Musicworks was formed by John Osborne and Hazel Kerr in 2005, with a laudable aim: “to promote all forms of music in Nottingham by encouraging local musicians and providing a proper showcase for their talents”. And what better subject for a Nottingham production company wanting to premiere a new musical, in Nottingham, for the people of Nottingham, and performed by a Nottingham cast, than a novel by Alan Sillitoe.

When members of the Alan Sillitoe Committee attended last Wednesday’s performance, what could technically be described as an amateur production played to a packed house and was met by enthusiastic applause. In commissioning Stephen Williams (music) and Catherine Spoors (book and lyrics), Osborne and Ker struck gold. So too with Sarah Warnsby as director.

And kudos to Musicworks for turning over the set design to Abaigael Snape, a final year Theatre Design student at Nottingham Trent University. This is a production that truly champions not just home-grown talent, but young and up-and-coming talent. Design students were also involved in building and painting the plentiful props that transform the stage, variously, from the Seaton living room to the Raleigh factory, from the crowded bar of the White Horse to the back seats of a cinema, from the back yard in which Mrs Bull gets it from Arthur’s air rifle to the hustle and bustle of the Goose Fair.

The cast gave it their all. Tom Keeling gets the ballsy swagger of Arthur Seaton just right, Kate Williams and Nicola Bilton give fiery performances as sisters Brenda and Winnie, and Amanda Bruce is winsome yet steadfast as Doreen. Mark Pollard, Morven Harrison, Kate Taylor and Alice Bentham – as the Greek chorus who parody and occasionally stand in for the protagonists – are equally memorable.

Here’s hoping Musicworks take ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The Musical’ beyond Nottingham, preferably with the cast and crew already attached to it. Arthur Seaton versus ‘Les Miserables’ or ‘The Phantom of the Opera’? My money’s on the hard-drinking ladies’ man from the Midlands!

(Oh, and in case you were wondering – yes, there is a song called “Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down”.)

Read the LeftLion review here.

Visit Musicwork’s website here.

The work of Alan Sillitoe is being featured on The Space – an experimental digital arts collaboration between Arts Council England and the BBC.

Launched at the Royal Festival Hall by Arts Council CEO Alan Davie and BBC Director General Mark Thompson, The Space will run from May to October although Mark Thompson hoped it can be extended “way beyond that”.

The Space offers a unique opportunity for creatives to push the boundaries of digital technology, providing content via the web, mobile, tablet and the new generation of connected TVs. Arts Council chief Alan Davey said it was an “extraordinary way of experiencing an exceptional summer of arts”.

The Sillitoe Trail is one of the few literary projects selected by Arts Council England and will be focussing on the key locations and underlying themes presented by ”Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. Writers need to “rethink the way we work.” said Will Self who is also contributing to The Space.

Several contemporary writers from Nottingham have been commissioned to explore these themes through essays and special events.

“There will be an opportunity for local people to contribute through Facebook and Twitter” said Creative Director Paul Fillingham.

Some of the best content will be featured in a Sillitoe Trail iPhone App and a ‘Cycling Handbook’ to be released at the Sillitoe Day being held at Nottingham Contemporary in October as part of the Sillitoe Season.
Download Sillitoe Season 2012 Leaflet (5.6MB PDF)

The Space will be regularly updated with an ongoing programme of cultural events and content
You can get involved via our microsite www.sillitoetrail.com or social spaces.

First stop on the Sillitoe Trail is the Old Market Square which features the work of local writer Derrick Buttress, author of ‘Broxtowe Boy’.

To share your comments, pictures and memories of ‘slab square’ please ‘Like’ our Facebook Page:

www.facebook.com/sillitoetrail

You can also join in the conversation on Twitter

www.twitter.com/sillitoetrail

But look out for Arthur Seaton who will be dropping by occasionally to keep us in check with his acerbic wit.

Fortunately, the lure of food and good company prevailed and the creator of genre-defining Brit-cops Resnick and Elder was spared County’s 4-2 defeat by Bury.

David Sillitoe introduced the event and read a selection of Alan’s poetry. Following a hearty meal, John read from Alan’s pared-down and emotionally honest short story ‘The Fishing-Boat Picture’ and discussed the quality of Alan’s writing and his ability to trust to the reader to understand and explore the subtext and the subtleties of what is left unsaid.

Recounting an episode at a crime fiction convention where he refuted as over the top a review citing him as Britain’s best chronicler of the underclass since Dickens (only to find himself in the company of the reviewer!), John gave comparative readings from Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’ and Alan’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. The contrast couldn’t have been more effective! Whereas Dickens depicts Stephen Blackpool as a long-suffering mill worker ground down by the appalling conditions and turgidity of the work, Alan gives us a wily and defiant Arthur Seaton, facing up to another week at his capstan lathe: “He jettisoned his cigarette into the sud-pan … Two minutes passed while he contemplated the precise position of tools and cylinder; finally he spat on to both hands and rubbed them together, then switched on the sud-tap from the movable brass pipe, pressed a button that set the spindle running, and ran in the drill to a neat chamfer. Monday morning had lost its terror.”

Don’t let the bastards grind you down, indeed!

John finished off his talk with a reading of his short story ‘Ghosts’, published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, before officiating at the raffle. There’s almost a pejorative about the word, isn’t there? Raffle. The mind hyperlinks to “tombola”, and from that to “unwanted gift”. Forget about it! This raffle was quality with a capital Q, the choicest of which was a signed copy of John’s new novel ‘Good Bait’. The raffle raised £165 for the Memorial Fund.

John was kind enough to write about the event – and some of the forthcoming Alan Sillitoe Season highlights – on his blog. More details can be found on our Alan Sillitoe Season 2012 page: film screenings, theatrical productions, exhibitions, live music. And this isn’t even a definitive list yet. More events and activities are in the works. Keep checking back to make sure you don’t miss out.

What is The Space?

The Space is a project funded by the Arts Council in collaboration with the BBC. On 1 May, it will go live online at www.thespace.org until 30 October. It’s seeking creative output produced in a variety of formats that can be accessed via tablets, mobile phones or the red button on your TV. The aim of the project is to bring arts organisations into the 21^st century so that they are equipped with the skills to reach a broader audience and to take advantage of the different possibilities offered by emerging technologies.

There were over 800 applicants for the project, of which 53 were granted funding. The Alan Sillitoe Committee was one of these for a project called ‘Sillitoe and the art of life cycle maintenance’. We were the only literature organisation outside of London to be selected and stand proudly next to Faber and Faber and the London Review of Books.

Sillitoe and the art of life cycle maintenance.

2012 is an important year for Nottingham. It marks the 125^th anniversary of Raleigh as well as the 50^th anniversary of Tony Richardson’s film adaptation of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. To celebrate this we will produce a mobile phone app of Sillitoe’s Nottingham that visits key locations from the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Users get to navigate the App from the perspective of the two squaddies chasing Arthur Seaton around town. Each location along the trail also has a particular theme to engage the reader. We’ve done this in the hope that it will attract new audiences to the novel who may have been put off by something too prescriptive.

We will also be producing an authentic, 1950s style Raleigh manual that details the literary trail. We’re calling it a ‘physical book with a digital heart’ as it will literally write itself as the project goes along, dependent upon content generated on The Space. We have graphic design students from New College Nottingham illustrating each location, five specially commissioned writers addressing key themes from the book, Confetti recording podcasts and many other forms of collaboration that are allowing this seminal text to re-imagined in the 21^st century.

You can help support this project by visiting The Space and joining in the debate. These are changing times and we are in the fortunate position of being guinea pigs in a trial that will determine the future shape of broadcasting. You out for a good time with us?

https://twitter.com/#!/thespacelathe Arthur Seaton @ TheSpaceLathe

www.thespace.org

John Harvey’s 1995 Inspector Resnick novel ‘Living Proof’ opens near this nexus. If you wanted to pick the most memorable first paragraph in British crime fiction in the last couple of decades, you’d be hard pressed to beat this opener:

“The man running down the middle of the Alfreton Road at five past three that Sunday morning was, as Divine would say later, stark bollock naked. Poetic, for Divine, if not scrupulously true. On his left foot, the man was wearing a size eight, wool and cotton mix, Ralph Lauren sock, a red polo player stitched on to the dark blue. And he was bleeding. A thin line of drying blood, too light in colour to match the Lauren logo, adhered to the man’s side, its source, seemingly, a puncture wound below his pendulous breast.”

Less than a hundred words, yet Harvey throws the reader straight into the narrative, establishes the straight-talking personality of Resnick’s colleague Detective Sergeant Divine, teases out almost painterly details, and introduces the mordantly sardonic tone that makes the Resnick novels unmissable. With Harvey, detail is unlaboured but accumulative, giving his work character, authenticity and a keenly communicated sense of place.

Two paragraphs later, Harvey presents a snapshot of Alfreton Road in the mid-nineties: “… he continued to run, past the Forest Inn and the Queen Hotel, the carpet tile shop and the boarded-up fronts of the café and the fruit and veg shop, both long closed down; past Don Briggs Motorcycles, the Freezer Centre and Kit Em Out, all closed down …”

It’s Nottingham – then, as now – in recessionary times. A Nottingham defined by the pub and the local shop (the one that’s still in business, that is), a Nottingham of communities living very close to poverty. A Nottingham, turning the clock back even further, that chimes with the city Alan Sillitoe was born into in 1928. To quote an article published in The Guardian two years ago, Alan’s father “was illiterate and rarely held a job for more than a month at a time, and as a consequence the Sillitoes moved constantly from one overcrowded insanitary dwelling to the next, followed by mercifully feckless rent collectors”.

This transient, one-step-ahead lifestyle informs some of the most memorable passages of Alan’s 1961 novel ‘Key to the Door’. Charting the life of Brian Seaton – Arthur’s older brother – from his impecunious childhood in Nottingham to his National Service in Malaya, the rites of passage he undergoes and his return home, the tone is set early on as the Seatons plan a moonlight flit. How feckless are their rentbook-wielding pursuers? This evocative passage answers the question:

“The flit was planned for a Saturday night, when Raglin the rent collector (who had a room off the entrance hall) would be boozing in his favourite pub at Canning Circus. Seaton looked on the prospect of a ‘moonlight’ with elation: days beforehand he was taking down shelves and dismantling the furniture, was ready to rent a handcart from a nearby woodyard half an hour before they were due to move, time enough to carry everything downstairs on broad, long-accustomed shoulders and rope it firmly on.”

Two views of Nottingham, half a century apart capturing the same backdrop of economic hardship. Two authoritative voices who know the turf. Two novels that make for a hell of a good read.

John Harvey is guest of honour at The Alan Sillitoe Memorial Lunch on Saturday 21 April 2012. The venue is Welbeck Banqueting, Welbeck Road, West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 7QW, 12.15pm for 1.00pm. Tickets are £22.50, including a welcome drink on arrival, a display of Alan Sillitoe’s life and work, raffle, and free car parking at the venue.

For more information, or to book a ticket, please contact Viv Apple at 38 Harrow Road, West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 7DU. Cheques should be made payable to The Alan Sillitoe Committee.

Then it was over to Nottingham roots band Blue Yonder whose thirty minute opening set included their ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’-inspired classic “Propaganda”. It made for a perfect segue to the prize-giving. Committee member and Nottingham Poetry Society stalwart Viv Apple introduced adjudicator Ruth Fainlight.

Ruth presented an overview of the winning poems and praised their technical merits, announcing the winners – in time-honoured tradition – in reverse order. Five runner-up prizes of £10 each went to Paul Groves for his poem ‘Memoir’, Roy Marshall for ‘The Bow Saw’, Fiona Richie Walker for ‘In Life Story’, Corrinna Toop for ‘In a Hall of Shells and Mirrors’ and Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé for ‘By the Waterfront’.

£50 third prize went to Adrian Buckner (right) for ‘Downshifting’, praised by Ruth Fainlight as “rich with evocation of the treasures of English literature”.

Lesley Burt (left) won second prize – to the tune of £100 – for ‘Carpet Shop in Delhi’, “a very cunningly constructed poem … a vivid, almost painterly picture”. Deceptively short and deceptively elegant, Lesley’s poem conjured “a crowded, colourful interior, and evoked the human situation and moment with much artistry”.

The £200 first prize, for ‘Poems to My Horse’, was awarded to C.J. Allen (right). Ruth Fainlight praised his technical accomplishments, the subtle use of imagery and assonance, and recognised in the subject matter the evocation of “a symbol of eternal endurance”, adding that the use of “morning” as the first and last word of the poem “frames and distances it very satisfactorily” .

Please click on the link to read each of the winning poems along with adjudicator’s remarks.

After Blue Yonder’s second set, there was more poetry courtesy of former Derbyshire Poet Laureate Cathy Grindrod, and Nottingham Poetry Society chairman Jeremy Duffield, two favourites on the Midlands literary scene who needed no introduction. Accomplished poets individually, as well as a great double act, they provided some diverse versifying before Blue Yonder wrapped up the evening with a blinding final set. As the last notes of The Band’s anthemic “The Weight” rang out, it was a reminder of how essential music and poetry are.

Photography credits:

Dennis Apple – Ruth Fainlight, Adrian Buckner, Lesley Burt, C.J. Allen, Jeremy Duffield & Cathy Grindrod

Christopher Frost – David Sillitoe, Blue Yonder

Well, not only did we want to generate some Hitchcock-like suspense, but we also felt that a competition boasting £400 in prize money and which raised over £850 towards the memorial fund deserved a proper winners’ event.

So join us tonight at the Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB, from 7.30pm. Compere and committee chairman David Sillitoe will be introducing an evening of poetry, music, boozing and good company – all you need, really, for a convivial Friday night out. Ruth Fainlight will be presenting the winning poems, and there’ll be more poetry courtesy of Cathy Grindrod and Jeremy Duffield – two of the most renowned figures on the local literary scene – while Blue Yonder will be playing three sets (yup, you read that right: three), including their classic ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ influenced track “Propaganda”.

You’ll have to wait till the weekend to read the winning poems on the website (exact “go live” date and time  dependant on the webmaster’s hangover), so come along to the Nottingham Contemporary tonight, hear the winning poems, listen some great music and raise a few jars. We’ll see you there!

For more information, see the Nottingham Contemporary or LeftLion websites .

Supported by Arts Council England and the BBC, ‘Alan Sillitoe and the Art of Cycle Maintenance’ will take the form of a mobile app and a 1950′s style Raleigh handbook. Creative content will be gathered at various public events to be held around Nottingham and via social media channels.

Follow our Twitter feed and visit the Sillitoe website for more information about the cultural events taking place throughout 2012.

Listen to the Radio Interview on Soundcloud

For technical information about the project, please email Alan Sillitoe Committee Member Paul Fillingham

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down” – the words that Arthur Seaton lives by are stamped in no-nonsense text at the foot of the poster for Matthew Dunster’s adaptation of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, opening at the Royal Exchange, Manchester on Thursday 1 March 2012.

In stark monochrome, Perry Fitzpatrick, playing Arthur, glares out at the world, one hand balled into a fist as he fixes his cufflink. You can almost hear the classic, in-yer-face, belligerent line “I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.”

Retaining the late 50s Nottingham setting on Alan’s novel, Matthew Dunster’s new production – his return to the Royal Exchange following his headline-grabbing adaptation of George Orwell’s ‘1984’and the Bruntwood Prize-winning ‘Mogadishu’ – promises to fuse kitchen sink realism with his acclaimed capacity for exciting theatrical immediacy.

Perry Fitzpatrick, who has already chalked up an impressive slate of film and TV credits, gave a break-out performance in Channel 4’s ‘This is England 1986’, directed by Shane Meadows. The cast also includes Graeme Hawley (John Stape in ‘Coronation Street’), Clare Calbraith (Jane Moorsum in ‘Downton Abbey’), David Crellin (another ‘Corrie’ alumnus; he played Colin Fishwick), Chanel Cresswell and Jo Hartley (respectively, Kelly and Cynthia in the original film version of ‘This is England’), Ryan Pope (“Psycho” Paul in the sitcom ‘Ideal’) and Tamla Kari (Lucy in the big screen version of ‘The Inbetweeners’).

So: a high-profile cast, the authentic working-class novel by way of source material, and one Britain’s most dynamic theatre directors at the helm. It’s a safe bet to say that this will prove unmissable. The production runs till Saturday 7 April. A new generation of theatre-goers can take advantage of the Royal Exchange’s Happy Mondays offer with tickets at just £5 for under 25s. There are also audio-interpreted and BSL-described performances. For further details, please contact the Royal Exchange box office on 0161 833 9833 or visit their website at www.royalexchange.co.uk.

Matthew Dunster kindly spared the Alan Sillitoe Website some time to answer the three questions uppermost in our mind about the production:

Your striking version of Orwell’s ‘1984’ was memorably described as “Kafka meets Kraftwerk”. Can we expect an equally iconoclastic take on Alan Sillitoe? 

MD: I don’t know. My interpretation of ‘1984’ was as focused on the book, its themes and tone as I thought possible. In that respect I’d argue that “Kafka meets Kraftwerk” represents the scale of Orwell’s imagination – psychological horror meets crude technology.

I’m attempting to focus on Sillitoe’s novel. I want to bring out the elements that surprise me – the iconoclastic attitude to empire and the army, the colour of working class life, the extreme nature of the sexual betrayal, the horror of DIY abortion, mixed race sexual relationships.

I guess I think Sillitoe is the iconoclast; I just need to stay as true as possible to his vision of working class Nottingham in 1958 and to my idea of exciting theatre.

Perry Fitzpatrick plays Arthur Seaton; will there be shades of Albert Finney in the classic film adaptation, or will this be a very different Arthur? 

MD: Perry is grappling with a rich, detailed portrait as provided by Sillitoe. We have never discussed Finney. And I made a decision not to re-watch the film while working on the novel. And I told the actors to avoid it too.  What he shares with Finney is the working class authenticity and an edgy instinctive talent.  But Perry has two elements of Arthur’s character nailed that were beyond Finney: he’s tall and he’s from Nottingham!!!

Why do you think Alan Sillitoe’s story of working class belligerence in the late 50s still chimes with modern audiences? 

MD: Well I guess I don’t know! I’m working-class. I’m belligerent. But I’m 42 years old. What are today’s youth? Lost? Angry? Underpaid?

Arthur resents and fights the system. I’d argue that the system has a firmer hold on all of us than ever and that we’ve seen with the recent UK riots that there is a group of people who feel angry and excluded.

There is a connection – but it’s up to the audience to make it.

Watch Matthew Dunster’s Saturday Night Stage Adaptation Trailer on YouTube.

How best to describe it? Imagine if Terry Gilliam had re-imagined ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ with a Stalinist twist and brought in his erstwhile Monty Python colleagues to ramp up the absurdist humour, and you’re halfway there.

It left a good few readers and critics baffled. Not so Andy Partridge, founder member and principal songwriter of groundbreaking new wave band XTC. Responding to Alan’s dementedly imaginative depiction of a topsy-turvy society in which motorists are legally required to be intoxicated (“drink Nihilitz, keep death on the road”) and sports cars replace tanks in an attempted coup d’etat, Partridge found inspiration for two songs.

In an interview with Todd Bernhardt, reproduced in full on the XTC Myspace page, Partridge discusses the novel’s impact:

TB: Let’s talk about ‘Travels in Nihilon’. Where did this song come from?

AP: Well, the title came from the title of a book by Alan Sillitoe, which I bought in the mid- to late-’70s. I was still reading novels at the time, and this is a novel about a non-existent vaguely Communistic-type dictatorship somewhere deep in Europe called Nihilon, which was run by a fellow called President Nil.

TB: Here comes President Nil again!

AP: There you go! So, I borrowed two things from the ‘Travels in Nihilon’ book – the actual title, which refers to nihilists and nothing, and I nabbed the title of President Nil for the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ song.

If I remember correctly, you never get to see President Nil. Whenever a photograph of him is put in the paper for some reason, it’s always a different person, and/or sometimes an animal, like a gorilla or something like that. You never really know what this supposed President Nil looks like.

So, it was a great book, but the actual song isn’t about the book – the song is really about traveling through the land of nothingness. It’s a song about a con – that enormous con of Pop Culture and the con of religion. 

‘Travels in Nihilon’ is a great song – it provides an atmospheric conclusion to XTC’s brilliant 1980 ‘Black Sea’ album.

The novel remains arguably the most offbeat and experimental entry in Alan’s bibliography, hilarious and horrifying in equal measure with an off-the-scale bizarro denouement that makes the last episode of cult ‘60s TV oddity ‘The Prisoner’ look like an exercise in formalism. Intrigued? Track down a copy and prepare to be entertained, inspired and weirded-out in roughly equal measures.