma musician and an English woman obsessed with Romany music. Kubarska’s The Wall of Shadows documents the story of a Sherpa family who break an ancient taboo and lead an expedition up the forbidden slopes of Mount Kumbhakarna in Nepal in order to raise money for their son’s education. Although all are technically documentaries, each of these films is a jewel unto itself. 

I was left with a sense that Kino had put together a fantastic array of options which offered many people a glimpse of what film can say about humanity beyond our apparently endless need for superheroes and explosions. Most basically, it was clear that each director selected and cut their truth together in sharply different ways. Documentary, in that sense, shares with fiction a commitment to find ways to tell a human story. Maybe that was Herzog’s point. Either way, Kino’s DocFest was a triumph of true tale telling.

Beacon Jazz

Fans of avant-garde music are in for a double treat at the Beacon in October. Free jazz trio Somersaults are touring their new album ‘Numerology of Birdsong’ (West Hill Records) featuring local bass hero Olie Brice, Dutch reeds player Tobias Delius and drummer Mark Sanders. The second half of the gig features a set of solo sax from improv pioneer Trevor Watts (interviewed in HIP in March this year). Tickets £5 on the door. 8pm Thursday 17th October 8pm The Beacon 67-68 St Marys Terrace, Hastings, East Sussex,TN34 3LS.

Big Band at Kino

Following the sold-out show in May this year, the Big Band at the Kino returns on 19th October, 2019 with 2 shows at the iconic St. Leonards venue. The seventeen-piece big band is augmented by 4 guest singers known to most who frequent the local scene; Chantelle Duncan, Dr. Savage, Blair McKitchan, Bev Lee Harling and featuring their own original songs. This round of performances will include fantastic new arrangements from Frank Moon, Chris White and Greg Heath. We have the best lead performers, blistering improvised solos and an exhilarating modern big band. All you could want from a musical extravaganza. Check out the compilation video from the last show, you can book your tickets on the Kino’s website.

Blues in the Afternoon 

Following last year’s fantastic show, Blues in the afternoon is back at The Sea Angling Club on The Stade in Hastings Old Town, on Sunday 6th October, from 2pm (free entry, donations to St Michael’s Hospice welcome). The Mayor will be opening this year’s proceedings and local Historian and music expert Andre Palfrey-Martin will be the show’s MC. There will be incredible live Music from the talented: Freak Flag; Pete Prescott and Friends; an appearance from the Eric Harmer Band; and music and poetry from Pete Brown. A new CD will be available for £5, featuring fab local bands including Kingsize Slim, Roger Hubbard, Nelson King, Peter O’Donnell plus many more. Proceeds from CD sales will go to St Michael’s Hospice.

Plastication Imagination 

From 17 September to 27 October 2019, Marybeth Haas will be displaying work in six locations on advertising boards along Hastings and St Leonards Seafront, as part of both Coastal Currents and Photohastings season. Two sets of images are opposite the rear of Debenhams, close to the underground walkway from the underground car park, and another pair are to the left heading towards Hastings Pier.

Haas comments: “These images are a result of my own exploration and expression of multiple conflicting thoughts and feelings about the environmental challenges we collectively face. Overall, I feel optimistic about our capacity for connecting with and caring for our environment. I also feel an urgent need for collective shifts in attitude, and frustration about how difficult it sometimes is for me to make better choices and also what I see as continuing mass complacency. We are slowly waking up to the need to change our behaviour, particularly our attachment to using plastics and habit of throwing things away after use. We still need to find motivation and inspiration to commit to making more holistic and less convenient choices.”

New Reggae Sound 

Humble Rumble Sound System is a new Hastings’ based reggae Sound that’ll be powering The Hastings Dub Club. First session at Crowleys Bar, 56-57 Havelock Road, Hastings, TN34 1BE on Saturday 19 October, 9 pm till late, free entry. Run by father and son, Charlie and Jamie Woods, Humble Rumble is supplying a musical treat for lovers of reggae music, coincidentally during Black History month. The duo have built a massive System that pumps out heavy vintage and new reggae, from the 1970’s right up to date, including Humble Rumble’s own slab of newly released 7” vinyl featuring singer Milton Blake on one of Jamie’s crucial rhythms.

Tuesday 11th December
The Printworks, Claremont, TN34 1HA

Video featuring a selection of the art on offer.

Live Music from Roger Hubbard and Marie White,
Food available in Gotham Alley from Southside Wrappers (Christmas Meal or Vegetarian Wraps) Mmmmmm

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