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“WE BUILD A cAmpfIrE on thE SUffoLk BEAch nEAr SIzEWELL nUcLEAr poWEr rEActor BUt It qUIckLy BEcomES AppArEnt WE’rE not mAkIng A cookIng fIrE, WE’rE mAkIng A pyrE for A VIkIng fUnErAL.”

(Matthew de Abaitua, December Campfire)

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Greg Wilson, DJ, Producer,

Music Pioneer

Phil Cheeseman, Journalist,

A&R, Producer, Head UK

Strictly Rhythm

Sunrise 2011 - Steve Smith,

Animator & Director

Retrospective, ditto doors

Ashley Beedle, DJ, Producer,

Music Pioneer

Sunrise 2011 - Don Boyd,

Film Producer & Director

Ralph Blundell, Strategy

Consultant

Ruth Mackenzie, Director,

2012 Cultural Olympiad

Ben Kelly, Designer

Adam Dawe, Still Life

Photographer

Jude Edginton, Photographer

The Summer Cookout &

Sunset 2011

campfire storytellers 2011

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22

48

12

30

49

14

38

54

20

42

56

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Liam Bailey, Photographer

Ambit, Poems on the

Underground, Film Poem

Dr. Mindbender, Man of

Mystery

Shane Walter, Co-Founder &

Creative Director onedotzero

campfire ditto doors fireside favourites

Hamish Jenkinson, Creative

Director, Old Vic Tunnels

Iain Green, Wildlife

Photographer

Sue Hubbard, Poet, Novelist,

Journalist

Kevin Leahry, War Boutique

Artist

Radio ditto

Shane Solanki, Spoken Word

Artist, Musician

Matthew de Abaitua, Novelist,

Journalist, Lecturer

Campfire app

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78

94

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96

72

86

98

74

88

102

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Campfire’s second year went beyond even our own ambitious expectations. In the beginning of 2011 we inaugurated the ditto doors art space. Over the year we curated exhibitions from high profile photographers and artists, as well as showcasing retrospectives from top musicians, record labels, magazines, and film festivals. ditto doors has added something truly special to our Campfire conversation, bringing in even more fresh creativity and starting new dialogue. And let’s not forget our 2011 Campfire speakers, chosen from a wide range of backgrounds, sharing their inspirational stories in front of a highly receptive audience.

Our Campfire community has more than doubled since January, and for us it has been a pleasure

to develop relationships with regulars, and make new friends. Our network includes creative professionals, artists, technologists, information leaders, opinion makers, our clients and more than a few crazies. Which is just how we want it. It’s enormously rewarding to see the encounters that happen in Campfire, professionally and personally, and how much fun can we have together. That’s why ditto created Campfire, because even while living and loving the digital era, we believe in the power of personal relationships and the importance of sharing. More than making history, we are building a culture. Come and join us.

Alicia BastosCultural Ambassador

WeLCOMe TO OUR SeCOND COLLeCTiON OF CAMPFiRe STORieS.

A FLAVOUR AND ARCHiVe OF THe ReMARKABLe JOURNey We HAVe TAKeN OVeR THe PAST TWeLVe MONTHS.

iNTRO-DUCTiON

Photography: Toby Wolf

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This introduction starts with a huge thank you to all of the wonderfully generous and talented people who took part and contributed to our Campfire evenings. The folk who when asked to come and share their story said “Yes”. A small word but what a massive one, and without which none of this would have been possible.

A second huge thank you goes out to the thousands of folk who have come through the doors of our studio The Lighthouse on the 3rd Thursday of every month and form our audience, our community, and make our Campfire.

At ditto we are storytellers, and each day we shape stories for our clients. It’s our job of work, our passion, our labour of love. And we celebrate this every month at Campfire. The idea is a simple one; interesting folk come down and share their tale with a room full of interesting people. There are no appearance fees, everyone receives the same level of production, and there is no admission charge. People come down and meet old friends, make new ones, share a glass of wine, and hear a story.

Entering 2011 and our second year of Campfire we wanted to push the boundaries of storytelling further. At ditto we believe that storytelling is a narrative, a visual and a sonic experience. So from January 2011 we added two new aspects to Campfire – the ditto doors and radio ditto – and this past year we have been exploring these additional avenues and worlds. Fitting new chapters to add to our lexicon of storytelling.

We are over the moon with how our ditto doors have been received, and the talented artists and storytellers who have put together such wonderful exhibitions. These six shaker style doors form the very hub of collaboration at ditto. Artists exhibit their work on these doors, we work and collaborate on the doors all month, then for Campfire we hang them like a gallery. Opening up a wonderfully rich aspect to the Campfire storytelling nights, giving us a deeper insight into the personality, the setting and the context of the stories being told. Proving doors can be windows too.

With radio ditto we set about exploring the audio and sonic side of storytelling and launched the radio show Fireside Favourites, taking our Campfire Storytellers, and ditto door exhibitors on a deeper and more personal journey. Exploring what moved them, grooved them and shaped their journey and their tale.

And finally we wrap the whole Campfire, ditto doors and Fireside Favourites stories into a truly multi-platform experience. We blog about the events, film them, broadcast them, have created apps for them and now in this compendium commit the whole year long adventure to print.

You can explore the stories on-line at ww.ditto.tv, or head to the iTunes store and download our radio ditto app, and also download ditto TV – our digital version of this Compendium. You can watch videos of the night, the ditto doors exhibitions and hear the Fireside Favourites shows.

So to close and to take one final look back at 2011 and just what a year we have had: We doubled the size of our studio The Lighthouse and created superb new technical and creative collaboration spaces. Our Sunrise film festival and partnership with Norwich University College of the Arts is entering its fourth year and we are proud to say is now the UK’s largest independent online film festival with more than 80,000 public votes in 2011. We launched Sunset as our online music festival and the quality and diversity of entrants was truly something special – and garnered an impressive 50,000 public votes championing new talent and new artists. We launched our radio ditto channel and our very own music label – ditto tracks – and have worked with fantastic artists, labels and producers. Alongside all of this we had the privilege to work with amazing clients on world class projects. We feel truly blessed to be here and have the opportunities to champion storytelling, the arts, creativity, technology and commerce.

And so to 2012, entering our 3rd year at The Lighthouse and our 3rd year of Campfire. Please treasure and enjoy this; our second Campfire compendium. Savour the passion, care and thought that everyone has contributed to its realisation. The pages contain the life’s work, ambitions and achievements of some very special people – those who say “yes” and grasp the present, shared with some very special people, on some very special evenings. See you at the next Campfire, and let’s embrace the moment. All our best friends were strangers the first day we met them.

Good people doing good things.

Michael Wilson Founder & Creative Director

Good people doing good things... the power of ‘yes’

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Greg Wilson was the first DJ to mix live on television, the first resident

dance DJ at The Hacienda in Manchester, and he was the first storyteller of our 2011 calendar.

Forget what Morrissey had to say. Don’t hang the DJ, whatever you do. Give him some credit, please.

Words: Tom BoltonIllustration: Michael Cranston

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In 1975, at the tender age of 15, Greg had not only set himself up as a jobbing, paid DJ, he had a club residency. Great for honing his skills, and trousering a pretty good wage; less so for his schoolwork.

As Greg’s expertise and reputation grew, so did the jobs. Gigs around Europe followed, and it was on his return from one of these that the opportunity arose to start a residency at Wigan Pier. A year later, towards the end of 1981, a successful demo cassette led to Greg’s taking over the Wednesday night at Legend. To Greg it was clear – this was very much the big time. An impressive American style sound system, and the potential to build a knowledgeable, passionate and dedicated crowd. Because, through it all, that’s what felt most important to Greg – moving people. As he pointed out, this wasn’t a party. It was more than that. In the midst of recession Britain, with jobs thin to the point of non-existence, and large sections of the country feeling ostracised and marginalised, the energy and community of the Electro-funk “dance” scene was a necessity. There was too much steam that needed to escape.

The scene was growing though, and 1983 saw Greg become the first DJ to mix live on UK television, on the much heralded show, The Tube. And then on to a place that needs no introduction – The Hacienda in Manchester. At the time a club pushing to set new agendas and bursting with ambition, they took Greg on as their first dance music resident. Throughout this journey it is clear there was plenty of resistance from the musical establishment, but what drove Greg, and the source of the memories he now holds dearest, was the enthusiasm of the

With standing room only at The Lighthouse, Greg stepped up to centre stage. An excited hush descended over the packed crowd. For the next 80 minutes, Greg led a rapt audience through his own personal and musical journey. A love affair that started with him borrowing 7” singles from his older siblings in New Brighton, Merseyside, and being lulled to sleep by the bass from mobile discos playing in the pub downstairs.

crowd. The guys who drove all the way from Birmingham to Manchester to see him; the first thing they did on arriving was to syphon petrol from another car to be able to get home again. They simply didn’t have enough money to pay for the return leg. Real passion. Real commitment.

Having achieved what he wanted with DJing, and ever one to push himself, Greg moved into a new field, managing one of the first UK breakdancing crews, Broken Glass; bringing a new art form to an amazed country. The ‘90s saw him working with the Rap Assassins, with two albums on EMI. But during this period he had also pulled away from DJing completely.

It was a bleak time for Greg. He recalled how he was sat in his front room, he could hear the ticking of the clock, and became very aware that his life was ticking away one second at a time. But Greg had a brainwave that would get him back on the good groove. In the late ‘90s, with dance culture truly ingrained in the nation’s psyche, Greg noticed a significant absence in the genre’s timeline – namely its black music origins.

Feeling this to be a significant omission, and with a wealth of knowledge and memorabilia from the period, Greg started his website Electrofunkroots. What began as merely a way to help tell the story of how a music evolved, soon led to invitations for Greg to return to the decks; and in 2003 he played his first gig in decades, bar the occasional one-off, back in Manchester.

Word of mouth again did its work, as the gigs got bigger, and more geographically

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dispersed, until he was invited to make an album of re-edits – titled Credit to the Edit. It was what Greg had always wanted – the chance to select the records he wanted to handle, and push them out into the world. Again this snowballed, and Greg found himself gigging round the world, finally making it to the place that had influenced him so much over the years; New York.

In 2009, Greg’s Essential Mix for Radio 1 aired to international acclaim – exposing Greg further than ever. Festivals, major clubs, remixes for the likes of The XX – the world was his oyster once again.

But what drives him, what fires his passion, and what he was most keen to impart to the audience, is the importance of knowing your history. As he said on the night, one of his favourite adages is that “to know the future, you must first know the past.” As part of our evolving musical and social landscape it is vital that we acknowledge what really shapes us: the music we listen to, the shapes that we throw, the clothes on our backs, the words in our mouths. And for Greg that means highlighting the importance of “the influence of black culture on British culture – it is our culture.” Ever passionate, ever committed – a true storyteller.

punters who drove from Birmingham to manchester to see him play would syphon petrol from another car so they could make it home again.

Top: Dancers @ Legend, Manchester Middle left: Flyer, Angels, Burnley Middle right: Flyer, The Hacienda, Manchester

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New Brighton is my hometown on Merseyside. The richer side of Liverpool decided they wanted little holiday homes so they went across and built them

here. At first it was the moneyed people, and then it went down market. They used to have a Ham & Egg parade and it got closed down because of prostitution. I remember during the summer holidays it being rammed and ferries coming over, and you had to dodge the Scousers. There was a covered fairground called the Palace, and they had a Waltzer and would play Motown and Trojan reggae surrounded by a crowd of skinheads. Before we moved into the pub, I was on Egerton Street and it was the next street to where the fairground was. They also had a place called Tower Ballroom, an amazing venue where the Beatles played many times. I would have been asleep in my bed not 100 metres away.

New Brighton

Heroes

Chris BlackwellSomeone who approached the music

business and did it right, a champion of

black music and someone who brought

our culture immeasurable riches. The

scope of the music he introduced via

Island Records enriched British culture

and inspired musicians. It’s such a gift

that he gave us.

Villains

Simon Cowell Almost a pantomime villain, but it is

a little more sinister than that when

you think of the monopoly he has. I’ve

got no beef with the X-Factor, a light

Saturday night TV show, but the power

it’s assumed, how all the finalists get

record contracts when all that money

could be spent on developing music

talent, is a real waste.

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Greg Wilson

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This is the reel-to-reel machine I still use when I’m playing now. I know this piece of equipment because when I was doing my mixes for Piccadilly we used to record them

with this, which was a portable broadcast unit. One day there wasn’t anyone in the station so I found my way to an editing booth and next thing I’m loving it. It changed everything for me because all of a sudden it wasn’t a case of doing a straight as-live mix. I could edit, add FX. By 1984, I was trying to get work doing more production. One of the only ways of demonstrating what I could do was to edit stuff using the B77. I did Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Depeche Mode, Scritti Politti and Chaka Khan, hoping this would get me a lot of work, but it didn’t. The only person who was very positive was Dylan Jones who at the time worked for Record Mirror. Nowadays he’s the editor of GQ. Years later, when I came back to DJing in 2003, I dug out the Chaka Khan edit and everyone was coming up to me asking, ‘What’s this? Where can I get a hold of it?’

This for me is the ultimate format. You know where you stand with it. What’s on the A-side is the A-side, and it has a B-side. We’ve lost that B-side thing. Sometimes you

discovered the B-side was the one. I almost like those generic labels – it takes me back to the 70s – where every record looks the same apart from the name of the artist and the song, like Tamla-Motown for instance, with its sheer black label and the label name written in joined-up writing. The same applies to Stax, with the finger-snap logo. And Atlantic too. The idea of two tracks, one on each side, that’s what I grew up with and meant so much to me. It wasn’t till 1976 that the first 12” came out.

Revox B77

The 7” Single

The TemptationsBall Of Confusion

Mr BloeGroovin With Mr Bloe

Chaka KhanI Feel For You (Greg Wilson Edit)

Booker T & The MG’s

Time Is Tight

The FlamingosI Only Have Eyes For You

Greg’s Sonic Tonic

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Top: Disenchantment by Agents of Change Middle: Enchantment by Rob Brandon - Music: Özlem Şimşek Bottom: Photography: Claudia Gannon

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ditto retrospective

For the inaugural exhibition on the ditto doors, we revisited some of our astonishing creative work, stretching the limits of the possible.

ditto’s Big Bang, our Year Zero was a live one-off performance at the famous Roundhouse in Camden. Taking as our theme ‘The Human Condition’, our concept was that communal experience was diminishing in the era of 1s and 0s – where’s the love in that?

ditto was our reaction to this situation, a one-off experience, never to be repeated. You had to be there. You had to be involved – doing it together, once: ditto. The project created 21 original pieces of film and music, a powerful and emotional narrative, performed live to the audience.

Building on that momentum, in July 2009 we were invited to the Latitude Festival where we would collaborate with a call to arms to all of the 50,000 strong audience. Our mission was ambitious: to produce a 90-minute live performance with at least half of the show crowd-sourced.

In October of the same year, at The Tabernacle, a venue that saw the first mixed black and white audiences, and a stage that saw The Clash first perform, ditto was asked to produce a community-wide collaborative project as part of the opening celebrations. We curated a high-octane rollercoaster of a show with 20 live performances, complete with a circus ringmaster.

As 2009 came to a close, so too did this chapter of ditto. We had new ideas to pursue, new stories to tell, new stages to perform on.

Photography: Alicia Bastos

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LeADeR OF THe

PACKA master of leadership and strategic consultancy, Ralph invited the audience to join him on an inner journey, revealing how we can all empower change for the benefit of mankind.

Words: Richard Galbraith Photography: Alicia Bastos

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Wasting no time, Ralph got straight down to business, analysing the relationship between work and service. He proposed that businesses can be a force for good in the world and that they can be more trustworthy than those organisations such as governments and other NGOs that we supposedly rely on.

Ralph highlighted both sides of the business coin, if you will; not just the money making machine, but also the service offering. He affirmed that human nature is originally noble, and incredibly capable of doing good things – a statement that may seem at odds with the rampantly capitalist society evident around us. But it sparked interesting thought and discussion about our potential to serve the world, or at least benefit it, through communication.

This is not simply chat for charities, but a worldwide conversation about the possibility for changing lives within us all. How do we best challenge these times of greed and futility, vanity and waste? Perhaps by evolving ourselves, then sharing our intentions and achievements with other like-minded people, and thereby inspiring others to take the same journey. That sounds easy enough, right?

Ralph explained how he himself had worked in Kosovo, in a period when the country was dealing with the harsh consequences of a brutal civil war. A country of many cultures and languages, invaded, bombed, and terrorised. The freedom of Kosovo has cost them so many lives, and so much of their confidence and organisational structures; leaving them with half of its population under 25 years old.

Although Ralph has travelled through other war torn countries, he found himself particularly touched by Kosovo; despite its hardships, it remains a place of optimism, hungry for innovation. In encountering this contagious will to move the country forward, Ralph was shocked by the economic disparity evident; the pitiful sums at the disposal of the passionate medical and education professionals, and the absurd figures being bandied around by aid agencies.

Ostensibly both aiming to help the country recover from the ravages of war, the commitment gap between these two groups was something Ralph found deeply shocking. All the money in the hands of bulky multi-national aid agencies, while one of the country’s abundant natural resources, its young entrepreneurs, were out in the cold.

So Ralph decided to get back to the essence of human nature, and help people in Kosovo stop missing opportunities to find happiness and realisation through their work. As Ralph says, “At best we are paid to be passionate about our work; we work hard, we learn, we love and we deliver the best we can, because we know that we can do it really well. And after having had a great time and doing a good job, we still get paid for it, both in terms of money and the knowledge we grow.”

Ralph touches on the ‘moral compass’ concept – explaining, yes, we all do have one, and when it’s not aligned, it feels like there is something wrong. It makes sense to go back to human nature, and take a moment to consider how our relationship with work affects our moral compass.

The theory is all very well, but the real moment of change occurred when Ralph threw a series of questions out to be discussed by the Campfire guests. They were deceptively simple, and easy to try in our own context with those around us:

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1. Thinking of business as a service offering to the world, where do you think the organisation you work in sits and what is your view of business, and how well it serves?

2. What attracts you to viewing work as a service? And what repels you?

3. If you were to follow your moral compass in terms of your work, what would you do differently tomorrow? How would it feel? What would happen? How different would it be from the world you inhabit now, and what would you need to help you to make that happen?

The conversations these questions prompted in the audience were so alive and vibrant that, as Ralph confessed, it was almost impolite to interrupt.

There may be no one solution to balancing the turmoil between what the world asks from us, and what we can give the world, but there is a first step: be responsible for our actions, inside and outside of the workspace, and envisage our moral compass being balanced don’t waste our potential.

Ralph comments about a commonly held opinion that businesses don’t care about our moral status. But if it is not business’ duty to care about people’s morals, whose responsibility is it? So, the initiative is with us to find companies and organisations that work in parallel to our values, where our talents and potential can be unlocked, allowing our work income to be more than just money. Ralph’s plea was that we think about the big ‘We’, and where this frame of thinking and acting can lead: we can all be our best more often. The truth is, the more we do this, the more we encounter people trying to do the same thing, creating an empowering wave of change.

His talk was not only inspiring but transformative. Asking people about what they were taking away from Ralph’s Campfire I shared the liberating thought that everything is possible, especially if we believe in good people doing good things.

There may be no one solution to balancing the turmoil between what the world asks from us, and what we can give the world, but there is a first step: be responsible for our actions, envisage our moral compass being balanced. And don’t waste our potential.

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I fell in love with the guitar as a kid. I loved the rock scene, I loved all that early James Taylor stuff. The first guitar I bought was an Epiphone

Texan. I had it until about seven years ago when a guy in the town I lived in at the time, who busked regularly, was sitting there begging. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him, and he replied, ‘I was beaten up and some people stole my guitar’. By this time, having started my guitar collection at the age of 15, I had amassed more guitars than anyone could play, and so I went home and gave him my first guitar – one that I didn’t play anymore.

The Guitar

Heroes Villains

`Abdu’l-Bahá`Abdu’l-Bahá was the son of

Bahá’u’lláh, founder of the Bahá’í

Faith. He was just an ordinary human

being who strove to live a life where

he exemplified perfectly the notion of

service. He and his father were exiled,

imprisoned, but through all that he

retained a desire to help other people.

An extraordinary and remarkable man.

George Dubya Occasionally you come across

someone who wilfully and deliberately

chooses to be wrongheaded and stupid

and I find myself challenged to forgive

such folk. Sadly one of the world’s

richest and most powerful nations

happened to be led by one such

dimwit. This is a man who knew what

the right thing to do was, and decided

not to do it.

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Ralph Blundell

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I was living in Lewes and my good friend and neighbour downstairs moved out and said to me, ‘There’s a woman arriving who’s going to rent our apartment and she’s just

come back from China. She’s Baha’i. Please be friendly to her, I don’t know if she knows anyone.’ What started as an introductory cup of coffee became our wedding. Linda is just an extraordinarily beautiful, talented, mercurial, perplexing woman. At the time we met, I was living on my own, having been divorced, and I was really absolutely 100% not looking for a relationship, She was in the same place, so it was torture meeting, but a torture that has been a joy ever since. Anne of Cleves’ house stands in for Lewes, where I met my wife.

I was very lucky for nearly 20 years to live in the north east of England, on the doorstep of Northumberland, an extraordinarily beautiful county. There are mountains and

moors and rivers and the sea there, all of which I adored, and when I lived there I used to fish the River Coquet, a beautiful Northumbrian River with the most gorgeous trout. Whilst in the North East I heard for the first time this music that entranced me. It was the Northumbrian pipes. I just fell in love with it. I joined the local pipe society which I assume still exists till this day, where we would gather once a month in a pub and play. An early teacher of mine was a guy called Joe Hutton, a fantastic man. When he died, the town of Rothbury was filled with people.

Anne of Cleves’ House

The River Coquet

Kathryn Tickell Our Kate & The Wedding

Tuck & Patti Little Wing

Taj Mahal & Toumani Diabate Queen Bee

Tom Waits I Hope I Don’t Fall In Love With You

Prince Nothing Compares 2 U

Ralph’s Sonic Tonic

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Background: Blue SplashTop: Hermes Lock Middle: Yuki Bottom: Fairy Smoke

Adam Dawe is originally from Newcastle, serving his apprenticeship in photography by assisting Jerry Oke, one of the greatest still life photographers of his generation. Adam has been working commercially for 18 years, specialising in still life photography for advertising & editorial clients both in the UK & abroad. Adam has been commissioned by magazines such as The National in Dubai, ES magazine, Sunday Express Magazine, Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph and his client book includes Axa, Amex, British Gas, Cancer Research, Marston’s & Shell.

A long time friend of ditto, Adam was one of the key contributors to ditto’s inaugural project at the Roundhouse Short Circuit Festival. Adam did the lighting and production for the short film ‘Jolene’, in collaboration with the film-maker Nick Sutton, the musician Mieko Shimizu and the choreographer & contemporary dancer Clara Barbera. He also contributed stills and collaborated with Michael Wilson on the short film ‘On Raglan Road’. Adam’s photography speaks for itself, with a sharp and clear design in lighting & composition that enhances the beauty of shapes and textures, creating a fascinating atmosphere, giving life to the still.

The ditto doors prints are for sale, please contact: mail@adamdawe.comwww.adamdawe.com

Adam Dawe

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Journalist, DJ, label manager, and producer Phil Cheeseman

is a particularly rare breed. Not only was he at the centre

of two cultural storms, in punk and house, but he can still

remember them both.

Words: Tom Bolton

Illustration: Toby Haynes

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The record industry these days is like a giant brought to its knees, a Superman emasculated by green kryptonite. But when Phil came of age it was a whole other beast. Phil was there during its decadent last days, striking deals with record label bigwigs around the pool in 5-star Miami hotels, jetting off to MIDEM in Cannes where you could put absolutely anything – and we mean anything – on expense accounts. He had close shaves with Mafioso promoters in Naples, stole hot chart singles from under the nose of clueless rock A&Rs at major labels and met superstar DJs when they were just little nippers.

But, for Phil, the career path to record industry high roller wasn’t your average trajectory. Starting out producing fanzines at the tender age of 15, somehow booking leftfield legends like Crass to play chicken in a basket venues in Ipswich, Phil was bitten by the music bug. Moving to London at the earliest possible moment, he carved out not just a living, but a life and reputation in music as a

journalist of the highest calibre. Writing for various music publications such as Melody Maker and Record Mirror, Phil truly hit his stride when he first stumbled on house music on pirate radio stations Kiss and LWR. He was soon writing for DJ Magazine, penning the seminal History of House Music article and suddenly found himself at the centre of a flourishing scene.

For many this would have been the end of the story, but for Phil it was just the beginning of a new chapter, as his path crossed with the legendary house label, Strictly Rhythm Records. This relationship, begun in the ‘90s has resurfaced today, with Phil now running the European arm of the label that brought us the likes of Armand Van Helden, Masters At Work, Roger Sanchez, and many more. He talked with relish about hits like ‘I Like To Move It’ by Reel 2 Reel, which neither Radio One nor Top of the Pops wanted to play until they were forced to by popular demand. And another Strictly Rhythm hit, Wamdue

If there’s one thing the music industry

is not known for, it’s restraint. Fortunate

then that March’s Campfire, falling

on St Patrick’s Day, a celebration close

to ditto’s heart, was presented by

journalist, producer and Strictly Rhythm label manager, Phil

Cheeseman. So here at The Lighthouse we celebrated in the best way we know – with gallons of Guinness,

lashings of Irish stew, tonnes of friends and a good dose

of laughter.

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Project’s ‘King of My Castle’, finally knocked off the #1 spot before Christmas by, you guessed it, Cliff Richard, who else?

Phil also generously put together an exhibition of memorabilia accumulated over his glittering career, from gold discs to magazine front covers. The exhibition was divided in three main periods:

• His journalistic days started at the tender age of 15, producing the legendary punk fanzine Anti-Climax in the yards of Ipswich, Suffolk. He went to on to become a fully fledged music journalist, writing for the likes of DJ Magazine. The exhibition feature his article The History of House along with the original fanzines, including a lithograph, punk badges, and handwritten letters from fans.

• Phil’s adventures in New York led to his running the European arm of Strictly Rhythm Records. The award-winning label featured seminal artists, including Todd Terry, Roger Sanchez, DJ Pierre, Kenny Dope, Erick Morillo and Armand Van Helden. Along with personal archive photos of many of these household names, the exhibition include gold discs, iconic party flyers, and other articles that make this an amazing time capsule of the period’s culture and energy.

• The third area was dedicated to Phil’s inspirations and influences, including Chicago and the UK acid house parties, his DJ work, plus the creation of his record label Essence.

We also screened a selection of Strictly Rhythm Records music videos from Ultra Naté, Reel 2 Real, Barbara Tucker, Wamdue Project, plus two BMP shows with Dj Pierre, Erick Morillo and Phil Cheeseman interviews.

Phil’s story was a unique and privileged insight into the wheelings and dealings, the personalities and pitfalls of one of the most significant musical genres of the last twenty years. But don’t worry if you missed out – you can relive the night with our TV show of the evening over on ditto.tv. Because like the music, this is a story made for sharing.

Top left: Phil with C&C Music Factory in New York This page: Flyer, The Wag Club, London

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The radio was my route into music, my means of discovery. You can discover things by word of mouth, by meeting people in record shops, but

radio is straight into your home, direct to you. I think it’s the greatest means of communication we have and I still believe that today. With a radio you just roll the dial and discover what’s there. It happened to me time and again, not just as a kid, but later in life. For example in the mid-’80s I was writing for Melody Maker but there was little exciting me. Then I heard John Peel play LL Cool J ‘Rock the Bells’ and that was my road to Damascus moment. Overnight I almost completely stopped listening to rock music. Hip-hop was fresh and exciting. Through hip-hop I started listening to pirate radio stations like Kiss and LWR. And that’s where I heard DJs like Jazzie M and Steve Jackon play this thing called house music.

The Radio

Heroes Villains

Nelson MandelaFor so much change to happen in

that one country... here was a man

who spent most of his life in prison,

unjustly, who came out and wielded

huge influence in his community and

went for peace. To have overseen

that transition in South Africa was

just incredible.

Rupert MurdochIn the ‘80s, you couldn’t be neutral,

you were either on one side of the

picket line or the other. I had friends

who went to work for Murdoch’s

paper but I decided not to. I wasn’t

about to support what he did to the

print workers, this man who put all his

weight behind a government I hated.

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Phil Cheeseman

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Fanzines were the blogs of the day. All you needed then was a photocopier – my brother knew the guy in the photocopier room. But the typewriter for me is

a symbol of my route out, from childhood to adulthood, from where I was to where I wanted to be. It’s funny, I used my mum’s typewriter and I learned to type at school which meant I could make my fanzine faster. I was the only boy in my class to pass my RSA typewriting exam. And when I moved to London I used some knackered old machine where not all the letters were level. And then I found an electric typewriter in the skip – this was London in the middle of a property boom and you could find anything in a skip. I found this huge typewriter, this massive old thing, and it sounded like a taxi, a diesel engine. For years that was what my copy for magazines was produced on.

New York is so close to me in my professional life. I wouldn’t be where I am today without a connection to New York. I first went to New York in 1990 to interview Mantronix – the

record company paid for the plane tickets and it was very exciting. But New York is also the home of Strictly Rhythm. I remember it was Tim Jeffreys at Record Mirror who asked me to write about a record on this small New York label called Strictly Rhythm. I phoned their offices, told them who I was, and next thing I know there was a big box in my London office with 20 records in it. In 1991 I visited their offices in New York, interviewed the owner of the company, Mark Finkelstein, and the next year he hired me.

The Typewriter

New York City

The Clash London Calling

Marshall Jefferson Move Your Body

Words of Peace (White Label)

Logic The Warning

Ben Westbeech Falling

Phil’s Sonic Tonic

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Acid House - The infamous Sun newspaper headline creating moral panic about acid house and the widespread use of ecstasy. It begins, “Night of ecstasy... thrill seeking youngsters in a dance frenzy at the secret party attended by more than 11,000.”

Phil Cheeseman

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Anti Climax The punk fanzine Phil put together as a teenager from his home in Ipswich featuring bands like the UK Subs, The Damned and Stiff Little Fingers.

Killing Joke More pages from Anti-Climax. In the days before desktop publishing, all you needed was a photocopier, a pair of scissors and a tub of UHU.

New York, New York Phil taking a bite of the Big Apple, and in good company too, alongside David Cole (C+C Music Factory) and the inimitable DJ Pierre.

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Though he’s more accustomed to rocking dancefloors, Ashley Beedle came

to Campfire and tore the roof off. A consummate professional, and a true

gent, this is his Campfire.

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MANON AMUSICALMISSION

Words: Jez SmadjaIllustration: Michael CranstonPhotography: Alicia Bastos

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In the afternoon the piles of burgundy chairs arrived and were laid out in five rows across the studio, the guest list was closed with over 200 names on it, the boxes of wine were delivered from Waitrose, Brian the chef brought 120 pieces of jerk chicken, and the star of the show, Ashley Beedle, pitched up at the ditto Lighthouse for 6pm. Even though he’s regularly played to crowds of tens of thousands of mad-for-it clubbers, he was nervous at the prospect of talking to Campfire. He needn’t have been. On stage Ashley was every bit the charismatic good guy that he is in person, but more of that later.

Downstairs in the exhibition space, Ashley had assembled a collection of the records he’s made – from his early material with X-Press 2 and the Ballistic Brothers to compilations for Strut and Azuli as well as his album with Horace Andy, his Mavis Staples tribute project and his Bob Marley remix. For the exhibition, Ashley also revisited some of the places around London that provided him with his musical education. Revisiting those places was something of a bittersweet experience for Ashley as only a few places had survived the intervening decades. Nevertheless they provide a fascinating back-story to the life of this Ivor Novello winning record producer.

By 8pm, the smell of jerk chicken wafted from the pan and drew a long queue of salivating guests while the bar was flowing with rum punch. It was an elegant and mixed crowd in attendance, and we spotted a few stars including Phil Cheeseman (Strictly Rhythm), record producer Yam Who, and even Ashley’s two sons. When the last piece of jerk chicken had be eaten, Ashley took centre stage for what would be a hugely memorable Campfire.

Everyone is a Campfire virgin at one time in their life. This April edition featuring Ashley Beedle, it was my turn

to be introduced to Campfire’s indefinable charms and drink from its cup of knowledge.

Top: Ashley Beedle and his jellies Bottom: Hall of Fame

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Left: Ashley Beedle & Michael Wilson

Retracing his childhood days in west London, Ashley told us about growing up in Harrow Weald and his early excursions into music, being taken to sound systems by his parents as a young boy, then embarking on his own musical journey round the record shops of Harlesden.

Not short on stories, Ashley told the audience how, as a young soulboy, he was sent home from school for wearing plastic sandals that were popular at clubs like Crackers. (“What are those?” asked the headmaster. “They’re plastic sandals,” replied a disingenuous young Ashley. “I know very well what they are young man. You can come back to school when you’re not wearing them.”)

Ashley then moved on to the acid house chapter, which drew cheers from the audience and was full of tales about clubs like Clink Street where alongside Rocky and Diesel, Ashley ran Room Two. One night they were playing Robert Owens’s ‘Bring Down the Walls’ when Ashley got on the mic and told people to bring down the

walls. People literally started tearing down the netting from the ceiling, but that wasn’t the half of it. By the end of the night, a rumour started circulating around the club that some guys had dug a hole through the walls. In fact, with the help of a screwdriver, two punters had burrowed through four walls, clean through the side of the building and into the light of day.

The stories kept coming. There were stories about how Ashley, alongside Rocky and Diesel as part of X-Press 2, lured David Byrne into the studio to record what would be the huge chart smash ‘Lazy’; as well as stories about his more recent projects like the Mavis Staples covers album featuring soul legend Candi Staton and Kurt Wagner (Lambchop).

Bringing things to a close on a rousing note, Ashley spoke of the power of music to unite people. ‘Music is magic that we pull down from the air,’ he said. And the bewitched Campfire attendees who were packed into The Lighthouse – the biggest crowd we’d had to date – could only nod their heads in agreement.

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My dad would bring round friends and have an impromptu party on a Saturday afternoon (which usually ended on a Sunday afternoon). They used to

bring round amazing 45s, with the label halfway across the record and the writing spelt wrongly. But put the needle to the record and you’d be transported to this incredible place. And what an impact Jamaica had, culturally, on the UK. When it came to buying Jamaican music, I would get a 182 bus from Harrow to Wembley, and from there to Craven Park, Harlesden. There you had Hawkeye Records, Starlight Records directly across the road, the notorious Pama Brothers running reggae distribution, and Mojo Records who were putting out all the James Brown material. Hawkeye was also one of the first shops to set up their own reggae label. The first 12” they put out was Dennis Brown and Trinity’s ‘Funny Feeling’.

Hawkeye Records

Heroes Villains

Malcolm XI read the biography by Alex Haley and

realised what Malcolm went through,

what he did. A lot of people forget the

transition he went through, breaking

away from the Nation of Islam. He was

ever evolving as a person right up to the

point where he was assassinated.

Margaret ThatcherMaggie made it known that she was

your enemy, which I admire her for.

She wasn’t hiding behind anything. But

what I hated about Margaret Thatcher

was how she destroyed communities.

This is a woman who was brought

up in a corner shop, and she was out

there destroying communities for the

advancement of her politics.

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Ashley Beedle

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Being a soulboy, I’d got my first pair of plastic sandals up in the West End, a brown pair of Bowie pleats, red socks, a school blazer, a white shirt and a bow tie. I’d gone

into school – at the time I had a black afro with a blond streak. I’d arrived late to assembly and the whole assembly went quiet when I walked in. The headmaster wrapped his lectern, looked at me, and said, ‘You boy, go home. How dare you come into my assembly looking like that.’ That was my first case of rebellion. The whole look stemmed from the Parliament/Funkadelic thing, and Bowie of course. Bowie was so goddam out there, and the music was – oh my God. And you couldn’t catch up with him because he’d be changing on each album. The point where he was moving out of the whole Ziggy Stardust thing – Diamond Dogs – is a pivotal album for me, because we’re not talking about Young Americans but we’re talking about the crossover point. And also the cover was absolutely shocking – David Bowie, the bottom half of him a dog with his bollocks hanging out.

It was for my twelfth birthday that my dad – who very sadly passed away in 2011 – bought me a combined stereo, where you’d have your radio and your deck. I’d

come home from school, do my homework, then at 9pm I’d tune into Capital Radio. It was one of the newest stations and they had a DJ called Little Nicky Horne. He’d be like “I’m in LA, in a helicopter, across Coldwater Canyon, I’m just about to land”. I dread to think how much money they must have spent on the show. The following week it would be, “I’m live in New York with Bruce Springsteen”. The first time I ever heard ‘Born To Run’ was thanks to Nicky Horne. I was in bed, in my house in Harrow Weald, with my headphones on, listening to ‘Born To Run’, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

Plastic Sandals

Vintage Stereo

John Coltrane My Favourite Things

Big Youth All Nations Bow

David Bowie Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family

Gang Starr Moment Of Truth

Hall & Oates She’s Gone

Ashley’s Sonic Tonic

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Ashley Beedle

From his seminal productions as part of X-Press 2, his recordings with Black Science Orchestra and now-classic compilation albums for the likes of Strut Records and Azuli, we chronicled Ashley’s prolific musical output on the ditto doors. There were the more recent albums – Inspiration Information with Horace Andy, the Mavis Staples project and DarkStarr – and Ashley also revisited some of the formative places around London that provided him with his musical education.

Above: Classic Ashley Beedle productions Right: Ashley’s musical journey: Two Abodes In Harrow (1966-1977); Harrow-On-The-Hill Tube Station (1978-79); Wembley & Brent Town Hall (early ‘80s); Soho Record stores (late ‘80s); Photography: Vicky Scarth

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Advisor to five successive New Labour ministers, one time head of the Scottish National Opera and now director of the 2012 Cultural

Olympiad, in the business of culture, there are few people better connected than Ruth Mackenzie.

Words: Jez SmadjaIllustration: Toby Haynes

The Cultural Attache

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Ruth is a brilliant and convincing spokesperson for the arts – she’s someone who, after many decades working in the industry, still believes strongly in the rewards that the best art can bring to audiences. Having worked at the highest level and dealt with entrenched bureaucracy, Ruth somehow remains not in the least bit jaded, but possibly more inspired than ever.

Her artistic credo – one that forms the basis for the 2012 London Festival, and her career as a whole – is that world-class art should be accessible to everyone, something she’s carried with her ever since her radical, feminist experimental theatre groups. Ruth explained that these world-class works are important because they are transformative, either in conjuring a better world or describing complex emotional experiences; and finally that the best work always takes risks or challenges the status quo. When she commissioned a contemporary opera in Mandarin to be performed as the centrepiece of the Manchester International Festival (Monkey, Journey to the East, you might have heard of it) there were questions whether she could fill the 30,000 seats required. It helped, of course, that Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett of the Gorillaz were involved, but still, it was a risk – but one that paid off with dividends.

Ruth’s biggest challenge of her career, however, will be to deliver a 70-day, country-wide calendar of events – the London 2012 Festival. She’s been frantically commissioning work from headline-grabbing British talent, and we were privileged to hear about the material in its early stages of development. Ruth spoke at length about Peter Sellars, Toni Morrison and Rokia Traore’s interpretation of Desdemona’s story from Shakespeare’s Othello showing at the Barbican; she waxed lyrical about the production of Dr Dee directed by Rufus Norris with music by Damon Albarn that will be taking place at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. She whet our appetite for the Big Dance, the world’s largest dance programme, as well as a number of Pina Bausch

pieces in development, and work from David Hockney and Rachel Whiteread.

With more acts to be confirmed nearer the time, the programme is already shaping up to be something that is not just risk-taking and of world-class calibre, but also inclusive. It aims to place the cultural agenda firmly at the heart of the 2012 Olympics, just as it was in Ancient Greece.

You get the sense that Ruth Mackenzie rarely suffers from stage fright, possibly the result of early stage performances with the London Schools’ Choir as a singing snowflake in The Nutcracker. Or maybe it was her time with an experimental feminist theatre group in Lincolnshire where she performed for the benefit of a not-always fully receptive local community.

So addressing a captive audience at ditto HQ was a walk in the park for this artistic director, curator and spokesperson for the arts. Ruth advised five successive culture ministers under New Labour and now has the daunting task of programming the London 2012 Festival – 10 weeks of events across Britain to coincide with the 2012 Olympic Games.

The audience for May’s Campfire was, as ever, an eclectic bunch, including a cross-section of people working in the creative industries, including curators, festival programmers, record label managers and designers. They hardly let their attention drop for one second as Ruth regaled them, in her laissez-faire delivery, with stories from her blazing trail through some of Britain’s best arts institutions, from the Nottingham Playhouse to the Scottish Opera, via the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Manchester International Festival.

But this was as much an exercise in self-deprecation as anything, with Ruth explaining how her own limitations as a performer drew her into arts programming, and how as soon as she had a large enough budget to hire acts superior to her own theatre troupe, she did just that. Ruth has always been open to other people’s ideas, and she recalled how after one belligerent punter at the Nottingham Playhouse laid out a furious critique of her programming, she hired him to the team. That punter, as it happens, was ditto’s very own Andrew Chetty.

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1. Martin Creed – All the BellsAt 8am on the first day of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, ‘Work No.1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes’ by Turner Prize-winning artist and musician Martin Creed, will be performed throughout the UK.

2. Damon Albarn’s Dr DeeDamon Albarn has written a visionary stage show that combines acoustic pop with contemporary opera to tell the story of this fascinating Elizabethan figure, an influential political adviser, mathematician, magician, alchemist, spy and scientist during the reign of Elizabeth I.

3. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina BauschTanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: World Cities 2012 is a month-long season of international co-productions to celebrate one of the most influential choreographers in dance, Pina Bausch. It is presented by Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican in association with Cultural Industry.

2.

3.

1.

In the Q&A session, Ruth managed to deal with questions hurled at her like a prize fighter parrying punches: ‘Isn’t her cultural programme elitist, appealing to the highly educated strata rather than the general public?’ asked one audience member. ‘How can she justify spending this huge budget at a time when arts budgets and social programmes are being scrapped across the country?’ wondered another. Unfazed, she emphasised that the 2012 Festival was designed to be inclusive and if she hadn’t achieve that goal, then she would have failed in her role. She added that while she wasn’t going to condone the government’s cuts, the value that the 2012 Festival would bring to the country’s cultural industries, with the eyes of the world watching, could provide the kick-start to the economy that this country is so desperately looking for.

It was on this rallying call that Ruth’s Campfire came to an end, and as audience members rose from their seats, careful to avoid knocking over their empty wine glasses, there was an appreciative and creative murmur that hung over the room. Some audience members tried to corner Ruth to pitch their own ideas for the 2012 Festival, others needed a refill at the bar, and as the evening wore on, and the sun went down, Ruth was still sat in the studio, clutching a glass of white wine and talking animatedly to a smaller but still captivated audience of admirers.

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I remember, this was probably in 1980, 1981, and I’d go to school in virtually a two tone suit and I remember my brother, he was dumped by his

girlfriend for wearing flares. We used to go to Roman Road market and buy our Fred Perry’s from a stall that sold seconds. And everyone would queue up on Saturday morning to get their cheaper Fred Perry’s. The fashion, the music just seemed very, very important at that time and the porkpie hat was the trophy item of the era. I remember going to a Madness concert and there were skinheads in porkpies. You could be a rudeboy skinhead but somehow the NF skinheads tried to adopt the Madness thing too. Somewhere down the line they got their wires crossed. They were probably sniffing so much glue they weren’t paying attention.

Porkpie Hat

Heroes Villains

Bob MarleyAt 18 I was in this situation where I had

a big mountain to climb. I’d moved

into this council estate in Oxford, and

because of my own snobbery, for a

second I thought ‘This wasn’t part of

my life plan’. But all my mates, all the

people around me, they didn’t have the

aspirations I had – there were a lot of

people leading difficult lives but actually

being pretty happy and getting on with

it. At that time Bob Marley’s lyrics

seemed very relevant.

Margaret ThatcherShe’d probably be pretty proud of me

because I’ve had a career that fits a lot

of what she was promoting. But, in a

way, that was the only option – to fight

to get to the top, and not spend too

much time caring about people you

left behind. I think there’s a way she

handled politics – the hunger strike in

Ireland is a good example. She stood

for a lot of things that made me angry.

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Jude Edginton

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My musical tastes went from the whole ska thing back to reggae when I bought a Prince Buster album. The Prince Buster album took me back 15 years, and educated me

about what happened next with ska. I looked into my dad’s record collection and found Bob Marley’s albums, the big, golden Exodus album cover that had been sitting in front of me all those years.And then the next thing I realised is there was contemporary British reggae. I was really obsessed by music then, much more than I have been since. I would have been 14 or 15 at the time. I had a job washing up in a restaurant where I’d get paid £10 a shift. I’d give the money to my mother and I wasn’t allowed to spend it until I had saved up £200 to buy these Goodmans Mezzo speakers. Steel Pulse, Linton Kwesi Johnson and especially Aswad, I was whacking it up very loud through these Goodmans Mezzos.

This car I found in a San Francisco newspaper – the equivalent of Loot. It was in a town called Santa Rose, around 40 miles north of the city so I got a mate to drive me

there. Now this car is huge. I measured the bonnet, which is slightly over 8 feet long. It’s a huge coupé, and there’s a big bench seat that goes across the front. The guy that I bought it off was so obese he could hardly walk, and this had been his car from new. The bench seat was absolutely crushed from where the driver had sat.

Goodmans Mezzo

5.4-litre Ford Ltd.

The Specials Too Much Too Young

Aswad Warrior Charge

Buzzcocks Why Can’t I Touch It?

Bob Dylan Hurricane

Bob Marley Lively Up Yourself

Jude’s Sonic Tonic

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Jude Edginton

From his stint in California, where he was turfed out of the Playboy Mansion by Hugh Hefner, to his big break shooting Jimmy White for Esquire, as well as his iconic images of Team GB prior to the 2008 Beijing Games, photographer to the stars Jude Edginton tells all to Really O’Reilly.

Were does the Jude story begin?It’s not one pivotal thing that turned me into a photographer but all the little ingredients. London in the ’70s, for example, the same journey to school would be full of different images. You’d have the rag and bone men on one side of the street and guys driving Rolls Royces on the other. As a little kid aged 7, all these images are popping around. For me, my sense of looking came from looking out the car window or the bus home from school.

So you move from islington to Oxfordshire at the age of 11 and at the age of 18 you have a daughter and decide to bypass university. How did you get your career on track?I’m in Oxford, in a council estate with my young daughter and I’m setting out to be a freelance photographer so I put together a portfolio of gritty,

black-and-white portraits, and I started getting jobs with people like the Oxford City Council Press Department and a little stint on a free newspaper, photographing shop openings attended by Princess Anne.

But it was with a video games magazine that your career took off.I tried out my portfolio on a publisher in Bath called Future, and very quickly began working on video games magazine. This is at a time when video games had only just progressed from a ZX-81 computer. There was one magazine in particular called Edge that adopted my black-and-white style of photography. Very quickly I had these computer guys wanting me to do their press photos, and ended up I living in San Francisco for two years. During that time I managed to get turfed out of the Playboy Mansion by Hugh Hefner – with the greatest courtesy it must be said – after I somehow got into a fight with a Playmate’s burly manager.

Then you come back to the UK from San Francisco. This, for you, is the beginning of a new chapter.In London, I was still doing video game work and

Above: John McFall, Paralympic Sprint

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Top: Christine Ohuruogu, Team GB 2008 Above middle: Chris Hoy, Team GB 2008Bottom: Fur Fashion

Virgin Games were bringing out a Jimmy White snooker game. This led to an afternoon with Jimmy White, playing snooker with a bunch of video game journalists – him getting drunk, them getting drunk. Then his phone rings and it’s Esquire magazine arranging a shoot. I said to him I’d love to do it and he gave me the number of the guy at Esquire. Two hours later I’m in the Esquire office. After that Jimmy shoot, they pretty much gave me the next 20 Esquire interviews.

you won Magazine Photographer of the year. Can you tell us about that?That’s a funny story actually. The Inland Revenue were chasing me for tax and I’d become on first name terms with the baliff. Every Friday he’d come to my flat and I’d cook him breakfast and I’d give him anything I could – sometimes it was £50 or £200. When I won the award, it was presented by Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. I was giggling to myself thinking that he’s chasing me for £4,000 and here I’m receiving a cheque from him.

What’s in store for you next?I have an agent in the US who gets me a certain amount of work. Then there are the other projects I’m working on. I’ve got a project on the Paralympics I’m hoping to start and this other project called ‘I’m the Daddy Now’, all about teenage fathers – from an expectant teenage dad, to a 90-year-old father with his 73-year-old daughter.

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ditto & NUCA present Sunrise 2011 Online Film & Animation Festival Featuring work by NUCA graduates

The Curve Auditorium The Forum Millennium Plain Bethel Street Norwich NR2 1TF

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Now in its third year, ditto’s Sunrise Film & Animation Festival continues to champion new talent from Norwich University College of the Arts, providing the future stars of British film and animation with a launch pad for their careers.

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Sunrise 2011: Industry Speakers

For our very special event at The Curve Gallery, Norwich, we had the pleasure of welcoming not one, but two larger-than-life figures from the worlds of film and animation. They generously shared their industry secrets with an audience of NUCA students who sat on the edge of their seats to hear this masterclass in moving image.

Steve Smith (Animator, Director, Beakus)

First up to the lectern was the award winning animator Steve Smith who, with ten years’ experience to draw on and a BAFTA and a British Animation Award to his name, had some valuable lessons in life to pass on to the promising, young animation students.

Steve was uniquely positioned to advise the assembled crowd on what it takes to make it in the modern world of UK animation. A gifted animator and a director himself, he explained how he began working in a number of places, shooting commercials for production studios including Bermuda Shorts, Sherbet and Passion Pictures where Jamie Hewlett (Gorillaz, Tank Girl) started out. Steve then proceeded to guide the aspiring animators from NUCA through the maze that is getting your work out to a wider audience.

His work has garnered awards around the world, including Annecy Crystals and a British Animation Award for ‘Fun Facts’ and a BAFTA for ‘Newsround: On Poverty’. In 2002 he was singled out as the Best Young Animator in London at the Broadcast Magazine Awards, cemented by the success of his Channel 4 short ‘Eating For Two’. A year later he won Channel 4’s ‘Celmates’ competition, creating an intriguing film about a love affair with a paper bag in just 72-hours.

These days, Steve, can be found running the highly successful animation studio Beakus, winning business and nurturing new talent. Underlining the opportunities as well as some of the pitfalls of running your own studio, these were important lessons for any aspiring creative. Above all else, Steve highlighted the importance of enthusiasm, dedication, and being able to make the most of new technologies. As he explained, there is a brave new world of animation out there, and talent will out.

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Don Boyd (Director, Producer, HiBROW)

Next up to the lectern was a copper-bottomed legend of the film world – producer, director and UK film royalty, Don Boyd.

In a career stretching over the decades, Don has literally seen and done it all – as a writer, director and producer, he’s worked both here in the UK and in Hollywood. With disarming frankness, Don took us through his career – the lows as well as the highs, the moments of doubt with those of inspiration.

Looks on faces grew steadily more incredulous, as Don skipped through his CV; producer of era-defining films including Alan Clarke’s Scum, Derek Jarman’s The Tempest and Lindsay Anderson’s Look Back in Anger; directing actors of the calibre of Ray Winston, Richard Harris, and Jon Hurt. Let’s be honest: if you’ve worked with the likes of Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, and Ken Russell (in one film!) it’s a foolish film fan who misses the chance to hear you talk.

Added to this, Don’s candour, and evident enthusiasm for film inspired all those in the room. Comparing the current technological leaps forward in the film and online worlds to the Gutenberg revolution, Don enthused about how growing freedom of the means of production will herald a new era of creativity for those who grasp the opportunity.

Don’s latest project – HiBROW – rides this new wave of technology. HiBROW is an on-line channel dedicated to the arts. It will be a project for untrammelled creativity, with 25-30 curators who won’t be answering to tyrannous executives, and which will be “as revolutionary as the printing press”.

It’s hard to imagine a better call to arms to nearly graduated filmmakers and enthusiasts, and it was a privilege to see a major player still championing new talent.

HiBROW launches late January 2012, check out www.hibrow.tv for more details

Left Page Top: Steve Smith at the Curve GalleryLeft Page Bottom: Matthias Hoegg for BeakusTop: Don Boyd at the Curve GalleryMiddle: Aria (1987)Bottom: Scum, Theatrical PosterPhotography: Joshua Carver

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Designed to foster new talent and expose them to a wider audience, the Sunrise official selection is made up of undergraduates and postgraduates from the fiercely competitive film and animation courses at Norwich University College of the Arts. The entire range of films is hosted on a dedicated microsite where the winner is determined by public vote.

With a great sense of excitement, the ditto team headed in convoy to The Curve Cinema in Norwich, Campfire’s home from home for the day. For the assembled students, film lovers and press, there were plenty of treats in store. Not just a first taste of the accomplished student videos, but in true Campfire style, talks from established industry experts.

NUCA course leaders and artists in their own rights, Suzie Hanna and Liam Wells, spoke movingly about the importance of encouraging new talent, and the benefits to the students of the exposure Campfire

In June, we took Campfire on the road to Norfolk to launch Sunrise, our third annual independent online film festival.

offers. These filmmakers are not engaged in a hobby, but building the skills to enter a competitive, vibrant and rewarding commercial industry.

ditto would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all those who made the Sunrise Campfire such a success; guest speakers Don Boyd and Steve Smith for their time and expertise; BBC East, Empire Magazine, Little White Lies Magazine, Future Radio Breakfast Show, and 99.9 Norwich Radio for helping us shine a light on new talent; Suzie, Liam and NUCA for all their energy and enthusiasm in creating a place where talent has the freedom to blossom; everyone who attended for support; and most of all the students whose work inspires us to want to share it with the world, and who we’re eagerly watching emerge to make their mark on the world.

To view all the Sunrise entries check out www.ditto.tv/sunrise

Words: Tom Bolton

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The Winners

Roscoe Gibson-Denney ‘Rroma’

Julie Garrod ‘Bob’

‘Rroma’ is a gypsy love story. It’s an idea I came up with while I was studying at the NUCA, a lost love story with a spiritual connection to it, and the play of semiotics in my film as well. It was a labour of love. I thought it was going to be fairly straight forward but I have a lot of technical issues with it and it was very difficult to get right, but I got there in the end. We battled with the weather, it was early February so it was short on light, very cold, it was the middle of nowhere so there was no way to get any power to the location. It was very challenging to say the least.

‘Bob’ was my Masters’ project and although I am newly graduated I’m older than some graduates so I’ve had a bit more experience. ‘Bob’ was just a labour of love – I didn’t expect anyone to really like it because it’s a bit abstract and people like narrative a bit more, but they do apparently. Either that or they want to see me hold a tarantula which is what I promised people on Facebook if I reached 10,000 votes, which I did.

I was really excited by the technique – probably the most exciting thing about the project. I’ve done a lot of paint on glass, like Caroline Leaf and Petra Freeman, and I like that but it isn’t enough so I introduced other materials and played with them. There’s a quote from

I’ve gained a massive amount from NUCA, the lecturers there are fantastic, their knowledge is phenomenal, they’ve always got a place to send you with regards to help if you’re looking to research something, and I’ve learned a hell of a lot from them – it’s been really rewarding. As for the future I’ve got some ideas in the pipeline for more projects, so watch this space.

Carl Jung that we play with the things we love the most, and I love paint and colour and getting stuff on your hands and getting really messy.

From the MA I made ‘Bob’, and the important thing isn’t just the lecturers, it’s the access to the facilities. NUCA has fantastic facilities that I don’t think you fully appreciate until you leave. But it was good, I made ‘Bob’ and it opened my eyes to new techniques. It helped me grow as a person – I decided to give up teaching, which I’d done previously. I’ve been a lot more creative since I’ve stopped teaching.

juliegarrod.blogspot.com

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Brine

by Will Barlow

Steve’s Genesis

by Andy Green

Sentient Decline

by Robby Wartke

Coffee

by James Jennings

Simple Guy

by Jonny Bursnell

The Folklore Tale

by George Parkes

Childhood Ghosts

by Neil Emmett

Snappy Dresser

by Becca Barry

The World Collector

by David Bain

Putt and Run

by Daniel Stenhouse

Metahuman

by Ben Allen

Watching Isobel

by Kate Richardson

Ministry

by Keir Brisbane

Rroma

by Roscoe Gibson-Denney

Bob

by Julie Garrod

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What Potions Have I Drunk of Siren Tears

by Joshua Carver

The Reclaimer

by Daniel O’Leary

Sleepless in Hyrne Close

by James Avery

Body in the Leaves

by James Bailey

Alfred

by Patricia Rodrigues

Billy and the Rogrob

by Adam Skinner

The Feast

by Tom Powys

Expiration

by Dan Etchels

The Last Cast

by Danny Boatfield

Hansel & Gretel

by Kayleigh Houghton

We Fly

by Adlai Moss

Harry

by Samantha Thorley

The Grand Adventure of Alexander Flyte

by Huw Churchman

The Entrants 2011We at ditto were blown away by the breadth and quality of the films in this year’s crop of entrants to Sunrise 2011. Whether it was stop-motion animation adaptations of Hansel and Gretel, inspired short films or even mockumentaires, the level remained exceptionally high.

www.ditto.tv/sunrise

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My father cut his blackthorn walking stick from a hedge in Northern Ireland in about 1925-6. A spiky and quite dangerous stick. It was in our house when

we grew up. It rested in the corner of the room all the time he wasn’t using it. Sometimes it was branded as a weapon, or a threat. When he died, I was determined to get possession of this thing because it represented him and if I held the handle of it, I could feel my father’s hand. When I started making my own work, I tried to think what could I do with this object to somehow change it but at the same time retain it if ever I was to lose it. So I had it cast in bronze by an ancient casting process, then I had it chromium plated. It became the opposite of what it was, it was like sending it to the moon and seeing what came back. I had it mounted on an aluminium panel with reflective material behind it, so it became a Warholian walking stick.

My Father’s Walking Stick

Heroes Villains

Marcel DuchampDuchamp exhibited a urinal in an art

gallery in 1908. He turned his back

on how art was until that point. It

was an intellectual pursuit. If an artist

chose that a table became a piece of

art, it became a piece of art. I believe

everybody’s life has been affected by

the way Marcel Duchamp looked at the

world, how he thought about art and

what he produced.

Simon CowellYou can’t escape Simon Cowell. He’s

responsible for the homogenisation of

how young people are placed in front

of us to become stars. These poor kids

on X-Factor – I think their lives are

ruined by the show. And where is their

artistic experience? Where have they

done their homework? Where have

they paid their dues? There’s no

depth there.

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Ben Kelly

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My second item is the building of the Royal College of Art, on Kensington Gore. When I went for my interview at the Royal College, I had to do an exam. We were told to do

a survey of the area surrounding the building. I chose the building itself, turning it into a piece of art. Roxy Music was the band that resonated with me at that time. They were the quintessential art school band – they broke the mould and laid the foundation for a new way of being musicians. Brian Ferry had been a student at Newcastle Art College and Richard Hamilton had taught at Newcastle Art College. It was probably Richard Hamilton who was on my mind when I was sitting my Royal College entrance exam.

The first time that I went to New York was a tricky journey. Freddie Laker had started Laker Airlines, the first budget airline. So I got my ticket, but the flight was diverted

to Prestwick Airport because of the massive thunderstorm. I was stuck there for 8 or 9 hours. When eventually I got there, my good friend Larry Williams met me at the airport and we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. On the radio came David Bowie singing Young Americans with the Manhattan skyline in the middle distance. It was just beyond belief. Fast-forward to June 2008, when I decided to marry my wife Claire in New York. We’d flown to JFK and took a cab to Manhattan. I connected my iPod to the cab driver’s sound system and we played Young Americans, with my wife Claire and my son Finbar in tow, as we drove over Brooklyn Bridge on the way to our wedding.

Royal College of Art

Brooklyn Bridge

Link Wray Rumble

Jimi Hendrix Hey Joe

Roxy Music In Every Dream Home A Heartache

David Bowie Young Americans

Devo Jocko Homo

Ben’s Sonic Tonic

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Words: Tom BoltonIllustration: Ecole de l’Image, Gobelins

Photography: Alicia Bastos & Jason Read

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With the heavens opening over Canonbury in one almighty downpour, it dawned on us we’d rather brought it on ourselves. Announcing that August’s Campfire, our Summer Cookout, would be festival-themed… What had we been thinking?

Downstairs on the ditto doors we hosted a selection from photographer Liam Bailey’s extraordinary book documenting his twenty year relationship with Glastonbury Festival. Upstairs, as the clock ticked closer to 7, the ditto girls (chivalry lives) waded into the tempest to wrangle a gazebo upright and provide cover for Brian and his BBQ.

Robert Castellani, virtuoso guitarist, and returning ditto performer, began to tune up – the rain thundering on The Lighthouse roof forming an interesting percussive addition. It was beginning to look like The Summer Cookout might be a washout.

Then the strangest moment – as the first guests began to appear, the deluge ceased, and something remarkably like the sun began to poke through. Fortune smiles on the brave. Or we just got lucky. Anyway you look at it, it was an omen that kicked off an epic night.

As drinks were drunk, and BBQ munched, the evening began to spiral. It began to really feel like a festival. A spellbound crowd watched Robert transfixed – the only motion that on camera phones being trained on him.

In the calm that followed the obedient throng were then whisked outside to witness fire poi, and the unusual spectacle of woman take an angle grinder to her metallic undercrackers. ditto’s queen of culture even took to the stage (ok, car park) to hurl some fire about.

Throughout the evening, guests tried their hands at juggling, plate spinning, diabolo and balloon animals, with some interesting results. Suffice to say it was all fun, AND nobody lost an eye.

Huge thanks to everyone who came along – from the performers and contributors who made the evening so special, to the guests who braved the rain and then threw themselves into the proceedings. As the evening wore on it became progressively tougher to tell the two groups apart. What a perfect celebration of festivals in all their forms; how they throw people together, and how they can bring out the best in us.

Top: Robert CastellaniMiddle: LaurenceBottom: Sophia Disgrace

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By June, with our online film festival Sunrise pretty much all sown up, we were looking for another challenge. It dawned on us – why don’t we take the already successful formula of Sunrise but instead of working with film and animation students, we take aspiring sound engineers from some of East London’s premier sound schools.

Hence Sunset was born. We worked with SAE Institute, PTriple community project, London School of Sound, London Music School and Roundhouse Studio to spread the word about Sunset, and it obviously worked as our servers were almost brought to their knees by the sheer volume of MP3s flooding our inboxes by the hour.

From there we were faced with the unenviable task of whittling down the longlist to a more manageable shortlist of just 16 tracks. The quality was truly astounding, with everything from graceful singer-songwriters to grimey East London emcees.The nominees were announced in July and were entered into a public vote on a microsite with hits from all four corners of the globe. Then in August, for our Summer Cookout, the winners of our inaugural online independent music festival, Sunset, were announced to great applause.

With a total of almost 50,000 votes cast, the competition was fierce, but the winners deserving. Ori Pliner won the public vote with his delicately crafted Dark Light, while Raz Olsher scooped the critics’ choice for his darkly mesmerising Prelude with Attitude.

Real music from real people, and not a Svengali in sight.

www.ditto.tv/sunset

Sunset 2011 is ditto’s first annual independent online music festival - shining a light on London’s new music talent

Words: Jez Smadja

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16 Nominees

Balaka ft. Besh o droM by Gypsy HillA rambunctious party-starter of a tune, with a heavy dose of Balkan fever with tubas parping along to the staccato rhythm track and an atmospheric dose of electronics for the iPhone generation.

Dark Light by Ori PlinerA emotional MIDI rollercoaster of a track, reminiscent of Ethiopian music during the reign of the Derg. An unlikely but deserving winner of the 2011 Sunset vote.

Feel it in your soul by Kip (Kapila Perera)Straight-up soulful US house, on a laid back ‘93 vibe, with piano stabs and a seductive female vocal part, this is one to carry you through the early hours of the morning.

Goodbye London by Hitchhiker (vincent Detaille)An atmospheric electro number, the sort of thing you might hear on the Drive movie soundtrack, with analogue synths and a Motorik beat. Les Enfants by Monsieur PanueMonsieur Panue brings a bit of panache from France with his deconstructed hip-hop beats with an orchestral sweep, this is like Nightmares on Wax or, more recently, Andres aka DJ Dez.

Mr. DJ ft. Kurfew and Nathalie by LCSupreme (Bona)This is the new skank with a sick vibe from Mr DJ, with the sort of beat Labyrinth would be proud of, and great verses from the rhymesmith Kurfew. Could imagine the whole club going buckwild to this.

Ohm Pad my Rom by Chameleon (Alex Goodwill)Chameleon represents the promising new school of techno producers, creating highly crafted and intelligent music productions full of deft rhythm elements and original use of his sound palette.

Pulse by End CodeSome drum n’ bass for your face, if you’re a fan of Chase and Status this will most certainly be up your street. The track really packs a punch, has an almost indie-band melody and the drums and sub bass are fierce.

Prelude with Attitude by Raz OlsherAn highly atmospheric piece of mood music that defies categorisation, it’s little wonder Prelude with Attitude picked up the critics’ choice award. A stunning solo piano part is layered with effects to create a piece that builds and builds to a huge crescendo. Mesmerising.

Profit and loss by The UnderclassThe only band to make it to the final shortlist, The Underclass are a five piece outfit hailing from Manchester who revive the fun of Britpop with the more observational style of songwriting from bands like the Arctic Monkeys.

Rainbows, Kittens & Butterflies by Ashley EngbrechtThis perfect slice of uplifting pop featuring beguiling vocals from Leighton Paloma, who cites The Kills and Adele as some of her influences, has a really catchy hook and highly sophisticated production.

Something Real by Ben HansonYou don’t get more real than Ben Hanson, an experienced producer and musician. With its insistent guitar line, broken drum pattern and soulful vocals, this song, which kind of creeps up on you from behind.

Sound the Alarm by Liz WilliamsNot an answer track to Beyonce’s ‘Ring the Alarm’, but something just as dramatic. Liz Williams is in fine fettle as she belts out this macabre song about failed relationships.

Sugar Daddy by Danilo PratesRunner-up in the public vote, this salacious slice of dirty pop, with horny horn parts, and a plinky-plonky backbeat, presses all the right buttons even if we’re not sure we totally condone sugar daddies.

Three Cheers ft. Lele Speaks by Fever 105 (Sidney Guillen)From the school of Tinie Tempah and Tinchy Stryder comes Fever 105 who spits on the top of a beat that Timbaland would be proud of. He’s ably supported by singer LeleSpeaks. So raise it up and let’s have three cheers.

Wet by Murillo SguillaroFurious guitar solos, and a rollicking drum part make this sizzling slice of garage rock from the one like Murillo Sguillaro that we’ve been listening to again and again in ditto HQ.

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Something I’ve always had such an affinity for is the simplicity and the beauty of film. I love the idea of its compactness, there’s discovery inside, and I

love the fact that the mechanics of it are so beautiful. In this little box you have 250GB worth of information. Okay it’s hard-copy storage but it can be received and understood anywhere in the world. And inside that roll of film is the most astonishing technology. A very wet chemistry system that effectively has to put an oxide onto that coating, drop it back down into a dark condition, seal it, make sure it doesn’t touch itself. It works on every platform (Nikon, Canon, Olympus), and that stuff will last for 250 years. If it came down to it we could melt it down and use it for energy or eat it.

A Roll of B&W Film

Heroes

Danny BakerJournalist, raconteur, radio broadcaster,

thinker, chaos maker, sprayer of

nonsense, friend to the world and just

a guy that I need in my life. Over 15

years of broadcasting, the chaos of

his thought inspires me every day. Talk

about Stephen Fry all you like; the way

Danny Baker uses language is genius.

Villains

Liam BaileyI don’t really want to go naming names

here. You could say the person who has

been most villainous to me is probably

myself. The villain, the one who can

unconnect the wires from time to

time, is me. We’re often our own worst

enemies as well as our own greatest

admirers. I waver between the two...

often on a daily basis.

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Liam Bailey

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Withnail & I had a second wind in the ‘90s and they had a showing in Leicester Square with the whole red carpet experience. When we got into the theatre, they had this

amazing pre-party, then the film, and at the end of the film an auction. Richard Curtis bought the script for £2,100, Chris Evans bought the coat for £800, Danny Baker bought some bits. The last thing they auctioned was a week in the cottage where Bruce Robinson finished writing the script. I got it for a ridiculously low price. I took my first daughter away, and found a couple of real adventurers to accompany us. We went to the cottage in Penrith and tried to locate the outpost used in the last scene of the film. We were told to go to the Water Board, who pointed us in the right direction. When we got there, it hadn’t been touched. There were still gels from the shoot, newspapers, cups of coffee. I took the mantlepiece on the two mile walk back to our cottage.

I live in London so the one thing that’s vital to me is an escape. Escape means two things to me – the beauty of the environment, and the beauty of people you escape

with. Ali’s the best thing in my life and before we had the boys we had our escape where we’d go to Branscombe in Devon. It’s cast in a rolling blancmange of an environment that falls down off the cliff, and the clouds feel like they touch the earth, and then you walk through primeval forest, and beyond that is a hut built in the 1930s which was inspired by the organicist movement and people going down there in the space. It was generously lent to us by some friends of ours, and that’s where we spent some fantastic time.

Withnail & I Memorabilia

Devon Getaway

New Order Age Of Consent

Kate Bush Under The Ivy

Ian Brown Fear

Bon Iver Holocene

Jimmy Cliff The Harder They Come

Liam’s Sonic Tonic

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So, where does the Liam Bailey story begin?As a photographer I came quite late into it. My father was a graphic designer at the BBC. He used to do title sequences for I Claudius and The Avengers for ABC. I was very lucky that I got to go along to the Beeb, and sit there smelling the pens and waiting for the very cheap lunch. I wanted to do something like that when I was older but my father would say that I possibly wasn’t lent to towards what he was doing. I showed some skills in science and that ended up in an BSc and teacher training.

I didn’t get an opportunity to understand what I really wanted to do until I left for the States to teach football. As it happened, they didn’t have any footballs but they did have a load of cameras, so they told me ‘Here’s some chemistry, get on with it’. I threw the cameras at the kids, they took pictures, I took pictures, and got lucky.

How did your career as a professional photographer finally kick off?It all happened in quite a roundabout way. I got a very lucky gig – I was writing captions for TV. For me it was the worst job in the world because I was

Really O’Reilly, the dashing and debonair presenter of Fireside Favourites, welcomes photographer Liam Bailey, the plastic Paddy who grew up in North London, went on to shoot for the Guardian, and whose chromatic images of Glastonbury hung in our downstairs gallery through the month of August.

Liam Bailey

very anxious, I couldn’t spell, and my timings aren’t brilliant sometimes. For example, once during Wogan I had an anxiety attack, got carried out in an ambulance – they thought I’d had a heart attack. On that night Charlton Heston was on the show. The paps were outside. They think Charlton Heston’s croaked and they keep lifting the cloth the ambulance men had put over me. Molinaire was the biggest and best environment I’ve worked in. They had a programme going out to Japan called Live at the Astoria where they had the likes of Blur and Radiohead playing to an empty studio. After two weeks I said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a camera in’?’ The stills I took got used by the programme and I started picking up gigs quickly after that. The Guardian sent me out to shoot the uprising in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, but they were very keen on me going to Minneapolis on the way. I was like, ‘What’s this about?’ and they said well Prince’s club is in Minneapolis. But that’s another story.

Was it around this time you were going to Glastonbury?I was commissioned to be the photographer on the

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Serious Road Trip, this charity that were going to drive a double-decker bus from London King’s Cross to Sarajevo to set up a child camp. I realise I was fortunate in taking pictures of this particular thing, but I wasn’t sure if the mission photographer role was really working for me – it was hurting me a bit, mentally. But they were invited to Glastonbury and were given a big space. I walked in there, and as I headed through the fields, I heard ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ by the Manic Street Preachers. I thought ‘This is lovely’ and then I suddenly realised it was live. What a feeling! The waves of music coming over the hills was just so overpowering.

Your Glastonbury photos, they don’t seem at all voyeuristic, in fact they almost seem like you’re in the photos yourself, which perhaps sounds a little nonsensical.For me Glastonbury is all about capturing a moment of time when so many people have an experience. Let’s take the 120,000 people who visit the festival as paid punters, and then maybe 70,000 people in support of that particular environment. It’s just amazing that all these people get there in the same space.

The Chinese say that when you bring humans into one space, you accelerate or bring up the humanity of those individuals. And I think the one thing being in a space like that allows is all the creativity to come round. Glastonbury is the seed of what life could be like if we all were as generous as we can be at that three-day festival.

Left: Glastonbury circusTop: Hamster’s Homemade FoodBelow: Slippers

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Words: Tom Bolton

Illustration: Michael Cranston

onedotzero is one of the world’s most

innovative digital

festivals, championing pioneers of the digital image like Spike Jonze

and Chris Cunningham. Co-founder

and creative director

Shane Walter activated the warp

drive and took us on an audio-visual journey into the unknown.

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Words: Tom BoltonIllustration: Michael Cranston

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ditto’s relationship with Shane Walter goes back way before we existed even as an idea – but that’s normal for Shane. He’s been there to witness the birth of many a digital awakening.

As the founder of onedotzero in 1997, Shane’s been at the forefront of the digital arts for fifteen years – and as he explained, digital years are much like dog years, so that’s an impressive pedigree.

Shane’s Campfire was one of the programme highlights of 2011 London Design Week. With so much to fit in, it meant that Shane’s talk had to be a whistle-stop tour (more of that later) of the onedotzero adventures. As the ever-favoured ditto saying goes, they’ve done a bit. Immersed in the world of moving image and the digital arts, Shane and his team have reached out into the real

world with their infectious enthusiasm, and their festival, onedotzero_adventures in motion is now a global phenomenon. The festival travels to 60 cities a year, and has so far racked up the staggering roll call of over 120 destinations in more than 40 countries. So if Shane ever decides to show you his holiday snaps, make sure you’ve some time on your hands.

What was so fascinating about Shane’s Campfire is the journey that he and his team have taken, from their humble origins to the present day where they commandeer the South Bank once a year with film screenings, workshops and interactive digital displays that light up the riverside. Shane showed the poster of the first ever onedotzero festival which took place at the ICA over the course of a weekend in 1997. It gives you a measure of how the seed of an idea can grow into a tree that bears fruits, year after year.

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From top, clockwise: Shane’s Campfire;

George Michael 25 Live Tour; Motion Blur

2 Publication; Daan Roosegaarde,

Dune @ Decode Digital Design Sensations

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And the thing about onedotzero is that it continues to be a platform for digital artists across different disciplines – illustration, graphic design, street culture, fashion, music – giving them exposure, nurturing them, and most importantly providing them with cheques to cover the rent. Not only has onedotzero remained relevant and cutting edge within such a rapidly changing media landscape, but it has managed to retain its passion for fostering new talent in all its forms, and in any way it can.

From those early days at the ICA championing the likes of Spike Jonze, Mike Mills and Michel Gondry – all of whom have gone on to shoot feature films in Hollywood – to commissioning first time writers and directors in the present, the impact of onedotzero can be felt all across the world. Shane spoke engagingly about a number of shows and events that onedotzero had participated in, from sell-out events at the V&A to specially commissioned work for Nuit Blanche, an event that sees galleries in Paris stay open all night long for one night in October every year. And how could we forget onedotzero Buenos Aries, entertaining some 100,000 people and proving that good ideas will cross language barriers and speak a universal language. Shane’s enthusiasm is infectious, and the selection of work he shared with the audience inspirational. Crazy running idents, towering interactive light and music displays for the likes of the Rolling Stones – it doesn’t get bigger than that. And we were even treated to a lewd, crude, but always entertaining animated intro for AC/DC live shows, featuring a runaway steam train, semi-clad babes, Angus and the rest of the boys in the band, and a bucket load of innuendo.

onedotzero has been described as being “as close to the future as you’ll get” which is a nice summary. It continues to look forward, and we can only advise you to join their journey as they keep on making inroads in the space-time continuum. We’ll see you there on the other side.

onedotzero.com

Top: onedotzero fesitval identity 2011, United Visual Artists Above-middle: Ben Abdallah, The Blob Outaspace Zombie Killer Lower-middle: Airside, Fur Wars Bottom: Madmapping, Projection Mapping Panel

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I’ve always been a collector and for me a notebook is my central processing unit, my inspiration engine. I’ve always kept notebooks, probably for the last

dozen years. I’ve found the Moleskine the perfect notebook, and I’ve had various versions over the years. I feel very comfortable with that format, to jot down those ideas and sketches. It started off with items like a bus ticket. If I put it in a book and I look at it in three years time, it reminds me of that day. If I lose that bus ticket I won’t remember all the details of that day – I might never remember that day again.

The Humble Notebook

Heroes Villains

Leonardo da VinciAs a kid, when you hear about art,

his name pops up all the time, in

connection to the Mona Lisa, but the

more I learn about him, the more

staggeringly impressive he is – an

awesome, hybrid producer, and that

idea of convergence really excites me:

art and craft, inventor and engineer,

he designed firework shows for dukes

in Italy. He made tanks and flying

machines, he studied the flow of

water, and, of course, he had an

incredible notebook.

Margaret ThatcherWhen Thatcher came into power in

1979, Finchley, her constituency, was

where I grew up, so it was very close to

home. She shaped my formative years,

and her policies, we can still feel them

now – the divide between rich and

poor, the way she celebrated this greed

culture. But more than anything she

devastated neighbourhoods, devastated

towns and devastated individuals.

Shane Walter

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Growing up I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew where I didn’t want to go. Academically I was quite strong but I never went to school very much.

I suddenly realised I didn’t want to go where these people were going but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I discovered I really wanted to get involved in film. It was very difficult, I couldn’t get on courses because I hadn’t got any work to show, I’d never picked up a camera before. So I managed to buy a stills camera and taught myself photography. The moment in the dark room was almost spiritual, it’s an amazing, immersive environment. I started taking pictures of actors, I started my own theatre company. Being behind the camera made me look at the world in a very different way.

Jackson is my son. I wanted to recognise that having a baby that belongs to you is a life changing thing – it’s a profoundly, deeply important thing. I come from a family

of four older sisters, a mother and no father so I was surrounded by women and my wife will tell you, I was more shocked when I found out we were having a boy than when I found out she was pregnant, because I was so convinced we were having a girl. Jackson is just an amazing spirit. I look at him and get a tremendous amount of strength, and also a sense of responsibility.

35mm Camera

Jackson’s Birth Certificate

Afrika Bambaataa Planet Rock

Sugarhill Gang Rapper’s Delight

Marvin Gaye Trouble Man

Nat King Cole Nature Boy

Minnie Riperton Inside My Love

Shane’s Sonic Tonic

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onedotzero exhibition

With 15 years of history behind it, onedotzero has showcased the work of over a thousand moving image artists, charting the development and relationship of arts, culture, technology and entertainment. On the panels, a rare display of the first two festivals’ original posters, brochures and catalogues containing essays about the artists involved from 1997-1999 and the evolution of the onedotzero festival up to the present day.

Right page: Decode @ The V&A, BBC New Music Shorts, and MTV Bloon This page: onedotzero_adventures in motion assets and documentation and onedotzero on tour in Paris and Tokyo.

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Illustration: Toby Haynes Words: Jez Smadja

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The inner life of the exiles, those who have left their home behind – that sense loss, also of always being out-of-place – has long informed the work of the artist. Dante’s great work, The Divine Comedy, was written while exiled from the city of Florence; the Irish writer James Joyce spent much of his adult life abroad in Europe; Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. We could go on. Albert Camus, Mark Rothko, Joseph Conrad, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, all great artists who have forsaken their homes for one reason or another.

Sue Hubbard, as she stood, unfazed before the Campfire audience, also claimed for herself the status of exile. Though born in Britain, it’s her experience as a third-generation Jewish immigrant of Russian and Dutch descent, that has informed the way she understands her identity and her place in the world. Never quite belonging. Never quite fitting in.“It’s that sense of being homeless that makes us into writers and artists. We create so that we know who we are, we write to make a home,” she told us some five minutes into her Campfire story. And, for anyone who looks closely enough, you can spot

it throughout her work – a copious output of poetry, literature and art criticism. Even in the poems from her earliest collection, like ‘Assimilation’, that dislocation is plain to see.

I did not know where I’d come from but guessed

At their journey through the snow-flecked storms

Of some Lithuanian December night

And yet, the exiles are also endowed with a rare gift to speak the language of their new hosts with a singular freshness and clarity, even if for Sue it took time for her to discover that gift. In fact, it wasn’t until her 30s that Sue embarked on a career as a writer. She’d separated from her husband and moved to London, with three children under the age of six to raise. Her first instinct was to go back to the antiques trade that she’d known in her 20s, but was soon contributing a few poems and pieces of art criticism to a small magazine in West London called The Green Book. From there she began writing for Time Out, followed by The Independent on Sunday and was subsequently given a column in The Independent.

Her collection of poems include

Everything Begins with the Skin (1994), Ghost Station (2000), and The Idea of Islands (2010) in collaboration with the Irish artist Donald Teskey. Written on the spartan West Coast of Ireland at an artists’ retreat, its desolate images of windswept beaches and freezing squalls of seagulls were brought to life by Sue as she read movingly from the pages of this latest collection.

Sue has won numerous prizes, including the London Writers Competition, and also has the rare honour of being the creator of London’s biggest public art poem, Eurydice. It was commissioned by the Arts Council and the BFI during her residency as The Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet, which runs in the underpass from Waterloo Station to the IMAX.

She continues to be busy, with a new novel, Girl in White, based around the life of Paula Modersohn Becker, the German expressionist and friend of Rainer Maria Rilke, due out in 2012. She also continues to write about art for numerous magazines and specialist art publications.

www.suehubbard.com

Sue huBBArdMoving to London at the age of 30, after separating from her husband, with three young children to look after, Sue Hubbard was late to take up writing, but has more than made up for lost time with acclaimed novels, sublime collections of poetry, art criticism and London’s biggest public art poem.

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Where does the Shane Solanki story begin?It begins with being called Shane. I’m Indian, for God’s sake. When my mum kicked my dad out the house for growing a moustache… Indian’s are supposed to have their dad’s middle names so my full name should be Shane Arvin Mutiram Kalida Solanki, but my mum decided to change my name to that of the cat, so I became Shane Sasha Solanki.

Where were you born? What was the environment like?I was born in 1971. I grew up an only child in Wembley. My parents were ‘fresh off the boat’ from Kenya, and my grandparents were born in Africa. But I grew up as an Englishman. I wrote a poem about it:

Life became such an eventful change, It’s funny how much is contained in a name, Instead of Said, My Dad called me Shane. As a kid I joked ‘bud, bud, din, ding’, Taking the mick as I tried to fit in. An inverse reaction to both my brown skin and the kind of country I was living in.

The young Shane, 14 years of age, you go and live with your dad. I’d love to hear the story of your awakening.

When I was 13 I got given my first mixtape. It had ‘Axel F’ by Harold Faltermeyer, ‘19’ by Paul Hardcastle, ‘Dr Beat’ by Miami Sound Machine and The Jacksons’ tune ‘Can You Feel It’. I got given at the time what was called a Ghetto Blaster. And, growing up in an Indian family, a lot of Indians were in love and fascinated by black dance music, most of which came from the States. Then the hormones kicked in and my mum sent me to live with my dad. My life changed overnight. This was 1986-87 when hip-hop exploded. The first record I bought was Grandmaster Flash ‘White Lines’.

When did you get the bug for performance?When I went to Goldsmiths University, my best friend, a dreadlocked Jewish boy called William Stern, was very good friends with a Rastafarian poet called Micheal

Shane is a writer, poet, musician and performer who’s worked with the likes of Arun Ghosh, Don Letts and Talvin Singh. In the Fireside Favourite studio, where the fire crackles, and the port flows, he talks to international man of mystery, Really O’Reilly, about the joy of decks and how his mother named him after the cat.

Arcangel. Micheal was on his way to Nigeria to write the biography of Fela Kuti, so we lived in his house, surrounded by artists and on a diet of Fela Kuti, an artist who married musicianship with genius and political consciousness.

Do you remember your first performance?I left college to start a business called Iconoclasm with a dear friend of mine. We were like a mini Adbusters. After that, I found myself working for a TV production company and wrote a little treatment called Citizen Shane, which we sent to Janet Street Porter who gave us loads of money to create a pilot. It was essentially a mini biography of my life – a young boy who cared about the world, who had friends who were hippies and DJs. After that, I started to make music and went to work for a label called Ninja Tune. I came up with album names for them like Flexistentialism: The Joy of Decks and through there I explored what it meant to take words to the stage.

We’re living under a Conservative government in tough times. The arts have borne the brunt of this perhaps more than anyone. What are your views on that?

I had the pleasure of running across a guy called Mark Stephenson who wrote a book called the Optimist’s Guide to the Future – he runs an organisation called The League of Pragmatic Optimists. I’m really inspired by TED. The future is designed by pioneers in every field using the digital medium to propagate the changing landscape we live in. You find it in every field, these pioneers who operate by what Mark Stephenson calls an ‘Engaged Serendipity’.

What are you doing now? Could you give us a quick tour?I’m writing a book called Songs of Immigrants and Expedience, a ‘remix’ of the William Blake classic, looking at grassroots movements around the world. I also run a poetry night called Tongue Fu, currently happening at the Rich Mix where I’m artist-in-residence. There are a number of musical projects too. Watch this space.

www.lastmangoinparis.blogspot.com

ShAne SolAnki

Photography: Briony Campbell

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You know the song ‘Treat Her Like A Lady’? Who’s that by? The Temptations? That’s how I treat my Mercian bicycle. She’s a beauty. She’s my lady. I’m

writing a short story at the moment, remixing The Tortoise and the Hare. In my story, the tortoise is a girl on a bike, and the hare is a boy in a racer. They course through London, and naturally, it’s the bicycle that wins the race. I love riding through London, it’s all about the canals, but I like taking it easy. Riding on my Mercian affords me a view of the world that I feel privileged to see.

A Mercian Bicycle

Heroes Villains

Josephine BakerTruly, she’d be my president of

the universe, a remarkable figure

throughout her life, the way she

redefined a cultural landscape with her

ability to be compassionate and open

beyond the shackles of identity.

Nicholas SarkozyAlgeria are playing football against

France in Paris. And obviously there’s

hundreds of thousands of Algerians in

France so when the national anthem

started playing, many in the crowd

started booing. And Sarkozy was

incensed – he almost wanted to shut

down the football match. To me,

Sarkozy is the image of everything I

scorn and laugh at.

Shane Solanki

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You’ve got a black lady with white lips, you’ve got a beautiful portrait of a lady with man’s arms. And there’s this quote of hers – “I wish to blur the boundaries by

which we, self-certain people, tend to delineate around all we can achieve.” It’s iconoclastic. It’s blurring these lines, which is something I’ve always wanted to point out. We live in this world where black is black, white is white, we are us, and they are them. And for me, the paradox and the spectrum of life is consistently shifting. I literally only came across these images a few days ago. My girlfriend sent them to me. Hannah Höch played a huge part in the Dada movement but, as a woman, she was marginalised. Inasmuch as I’ve always identified with the black struggle, I’ve always identified with the struggle of the marginalised and maybe that’s why I feel so strongly about these images.

I could have chosen a mango – Last Mango in Paris is the name I trade under, and Alphonso mangoes or Chaunsa mangoes from India and Pakistan are the juiciest fruits

out there – but what I love about the Sicilian lemon is its simplicity. In terms of its use, you use it to clean, or just need a tiny touch of it and it tastes incredible. You can do so much work with a lemon. Nina Simone has taught me possibly more about the world than any other individual and she sings the blues and for me that fruit, in its simplicity, in its bittersweet nature, is just a small thing that I can hold in my hand that will tell me stories about the world, and the paradoxes of the world we live in.

Hannah Höch Collages

Sicilian Lemons

Monty Norman Good Sign, Bad Sign

Florence & The Machine You’ve Got The Love (The XX Remix)

Bandish Projekt Feat. Last Mango In Paris Brown Skin Beauty

Seaming Soda Slow

Asa Chang & Jun Ray Hana

Shane’s Sonic Tonic

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Poems on the UndergroundCreated and coordinated by American poet Judith Chernaik, the 25-year-old project has been bringing poetry into our tube journeys with 3,000 posters distributed across the London Underground. Curators for the poems include poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert. TFL sponsors the project together with the British Council and the Arts Council. Poems on the Underground also produces events, and has published anthologies that can be purchased online.

FilmpoemThe ‘lens-based’ Scottish artist Alastair Cook and his expressive blend of poetry and film uses metaphors to connect visual and audio media. Alastair’s ongoing interpretive and responsive work with poets can be seen at www.filmpoem.com

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Poetry Exhibition

This exhibition explores poetic expression in the UK, showing the work of three not-for-profit organisations that help poetry survive through publishing, public art, film and new media.

Ambit MagazineAmbit is one of the most established poetry publications in the UK, created by Dr. Martin Bax 52 years ago. It showcases the work of contemporary poets and artists, including the large contribution from Sir Peter Blake for almost 50 years now. It has had stellar collaborators such as JG Ballard, Carol Ann Duffy, Edwin Brock, Geoff Nicholson to name a few, and Michael Foreman is its art director.

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How did Hamish Jenkinson come to be running one of London’s

most coveted and cutting-edge performance spaces? First thing’s

first, he had to get his foot through the door – quite

literally, as it happens.

Words: Jez SmadjaIllustration: Toby Haynes

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He had boarded up the road on either side, deployed security guards at both ends and had flown in 29 different graffiti artists from around the world who were busy spraying the all and sundry, carving out brick walls with a jack hammer, using burnt out cars as sculpture, and installing a tree with no leaves but CCTV cameras instead.

“It was this incredible world that Kevin and I walked into, but because of all the spray paint, the air was noxious. As a result, they had to open the side doors, which led to these archways. I went to use the toilet just inside the entrance to one of these archways.”

But rather than going back to where all the graffiti was being sprayed, Hamish decided to explore inside. “I found this door which, with a well-timed kick, opened onto somewhere I shouldn’t have been. What I found was 29,000 sq. ft. of abandoned Victorian tunnels that hadn’t been used for 20 years. I ran out, grabbed Kevin, and knew straight away that we had to do something with the space.”

That was 2008. By 2011, the Old Vic Tunnels, as it is now known, had hosted events ranging from Michelin-starred pop-up restaurants to hit-shows from the likes of immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. That event sold 20,000 tickets in the space of six hours and gleaned no shortage of media coverage. Banksy too wanted a piece of the action, and turned the space into London’s darkest and dirtiest cinema, Lambeth Palace, which for a week screened previews of his street art documentary, ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’.

If it weren’t for that fateful kick, the Old Vic Tunnels would never have come into existence. Like so much in Hamish’s life, it’s been about being in the right place at the right time. It must be said, Hamish is a consummate networker, even if the word ‘networking’ sounds a little squalid to his ears. But how else would you explain the fact he’s smoked cigars in Cuba with Raoul Castro, had dinner with Hugo Chavez eating his fine Venezuelan chocolates or played poker in the Ritz with Bill Clinton.

Before becoming Kevin Spacey’s assistant, Hamish had already worked for four-and-a-half years as assistant to Madonna and Guy Ritchie. During that time he gathered more than a few names and numbers in his precious black book, not to mention enough stories to tell his grandchildren one day.

As he hit his 30s, Hamish realized what an incredible decade he’d had, but wondered if he couldn’t pursue opportunities that were more beneficial to the planet.

Picture the scene. Hamish was working as executive assistant

to Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey. Kevin, at the time,

was just beginning his new role as creative director of the

Old vic Theatre. He’d missed a prior opportunity to meet

enfant terrible of the art world, Banksy, so Hamish organised

for Kevin to be taken down to a disused taxi rank at Waterloo

train station where Banksy was embarking on

a new project.

Photography: Toby Wolf

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It was in Toronto, at the house of a multi-millionaire, that he had an encounter that would change the course of his life. “A young kid came up to me called Craig and said ‘I’ve got a book’. As Kevin Spacey’s assistant, that happened all the time, so I was very dismissive and said ‘I’m staying at the Cosmpolitan, send it there.’”

When he received the book the following morning, Hamish was humbled by the story he read. It’s tells of Iqbal, a 4-year-old boy in Lahore, Pakistan sold into slavery to pay for his sister’s dowry. The child works in a carpet factory, where he is chained to the loom at night. After several years living like this, Iqbal leads a group of 100 fellow kids onto the street, demanding an education and a better life.

The story gets picked up by the national newspapers and Iqbal is flown out to Canada where he receives an award from Reebok. But on his return to Pakistan, the carpet factories, under intense international scrutiny, take out a contract on Iqbal’s head. Tragically, Iqbal is shot dead on the streets where he managed to regain his freedom.

Top left: Banksy “Exit through the gift shop” film posterTop right: Banquet at Old Vic TunnelsAbove: Fidel CastroLeft: Free the Children

It’s not the end of the story, though, because preserving Iqbal’s legacy becomes the lifelong project of Canadian teenager Craig Kielburger. Craig begins the charity Free the Children, which is also the title of the book chronicling Iqbal’s story which Hamish receives that morning.

When Hamish meets Craig the next day, he pledges to become a global ambassador for Free the Children, and has since become Chairman of the UK branch of the charity.

It’s this impulsiveness, this relentless energy, this boundless enthusiasm that drives Hamish Jenkinson, keeping him on his toes and forever moving from one thing to the next. His special gift is bringing people together, using his connections to make the world a better place. And if it means creating openings, he’s more than happy to knock down some doors for others to walk through.

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My address book is incredibly important to me. It wasn’t necessarily something I started cultivating consciously but I got to that moment when I had

8,000 contacts in my address book. There’s quite a range of different people from all over the world, having travelled widely with Madonna and Guy Ritchie and later Kevin Spacey. I feel like if I ever did choose to pack up in London, I’d have a host of interesting people I could stay with across the planet. But having a big address book is pointless if you don’t use it to connect people, connect artists – it only comes to life when you treat it like a cocktail maker and you pull out certain ingredients from the address book, put them together in an email, shake it up, and hopefully something brilliant happens.

My Little Black Book

Heroes Villains

Royce GracieThere was a great ju-jitsu master who

came over from Japan and settled in

Brazil. He was homeless so the Gracie

family took him in. He started teaching

ju-jitsu, and Royce Gracie’s father

began taking classes. Royce, however,

was small, weak and not very good at

ju-jitsu so he started breaking all the

rules and developed this new style -

Brazilian ju-jitsu. It was more dangerous

and powerful than any technique that

had gone before it.

Woodrow WilsonI got kettled when I went down to

Occupy London Stock Exchange.

It was frightening. One of the main

things that the Occupy movement are

talking about is ending the Fed. The

Federal Reserve Act was signed into

Congress in 1919 and it was done so by

Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson did a lot

of wonderful things, including

abolish child labour, so he’s not a

complete villain.

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Hamish Jenkinson

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I just love my bicycle. I have a couple of them. I have an old Dutch bike that you back pedal to break – a Dutch baker’s bike. And I have an incredibly light and expensive

racer with drop handle bars. I just wish more people would ride bicycles round the city – it’s such a great, great way to get round town. The more people do it, the easier and safer it will become.

This is something that’s been with me from birth but I very much consider it a blessing. Once you can tackle those early things that might mean you fall to the bottom

of the class, or you’re neglected by the teachers or you’re thought not intelligent, if you can get through those things without being too badly damaged, without your morale or your self-belief being too badly battered, then I think dyslexia is an incredible gift. I think about things and I think my brain works in a slightly different way to everyone else. Both my mum and my dad taught at a Steiner school, and my mum continued to teach at a Steiner school for many years, running a kindergarten and then lecturing at Plymouth University about early learning education. I feel incredibly passionately that play is an incredibly important part of development.

My Bicycle

My Dyslexia

Thomas Tallis Spem In Alium

Stephen Marley Mind Control

The Beatles A Taste of Honey

The Beach Boys I Get Around

Lowkey Terrorist

Hamish’s Sonic Tonic

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War BoutiqueWar Boutique is the pseudonym of Kevin Leahry, a Scotsman who studied textiles at university. Although his lifelong ambition was to design clothes for Action Men figures, after his degree Kevin joined a defence constructor, designing body armour. Haunted by the fact that his work was being ordered by rogue states and Middle Eastern governments, Kevin wanted to change what he was contributing to society. He gave up his job and enrolled at Goldsmiths University. After three years, he put together his first collection using ballistic military materials to create an arsenal of explosive artwork.

Photography: War Boutique archive

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Matthew de Abaitua was in every respect the perfect speaker to round off the 2011 Campfire calendar. We folk

here at ditto think we know a thing or two about Campfires, but Matthew is a real, bona fide expert (as the author of The Art of Camping, you’d expect as much) and was about to reveal to

us the meaning of the campfire.

Words: Jez SmadjaIllustration: Paul Blow

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Forget sitting round in a field, toasting marshmallows and singing ‘kumbayah’, the origin of the campfire can be traced back many millions of years to when our simian ancestors took an evolutionary leap down from the trees. Prehistoric man (and woman) would tend to sleep in trees, alone. When they finally learned how to tame fire, however, they could begin to sleep together and form pair bonding. And from there it’s just a short step to flat-pack IKEA beds and electric blankets.

So there you have it, an abridged history of mankind, and it all began with a campfire. We’d been hosting our Campfire events for two years. And since our monthly events are all about bringing people together, down from their trees, so to speak, so they can communicate, collaborate and create, well it seems we’d stumbled on exactly the right word.

Camping holds a special place in Matthew’s heart. As an acclaimed author – his debut novel, The Red Men is presently being adapted for the big screen by Shynola/Warp Films – it’s for his second book The Art of Camping that Matthew is perhaps best known. It chronicles, with some verve, his memories of family holidays spent in the south of France, trips to Ireland with his wife and daughter, as well as an infamous expedition with writer Will Self, who Matthew assisted after graduating from the creative writing course at UEA. What is important to Matthew is the symbolism of camping, as an escape and an alternative way of life.

“People have used camps as places to explore and discover alternative ways of living,” he told the audience. “That’s going all the way back – the origins of the word go back to campus, the Latin word for field. Ancient Rome had the campus martius, the place where soldiers were trained and foreign dignitaries were met.”

In the 1920s, it was a group of Germans called the Wondervogel who traipsed around the German countryside in strange Teutonic uniforms (when they weren’t in a state of complete undress) and went on to inspire the naturists, the hippies and many other youth movements of the 20th century.

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Camping, however, in the British popular imagination at least, is perhaps most synonymous with Glastonbury, that long weekend in June when a sea of tents turn the fields of dairy farmer Michael Eavis into a makeshift canvas city. It’s what political writer Hakim Bey might describe as a Temporary Autonomous Zone, a place where you can make your own rules.

“After a weekend of camping, civilisation seems a lot more arbitrary,” said Matthew. “Our concrete cities seem less like the laws of physics handed down to you, and more some kind of aberration, a wrong turn taken at some juncture in our collective history.”

In 2011, it was another image of tents that flooded the media with the Occupy Movement. The guys and poles first went up in Zuccotti Park in September, quickly followed by protesters on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral and across the globe, from South Africa to Chile, Italy to Australia.

Camps are a breeding ground for alterative thought, Matthew stressed, and it’s pointless to criticise the Occupy Movement for not having an agenda. “At a march, you know what you want,” said the author. “A camp, on the other hand, is where you work out your demands. It’s pointless to criticise them for not having their demands. In a camp you’re trying to work it out, that’s what’s been wonderful about this movement, that it’s been a place of exploration.”

As Matthew rounded off his invigorating Campfire performance, he also put a full stop to our 2011 series of talks. These too have all been a place of exploration, venturing into topics as diverse as: how to programme a Cultural Olympiad, how to produce cult cinema classics, how to develop the business leaders of tomorrow, and how to have an international #1 hit. It’s been one hell of a ride, and it’ll begin all over again in January. But for now, adieu, sayonara, ma’salama, adios and farewell as we go put our feet up for a well-deserved break.

Left page: December CampfireTop left: The Idler’s CompanionTop right: Will SelfBottom: The Red Men

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My first significant tent was a three-man tunnel tent that I used to take my daughter and my wife camping with, from Hackney. We’d get on the bus with a buggy

and a cool bag on top of it, some sausages and some milk in it. My wife would be wearing a rucksack. I would be wearing a rucksack. The tent would be on a trolley and sometimes the passengers on the bus in Hackney would scrutinise us in such appalled fascination, like – ‘what the hell are you doing?’ I would get too embarrassed so I would try to go on the top deck, and there I would get a different level of scrutiny from a collection of unpaid interns on their way to Shoreditch. Going camping from London meant you had to contravene every rule in the book of London Transport etiquette – quite a slim volume as it happens. At the time, our tent was on a trolley, so our mantra was ‘don’t forget the tent’.

My Tent

Heroes Villains

PrinceEverything Prince did would be

different, everything he did was a

reinvention of music. It’s an example

of someone who does not find a niche

and dig within it but constantly tries to

mutate and create the next thing. I saw

him at the O2 with Amy Winehouse,

and it was probably the last time I lost

myself in music and general frenzy.

When Amy left the stage, Prince, who

was accompanying her on ‘Love Is A

Losing Game’, said to the crowd

‘Please look after her’.

Dick MorrisDick Morris introduced the idea of

triangulation into political campaigning

in the 90s in his bid to get Bill Clinton

reelected. Triangulation is where you’d

adopt the professional clothes of your

opposition in order to appeal to a wider

audience. It was then picked up by

Phillip Gould and fed into the Labour

strategies for election. But it seemed to

bleed through culture as a whole.

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Matthew de Abaitua

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I was very lucky to spend my 20s working with The Idler. At 55 Turnmill Street was the Tardis, or what was known as Shadow Street. People might know Turnmills, the club. At

the other end of the road is Faringdon tube station. Between the two points, there was a brick wall with a door in it, and through that door there was a whole secret street, with a secret hall and a bar we built, a massive venue and offices too. It was run by a group of people who came from a squat called The Reservation in South London. They’d acquired it from Railtrack for a peppercorn rent in the early ‘90s when London was hollowed out by the recession and the property crash. Railtrack knew that if they ever built Crossrail they would be expanding into the space, but they didn’t know when that would be. We cleared out all the timber and made a venue and we would hold Idler parties there and the money would flow back in, so we’d renovate the building bit by bit. We had the most amazing parties. The only time I’ve ever seen it mentioned in print is in Russell Brand’s autobiography, My Bookie Wook.

Contrails are the condensation trails left by aeroplanes. They are the subject of the most depressing conspiracy theory. The idea that people could look up at contrails and somehow

feel that they are spraying mind-controlling chemicals betrays such a lack of knowledge about how the world works. The preposterous idea that airlines could have been running this for 30 years and secreting substances into their fuel tanks – it’s an example of depressing magical thinking. Contrails are a metaphor for people’s false reality testing. It makes you realise how people can get the wrong end of the stick as far as reality is concerned.

55 Turnmill Street

Contrails

Durutti Column Sketch Or Summer

Circulus To The Fields

The Beastie Boys Intergalactic

Julianna Barwick The Magic Place

Prince Power Fantastic

Matthew’s Sonic Tonic

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Heroes Villains

Santa ClausThe rosy-cheeked old curmudgeon

travels round the globe on his sleigh,

offering plastic toys Made In China to

little children as a substitute for all the

love they never had.

The GrinchThe sour-faced spoil sport, perennial

despoiler of Christmas cheer who hails

from a cold and isolated cave near

Whoville. Try as he might, he can’t ruin

Christmas as it belongs to the believers.

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Dr. Mindbender

It’s so good it’s on radio, such a visual medium, but the lights around your Santa cowboy hat are quite spectacular. I did go for the more demanding black version with Christmas humbug.

Chris Linford, aka Dr. Mindbender, is a man of very few words – a man of mystery, music and altered states. For this our Fireside Favourite Christmas Special the good Doctor presents his Yuletide Symposium – a musical collection of the ungood and the unholy. He’s so festive he’s festered.

Bizarre hats

Yuletide Symposium

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The thing I’m leaving you is one of the most astounding, non-comical but comical albums of all time by Wout Steenhuis, who is as you well know the most famous

Dutch Hawaiian musician of all time. This is a serious album from 1981. On the front, there’s holly and a beautiful Hawaiian beach with superimposed snow. On the back of the record you have the tracklist featuring such reliable Christmas numbers as ‘The Holly & The Ivy’, ‘Silent Night’, ‘It Came Upon A Christmas Clear’ and ‘Jingle Bells’. But for some reason, he decides to finish his Hawaiian Christmas album classic with Greensleeves. He must have run out of tunes.

You’re at the end of a Christmas party, all the wine has gone, all the beer has gone, you’re just left with dregs of it, and you’re hanging around wondering what to do so you make

a cocktail – mixing all the bits of drink you’ve got into one glass, and you drink it down. This is from the Christmas party I went to last night and this is what was left over, and I’ve mixed it together into one horrendous concoction.

Wout Steenhuis & The Kontikis – Hawaiian Christmas

The Christmas Cocktail

Kitty Stallings Carol Of Bells

Bob & Doug McKenzie 12 Days Of Christmas

Bob Rivers The Restroom Door Said Gentlemen

Joseph Spence Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

The Bob & Tom Band Christmas and I Wonder Where I Am

Dr. Mindbender’s Sonic Tonic

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Iain GreenPhotographing Wildlife is no easy task. It requires the patience of a saint and the stillness of a statue to get as close as possible to the subject, and there’s often just a few seconds of frenzied shooting to get the golden shot.

Author of ‘Wild Tigers of Bandhavgarh’ and ’Tiger Jungle’ Iain has captured the incredible images shown in our December exhibition, telling the tigers’ stories by following them around their home.

Iain’s appreciation for nature goes beyond capturing wonderful images of endangered animals. The photographer is committed to documenting climate change and he found inspiration in challenging himself to discover wildlife on his doorstep.

The results can be seen on his book ‘Wild London’ and in his show on the ditto doors with images taken in London that include Kingfishers, Red Deer, Seals and more.

With 14 years’ experience, Iain brings his inspiration and learning to kids on School Wildlife Winder Days. His images are not just art but an important research tool for the conservation of wildlife.

www.naturebygreen.com

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Left page: Wild London This page: Golden Grey; Snowball and Sleeping in Snowfall.

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Streaming 24/7/365, Radio ditto gives to the world all that is good – a sonic tonic to soothe the soul. Featuring music for the like-minded, hand crafted shows of quality and distinction, and interviews with some of the amazing people ditto has the privilege to work and

collaborate with. All made with love.

No news, no weather, no adverts, no rubbish, it’s fair to say we’re rather proud of our new platform.

Radio ditto is 100% musical goodness, unmixed and uninterrupted – just like mother used to make.

Featuring exclusive shows from the people who know, with something to tickle all musical taste buds.

Search the iTunes Store for ditto and download radio ditto for free

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Heaven 17 - Music for...Electronic pioneers Glenn Gregory and Martyn Ware take us through the tunes that shaped them and shake them, bickering all the way.

Ashley Beedle’s Out Hear: Earth TransmissionsEven gravity and interplanetary travel won’t stand in the Ivor Novello Award winner’s way on his mission to bring you the very best music in the solar system, including world exclusives.

Greg Wilson’s Random InfluencesLegendary DJ and musical pioneer Greg Wilson curates an entire 24 hours of the singles that influenced him up to his first gig in 1975. Sit back and soak it up, because Greg’s done the hard work for you.

Finger Lickin’ Management Past, Present and Future Break-beats, hip-hop, funk, d’n’b and chaphop; Adam Gainsborough showcases the finest old and new tracks that will smash any dance floor, from a label of true distinction.

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Fireside Favourites with Really O’ReillySlipmats and shenanigans, as ditto’s Michael Wilson aka Really O’Reilly interviews guests from across the cultural spectrum, to discover the tunes and objects that matter most to them.

ditto tracks Exclusive new tunes, remixes, mash-ups and bootlegs from the team at ditto and their friends. Banging house, blistering breakbeats, blissed out ballads and sounds that kill frowns, from ditto’s own record label.

Strictly Rhythm with Dave LambertBeats and treats from the label that’s been bringing quality dance music to the world and defining the genre since 1989, and continues to break new acts and champion talent.

Phunk not Funk with Mum’s Old vinylFunky groove laden beats, squalling guitars, oompah brass – Andy Robinson’s music collection defies classification, but will always bring a smile to the face and song to the heart.

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ditto’s TV app is the crystallisation of everything that Campfire is about – tales of courage and adventure, joy and surprise.

Our stunningly designed app allows you to watch in HD each of our unique storytellers’ Campfire talks. You can listen again to the Fireside Favourites radio show with Really O’Reilly. You can view in high-resolution the astounding photography and artwork that has hung on the ditto doors. And you can read

not only about past Campfires, but ones in the pipeline too.

With the look and feel of a book, but with the enhancement that only a digital publication can offer, and updated every month with fresh content, the Campfire App brings together inspired content, curated by ditto, to light up your day.

Search the iTunes Store for ditto and download the ditto TV app for free.

ditto’s iPad app

Photography: Toby Wolf

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dittoditto is an award winning communication agency & consultancy dedicated to the Tech, Finance and Media sectors. We work with world leading banks, brands and institutions helping shape their message and how they present their business.

We have a complete service offering creating Pitch Books, Corporate Videos, Research & White Papers, Web development, Social Media Strategies, Community Management, TV & Press Ads, Mobile Apps, Multimedia Experiences, Outdoor Media, Event Production and integrated Sales & Marketing campaigns.

With decades of front line experience in the most demanding of markets we help our customers win business, launch new products and be more successful.

We would be delighted to discuss our work and how we are creating and managing communities through the art of storytelling and the science of technology. Good people doing good things.

We have lots of ways you can stay connected with ditto, we publish daily blogs, release white papers, host special one-off gatherings and seminars, and broadcast an array of music and arts programming:

campfireCampfire is our monthly storytelling and art exhibition evening hosted at our 5,000 sq ft studio, The Lighthouse. It features a diverse range of artists, icons, enterprises, collectives, personalities and raconteurs, who share the story of who they are and how they got there with a public audience, alongside a gallery exhibition.

Campfire is about coming together, telling stories and appreciating creativity. With an eclectic host of speakers, we like to provide a flavour for all tastes, and extend an open invitation to all to join us on the third Thursday of every month to share, contribute and take part.

If you’d like to attend Campfire, want more information about any of our previous guests, or are interested in sharing your own journey with the ditto audience, please visit our website www.ditto.tv , email alicia@ditto.tv or call + 44 (0) 20 300 67850

We love collaborating with artists, technologists and thinkers. Drop us a line if you would like to chat through any ideas. We would love to hear from you.

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