TRACEY MOBERLY
INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST,
AUTHOR AND
CO-OWNER OF THE FOUNDRY
Place shapes people but a place without people has no shape to inform or create that which in turn shapes the music of any place.
Observing The Flying Lizards front man, the Libertines singer Pete Doherty and the artist Banksy all sat within a metre or two of each other, drinking the same drinks purchased from the same orating bar person. They digest the same current vibrant art show that adorns the overused walls as they listen to the musings of a recently de-sectioned poet whose creative metaphors describe her experience of a health system that is surfing toward decline. Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the former US president walks into the space. The ever-popular Flying Lizards’ cover version of Barret Strong’s ‘Money’ plays in an endless loop on my internal jukebox. A musical duo take over the stage made from discarded beer crates, carrying out a last-minute sound check. To my knowledge, most are unaware of each other as the boy, girl, man, woman, anonymous lover brushes shoulders, elbow to elbow, with the office clerk, dustman, murderer and mugger. They breathe each other’s breath and inhale the dust of each other’s flesh in an ex-bank turned arts and performance venue on the apex of Old Street and Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch, East London. This is the Foundry and it would seem like fiction not fact. It is fact as the people who will be making tomorrow’s newspaper headlines in music, performance, arts and politics absorb the creative, social and political variants they are exposed to. This is just a miniscule part of what the then almost derelict area of Shoreditch had to offer, but all here at this precise time, in this exact space. A free stage where an event can be organized to give anyone a platform, in front of a ramshackle collection of tables and chairs which allow space for discourse on any subject as strangers interact or become inspired to perform, create or instigate future collaborations. A mixing pot containing the synergy from new people meeting. The past shaping of people’s minds and experiences the main ingredients. The open access building space, the containing vessel. Shoreditch, the fired stove cooking up a fragrant stew of bands and musical partnerships fitting into a number of genres.
In 2005 entertainment licensing law reforms came into effect prohibiting small-scale ad-hoc performances and criminalizing musical expression, ensuring that many performers were not to be offered a live platform to even begin their musical careers. Creative production wrought through physical interaction waned with many operating from their bedsits and bedrooms. Communication mediated through the computer. The gentrification of Shoreditch saw the opening of commercial venues: places for people to congregate to live a music scene imported from elsewhere as trends snaked between indie, dubstep, and synth.
An illustration of this is ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’ a music video and song about the area which in my opinion is pure genius and soon to become a club night. The main critics of this musical movement are the aged once-radical yesterday’s youth. The hipsters ridiculed in the video, love the song, as do those aspiring to the life style it portrays. It has gone global in four months amassing nearly five million views on YouTube. People here continue to shape the place which in turn shapes the music which is now shipped into this small pocket of East London. But, as the weekend wanes and the vibrant Friday revelers turn into the 8.30pm Sunday drug and drink weary casualties it is left a ghost town until the following weekend builds it up again.