Provocateurs bring their brand of defiance to art cabaret show
Neu! Reekie! all-stars look back on 2016 and ask: Where Are We Now?
through its counter-cultural underground. Other artists on board include Charlotte Church, who Neu! Reekie! recently brought to the National Museum of Scotland with her Late Night Pop Dungeon extravaganza, poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Akala, playwright and poet Sabrina Mahfouz, DJ and producer Andy Weatherall and Edinburgh-sired pop polymath Nick Currie, aka Momus.
Artist Jamie Reid, best known for giving the Sex Pistols their visual identity by way of situationist-inspired ransom-note style lettering, has designed the festival’s poster, using similar lettering. The poster’s colour scheme is straight from the cover of The Boy Looked at Johnny, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons’s collection of amphetamine-fuelled dispatches from punk’s front-line.
The title of Where Are We Now? is taken from David Bowie’s song of the same name that was the lead single from his 2013 album, The Next Day. In March, Hull 2017 will feature a full performance of Bowie’s 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, played by Holy Holy, a supergroup led by original Spider Woody Woodmansey and Bowie producer Tony Visconti. Kirchin. On compositions such as Abstractions of the Industrial North, Kirchin worked with musicians including free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker and future Spider From Mars Mick Ronson.
Prior to this, Kirchin had toured dance halls playing drums with his father Ivor Kirchin’s Big Band on a circuit that included a year-long residency at Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge Palais.
As Neu! Reekie! has proved, it is in the back rooms of pubs and church halls as well as the likes of the New Adelphi and the Fountainbridge Palais where the seeds of the counter-culture are sired. But Where Are We Now? is about looking forward.
“Everybody thinks 2016 was a terrible year that we’re going to be glad to see the back of,” says Pedersen, “but it’s next year that the real reverberations of what’s happened with Brexit, Donald Trump and everything else that’s happened this year start to become real.
“Where Are We Now? is about preparing ourselves for that. It’s about fortifying ourselves against it, and it’s about keeping on asking questions that matter.” Where Are We Now? runs as part of Hull 2017, June 2-4, 2017. See www.hull2017.co.uk
‘‘ It’s next year that the real reverberations of what’s happened with Brexit, Donald Trump and everything else that’s happened this year starts to become real