Wednesday 8th October 2025
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Thousands sign petition to fight planned closure of Cellar

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A petition has been launched to save the cramped yet beloved Cornmarket club, The Cellar, after news broke yesterday that it is facing imminent closure next year.

Yesterday The Cellar confirmed that St Michael’s and All Saints’ Charities, the building’s owners, plan to turn it into a retail space in early 2018.

Since the announcement there has been a flood of outrage and support for the club amongst Oxford locals and students.

A change.org petition in support of “Oxford’s best and only underground music venue!” was set up yesterday. The petition, which implores people to save “the heart of this city’s incredible music scene”, has so far garnered over 6,000 signatures.

Comments on the post indicate the fury amongst Oxford clubbers that the announcement has provoked. One says: “The Cellar’s closure would be one of the biggest losses of true, vibrant, underground culture that could possibly be inflicted on a community.

“The Cellar is a unique and deeply adored space and to lose it would be deeply saddening for the thousands upon thousands of attendees from Oxford and across the country.”

Another reads, simply: “War on culture needs to stop.”

The continued closure of Oxford’s music venues such as Babylove and now Cellar has also affected those who use them to host club nights. Danielle Shreir, the founder of Oxford’s popular Burning Down the House 80’s themed nights, which began in Babylove, but after the club was bought back by Oriel College, transferred to Cellar, spoke to Cherwell about her fondness for the Cornmarket club.

“I will always remember getting in to a very light cellar in order to set up, pools of sweat still being mopped away – drunk people falling down the stars towards you as you sat selling tickets on the door,” she said.

“The tradition we had where everyone would get on their knees when they heard the intro to ‘Like a Prayer’ – the first time you ever dared get onto the stage to dance and felt very very important.”

She added: “I can’t believe what’s happening in Oxford – clubs closing down everywhere and being replaced by commercial centres. 

“Nightlife is so often viewed as frivolous but it’s key to self-expression, particularly when you’re discovering yourself. Cellar was one of the few places where you felt you could be yourself.

“At Burning Down the House we had everything from the ‘hip kids’ to boys that would come alone and just sit and sing along to the Smiths. I think it was a really nice and inclusive space and night and wasn’t just university-based – you’d get a mix of people actually from Oxford and then also the uni people.”

Ozzy O’Sullivan, an Oxford student who runs the Cellar SE10 garage, grime and jungle nights, also spoke of his regret over the club’s closure. “We are extremely saddened to hear about the intention to close Cellar,” he told Cherwell.

“Like many other student-run nights we started at this club, and its closure will only make it harder for future students to provide nights that Oxford desperately needs. The diversity of the nights that are spawned there is a testament to the magic of the place. The Cellar is a true Oxford institution and its closure would be a huge blow for both the students and locals in Oxford.”

The clerk of St Michael’s and All Saints’ Charities, which owns the building, Rupert Sheppard, has attempted to justify the closure by explaining that with more income, the charity can give more money to local good causes.

“The trustees have no wish to cause unnecessary upset to those who value The Cellar, but it will be appreciated that they are under obligations to act in the best interests of the charities and their beneficiaries,” he said.

Dan Iley-Williamson, the Labour councillor for Holywell and a DPhil student at Queen’s, told Cherwell: “Music venues like The Cellar are a vital part of the cultural fabric of the whole city.

“As well as place for people of all ages from all over the city to go for a good night out, small venues are where new artists can learn and develop. Without places like The Cellar the life blood of the music scene in Oxford gets cut off.”

Cellar, previously called The Corn Dolly and The Dolly, has hosted early gigs for successful bands such as Foals and Glass Animals. The venue has been since the 1980’s by the Hopkins family, who are currently consulting a solicitor to see what they can do to save the club.

My town and my gown: fruit-picking in the south of France

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If one wished to escape the ‘Oxford Bubble’, a remote farm in the south of France wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Cloisters are replaced by plum trees, essays by fruit picking, and, most significantly, rain by blistering heat. The only outside information I receive is when I occasionally get enough phone signal to refresh Twitter, and I haven’t heard the word ‘deadline’ in what feels like years. In fact, when I arrived at the small farm near a town called Condom (no, really), where I was to stay for a month, I thought I had found paradise. I was on the brink of making a call to Dante, to spread the good news about my revelation, when I started to recognise certain feelings from my time in Oxford.

This account is in no way prescriptive of the way in which working abroad will feel for everyone – my spoken French was admittedly terrible and I was awfully inexperienced. This wasn’t as much diving into the deep-end as it was throwing myself headfirst into the Mariana Trench.

Everyone at Oxford has those tutorials where, for example, they leave thinking they never, ever want to hear the name Proust ever again. Imagine leaving that tutorial and heading to hall, where you ask for the ever so slightly dodgy-looking lasagne. “Of course. But first, how is comedy presented in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu and what does it contribute to the novel as a whole?” You take your meal, sit down with your friends, and your neighbour turns to you and says: “Hey, how was your day? Also, how is Proust’s ‘Involuntary Memory’ presented in terms of narrative structure?” You return to your room to watch Netflix and your password is suddenly a two-thousand-word essay on the subject, ‘What is Time?’ That’s sort of what it feels like to be immersed fully in another language for the first time.

Living out your degree in such a way, you are constantly tested, even with the most basic of tasks. It felt like a never-ending exam at the start, and there was the constant fear that one day I would be found out as not quite as adept as I had made out and would be rudely ejected. Every conversation was like a lecture as my brain scrambled to keep up and absorb as much information as possible. I even started taking notes afterwards of everything I had learnt. At the end of each day, I was exhausted, my brain having had to work at tutorial speed for over twelve hours, non-stop.

As with essays, my speech was a lot of regurgitation of that which I had garnered from other people: I picked up stock phrases, useful words that I could apply when necessary. As I progressed – over the space of just a couple of weeks – it soon started coming more naturally, and I felt that I was becoming myself when I spoke, instead of a patchwork of the people around me. I realised that speaking and making mistakes is easier and more helpful than not speaking at all – even if the lunchtime conversation revolves around all the words you have mispronounced or even created that day.

Still, the exam continues, and I find myself worrying when I receive a message from a friend from home about how I am going to do the conjugations in my reply, before remembering I can reply in English. When an English person arrives at the shop, it feels like breaking cover – like this act I’m putting on can cease for a second while I catch my breath.

However, more and more frequently I find myself quizzing the French people around me on the peculiarities of their language: why “pas terrible” means really very terrible, why we get dressed to the nines and they get dressed to the thirty ones, and why you might “faire le baiser” to someone in public but you certainly wouldn’t “baiser” them. I often reach for the dictionary to search for words out of curiosity, and I constantly pester those around me to explain things – much to their annoyance, I’m sure. In short: I remember why I chose to study languages.

It’s that tutorial you almost don’t want to leave, or that book you bang on about at dinner despite the eye rolls from your friends. Every day is an exam but every day it gets easier. I go to bed wondering what I’ll get wrong the next day. It’s exciting.

The media’s focus on false rape claims deters real victims

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Last week, Jemma Beale was sentenced to ten years in prison for making false rape accusations – including that of a gang rape, several sexual assault allegations, and one accusation which resulted in a man being convicted and jailed for seven years. The years spent in jail and emotional stress for the victims of Beale’s lies may never be truly rectified. The accusation of committing a crime one did not commit must not be taken lightly. Yet, this case, or perhaps its fallout, has implications for all the wrong reasons.

Our increasing willingness to have frank discourse about rape and sexual assault in the public sphere and in the media is in many ways a positive – and the headlines made by this case are reflective of how we view rape as a society. Rape is now considered to be a crime so serious that it warrants jail time. As a nation, we have come a long way since the Ealing Vicarage Rape, and extra protections have been enshrined in the law to empower victims. The number of rapes reported has increased at a staggering rate, with more willing to come forward about their experiences.

But, if one is to believe the media narrative surrounding Beale’s conviction, it would appear as though this positive trend for rape reporting is in danger of collapse. A “perverse impact”, said Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith, may be the result of Beale’s actions, as more rapists walk free. As a result of cases like this, women may now fear they won’t be believed, and won’t report rape and sexual assault. To glance at the responses to this case on social media, the same conclusion could be reached. A high-profile case of this nature seemingly puts the nation on high alert for similar false accusations occurring.

But who exactly is making false rape accusations? A CPS report in 2013 found that many of the women, who had falsely reported rape or sexual assault, were young and vulnerable. Some had suffered from mental health difficulties and others had been victims of offences in the past.

Another study shows that it is not often the alleged victim who involves the police in false accusation cases, but one of their parents. Not to mention that false reporting of rape is actually incredibly low. Yet it is remarked upon as if any man may be in danger of a false accusation at any time. Men are supposedly living in fear. False reports, while not being a complete myth, have become a straw man for anti-feminist arguments, detracting from the real challenge of increasing convictions and bringing justice to rape victims.

The statement made by Loraine-Smith is in fact irresponsible and harmful to our understanding of why women may not report a rape. While reports have been increasing, the number of women who are actually reporting their rape remains low in comparison to the number of rapes and sexual assaults taking place each year. Women haven’t been believed when they speak about rape for time immemorial, but a myriad of other factors can influence a decision not to speak out. The psychological impact of the event, fear of repercussions, the stigma and humiliation someone may feel after being raped, and the fear of having to recount the event to police officers and re-experience it are seldom discussed when rape reporting statistics reach the media.

Perhaps a small number of women will be discouraged since Beale’s case. But, even when women do come forward more, the chance a conviction will actually take place remains slim. The percentage of cases coming through the UK court system that reach a conviction has actually fallen since 2011, and in 2016 fewer than 8% of the cases coming to court resulted in a conviction. Women often find it difficult to win their cases due to a lack of independent witnesses in rape cases, and the perpetuation of the myth that some cases of rape are more legitimate than others, such as those involving physical violence. Time and resources need to be focused on these issues, and supporting women that do come forward.

In the case of Jemma Beale, we must ask why one woman is at fault when many women aren’t believed when they come forward about rape. By pinpointing a specific reason for why women don’t report their assaults, and placing the blame for our failure to convict at the feet of a small number of people that make false rape claims, we fail to see the wood for the trees.

Blavatnik professor resigns over donor’s links to Trump

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An Oxford academic has resigned his post as Professor of Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government after the university failed to address his concerns that his job title was lending credibility to Donald Trump’s policies.

Bo Rothstein, a Swedish political scientist, raised the issue with the University earlier this month after learning that Ukrainian-born millionaire Leonard Blavatnik, who donated £75 million to set up the Blavatnik School of Government in 2015, had given $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration committee.

In his resignation letter, Rothstein said: “As I see it, Donald Trump’s policies are antithetical to the goal of the Blavatnik School of Government, which aims to improve the quality of government and public policymaking worldwide.”

Rothstein told Cherwell that: “I find it impossible to defend giving credibility and legitimacy to a person who supports a regime that is 100 percent opposed to what I have found in my research and what I try to teach students.”

Yet when Rothstein raised the issue with the leadership of the Blavatnik School early in August, he did not feel he was being taken seriously.

“They said Mr Blavatnik gives money to this and that…and it is not for us to have an opinion about it.

“If the leadership had said, yes, this is a serious problem, and we have to have a very serious discussion with Mr Blavatnik about it, because it is threatening the legitimacy of the School, it would have been different.

“If they had said, we have to do something, because this goes against the values and ethical standards of the School, I would have participated in that discussion. But the leadership decided to ignore the problem. They did not seem to care much about this problem.”

Rothstein maintains that: “I don’t have a problem with Oxford…Oxford is a wonderful university. But this position is not for me.”

A university spokesman said: “We are unclear why he [Rothstein] has resigned over political donations made by Sir Leonard Blavatnik, which are completely unconnected to the Blavatnik School of Government.”

 

 

 

 

 

Cellar set to close next year

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The Cellar, one of Oxford’s favourite nightclubs, is reportedly set close in early 2018 to be turned into a retail space.

The current leaseholders, the cosmetics shop Lush, sub-let the basement venue as the nightclub frequented by Oxford students and townspeople alike.

But Lush’s departure from their Cornmarket shop next year could mean the imminent closure of The Cellar, as the charity which owns the building, St Michael’s and All Saints, wants to transform it into a place for retail.

They have confirmed that a new tenant for the venue has not yet been selected, but once Cellar closes, there will be a complete refurbishment of the space.

This would mean the end of the beloved underground venue, renowned as much for its popular nights such as SE10, Glue, and Burning Down the House, as its grimy aesthetic and cramped clubbing experience.

First built as part of the tunnel network connecting colleges and once used as the University’s Cellar, enjoyment on a night at the club depended on “your tolerance for heat and need for personal space,” a VERSA article once said.

In a statement posted to its Facebook page, Cellar said: “We are sorry to announce that The Cellar has received notice from our head landlord that they are looking to redevelop the site.

“This is devastating news, not just for The Cellar team, but for the Oxford music scene as a whole, and represents the continued erosion of independent music venues by big business.”

It added: “We are consulting a solicitor to see what our options are and will keep you posted on any developments. We appreciate your ongoing support.”

Cellar will be the latest Oxford nightclub to close, after Lola Lo’s closed its doors in March and Wahoo held a final night last year. One second-year student said: “First Wahoo and now this? Without Cellar Oxford is nothing.”

Another said: “We’re genuinely worried that in a few years there won’t be anywhere left to go.”

Max Reynolds, who runs Dr Feel Good nights at Cellar, said: “Cellar is the only venue that supports new and alternative nights. It’s the heart of upcoming Oxford nightlife. If this news is true, it will be a terrible loss to the city.”

The Russian Revolution was a kind of orgy

Revolutions defy order and the status quo in order to abolish that very order. An orgy is disorganised, incoherent, a rebuke to conventional order. It is, in its contempt for normative morality, a revolutionary act. The Russian Revolution, then, was an orgy – of violence, of course – but also of optimism, frustration, confusion, didacticism. For the Russian Revolution, like its orgiastic antecedent, the French Revolution, was founded on texts and political thought. Which is not to claim the Russian Revolution was a pure Marxist upheaval of the Tsar’s rule and the replacement with a dictatorship of the proletariat, pace Joseph Weydemeyer. The Revolution had many fathers, although only an uncle—Uncle Joe—was to be victorious.

The strength of the British Library’s centennial exhibition, Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths, is in bringing together books, documents, posters, uniforms, letters, photographs, and memoranda, letting us see the whole paraphernalia of the state in a state of transformation, in the pivotal year of 1917 and after. One extraordinary example is a placard from that year, issued by the Provisional Government, that reads: “Newspapers are not being published. Events are happening too fast. The population should know what is going on.” They were distributed in major cities with bold headlines to spread news as quickly as possible, the conventional methods having broken down as the country writhed in war, both internal and external.

Yet the exhibition is able to draw out small personal moments amidst the almost overwhelming sense of history. There’s a hand-written note from Lenin requesting to join the British Library, and sprightly watercolours by Edward Barnard Linttot, Secretary to the British Ambassador in Moscow, painting the Revolution as it unfurls on the streets below his office window. In an exhibition full of such fascinating curios, one that stands out is an English Who’s Who of the Revolution, published in 1919, which detailed the prominent personalities, events, and concepts, of the Reds and the Whites, to allow English audiences to understand what was happening. The pace of change was too quick, disorientating bystanders. The Great War had accelerated the modern world to the speed of a hurtling bullet. Following the February and October revolutions, the nascent Bolshevik state crumbled into civil war, with counter-revolutionary White forces backed by Britain, the US, France, and Japan.

The curator though, Katya Rogatchevskaia, an experienced academic in Russian studies, indulges in her own kind of orgy: as you enter the darkened, hushed exhibition space from the airy atrium of Colin St John Wilson’s British Library building, we pass plush, red velvet curtains with mock chandeliers overhead, the desire to recreate tsarist decadence infusing the whole show.

Disappointingly, photos recording Russian history from 1905 into the nineteen-twenties are printed on red tinted metal plates, lines the route through the exhibition, which not only removing the material agency from the images themselves, but suffocates the viewer with its red-tinged aura. Subtlety has been abandoned, subtext shunned in favour of text; not so much radical as obvious, it nevertheless fails to torpedo the works on display. Their power is too strong to be crushed.

Scale is introduced early on by two vast maps of Russia, one covering ‘European’ Russia and the other, ‘Asian’ Russia, a country stretching across the world. In 1917, it totalled 8,800,000 square miles, larger than the US and Europe combined. One of the key points revealed by the exhibition, is that mass, rapid communication was crucial. The still commanding Bolshevik propaganda posters were effective tools for spreading propaganda, all hard lines and blocks of vibrant colour, such as Dimitri Moor’s 1920 poster Have you volunteered?, a testament to the rare confluence of modern art and revolution (as Robert Hughes has remarked elsewhere, radical art and radical politics rarely operate in unison). Intriguingly, the more ordinary White posters feature Muslims and Cossacks in an attempt to mobilise marginal groups against the Soviet regime, which achieved a limited success during the civil war.

Stalin makes little appearance here, emphasising that he was not a major figure in the early days of the Revolution, despite his own revisionist historiography. Rogatchevskaia may have been concerned that to trek too far down the path of Stalinism would derail the exhibition and loose its narrative focus, although when it comes to the closing years of the civil war, we are left with an incomplete picture. Nevertheless, it is striking that in Stalin’s promotion of a personality cult, in many ways echoed Tsar Nicholas II, only far more ruthlessly efficient. Stalin had no time for the passing Soviet fads for constructivism or creativity: orgies had no place in Stalinist Russia.

The Russian Revolution lives on, of course. Not necessarily in Russia, which under Putin has been unsure and cautious about how to approach the anniversary, downplaying any commemoration. No, its influence resides in a flimsy green pamphlet, published in 1848, and presented near the beginning of the exhibition: The Communist Manifesto. Its language of class, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, the bourgeoisie, has seeped into our language, the language of the academy and of the social sciences, not least economics itself. Marx’s (and Engels’) terminology lives on in the critiques levelled on the post-Great Recession West launched by leftists from within Labour, to Syriza and Podemos. Yet those who claim to inherit the Marxist mantel seem callow savants in comparison to the cunning, awesome drive of the Bolsheviks. We have retreated from the orgy.

Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths is on at the British Library until 29th August 2017.

Pizza Hut enters “town versus gown” dispute with Council

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Pizza Hut has become embroiled in dispute with Oxford City Council, after proposals for a new, neon-lit frontage were rejected.

The UK’s third most popular pizza chain claimed that a new sign was necessary to ensure that its brand image remained “bright and vibrant.”

But the council responded that it was “absolutely crucial” to protect the heritage of Oxford’s historic areas such as the High Street.

Council leader Bob Price said: “Part of Pizza Hut is also part of the Covered Market. It’s a very important part of the city’s heritage – and a sign could make a huge difference.

“The High Street in Oxford in one of the jewels in the crown of Britain’s shopping offering and everybody [retailers] along it knows by and large what is required.

“Pizza Hut were trying to push the boundaries a bit too far.”

A Government planning inspector rejected an appeal in July, agreeing that the proposal “was not up to the highest standards needed for the sensitive location.”

In a statement, Pizza Hut argued that Oxford should not be defined solely by the university.

“The conservation area overview reminds that while Oxford is exceptional in its colleges and general architectural quality, it is also a major regional commercial centre.

“It confirms High Street belongs to town rather than gown and that it is central to a vigorous commercial shopping centre.”

The Texas-based chain also suggested that varied advertisements are a positive both for the street and for businesses.

“[The sign] would have no impact at all on the High Street; it would provide some colour and interest to the market entrance alleyway, which is otherwise rather dull and somewhat forbidding.

“We’re disappointed that the application has been denied.”

A fresh proposal has now been submitted with the offending lighting removed.

An ode to the breakfast burrito

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America: land of the free, home of the brave, and mother of the godly tortilla parcel of egg, potato, bacon, cheese and chili that is the breakfast burrito.

Here on our small island we’re often guilty of cultural snobbery with regards to all things transatlantic. We mock Americans for their brashness, and roll our eyes at their trashy films, suburban homogeneity and burgeoning far-right politics.

Sometimes our collective condescension is targeted accurately. A lack of imagination has been one charge laid against Americans, and not without reason. American cuisine can justly be accused of pasting together rehashed versions of dishes brought into the US through waves of new arrivals, or the over-processed and over-engineered products that no longer resemble the food they purport to be. Sometimes though, you can stumble upon a real American innovation. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, that spark of genius is the breakfast burrito.

The old received wisdom that breakfast is the most important meal of the day remains stubbornly true. That said, as a cereal and milk puritan (Raisin Wheats, semi-skimmed if you’re interested) my perception of the perfect breakfast has long been dictated by convenience, especially during term time. Bacon, eggs, even toast – all of merit, but verging into brunch territory. Bang the bowl on the table, cereal, milk, and you’re out the door.

Santa Feans meanwhile are eternally relaxed, and the small city seems to operate in half speed, which makes it an unlikely birthplace for the breakfast burrito. Originally intended as a workman’s breakfast for consumption en route to the construction site, the closely wrapped and parcelled nature of the breakfast burrito still to this day allows for clean and easy eating on the go. The idea that convenience need get in the way of a substantial breakfast is made null and void.

Multiple claims to the invention of the breakfast burrito have been made. Wikipedia cites William Harm’s Burrito Shack, which purports to have been the original creator in 1975. Despite its lowly origins, the cultural impact of this key element of New Mexican cuisine has been profound, inspiring everything from high-range kitchen gadget ‘breakfast burrito makers’ to gimmicky fridge magnets. Now, it’s gone global, inspiring journalistic triumphs such as BuzzFeed’s ’18 Breakfast Burritos Worth Waking Up For’ (of which at least 5 are categorically not burritos).

Wander along a downtown street in any New Mexican city and you’re sure to find a dizzying array of commuter-friendly burrito options every morning. It’s beyond doubt that the breakfast burrito has had a rapid ascent to the rank of staple favourite, and all from an unlikely concept combining the favoured breakfast foods of Anglo, Hispanic and Native American communities in this culturally diverse state.

One of New Mexico’s more endearing eccentricities is the ‘official state question’, as passed by the state legislature in 1996. “Red or green?” – by which preference for either red or green chili can be expressed – is often supplemented with ‘or Christmas?’, offering a combination of the two rather than some kind of festive twist. When ordering a breakfast burrito from a café or street kiosk, this officially sanctioned query is recited with bizarre glee. Indecision is frowned upon, the queueing customers behind you can be unforgiving, and choosing the fence-sitting Christmas option can risk the derision of your fellow breakfasters (marking you out as a tourist with flashing neon lights).

Ultimately your selection is neither here nor there, as any and all combinations deliver the perfect balance of flavour and heft so critical in any substantive meal. You won’t feel the need to eat again all day, until a couple of hours later you notice the chef’s special enchiladas in a cosy joint around the corner, and the circle of food – New Mexico style – begins all over again.

Houghton Festival 2017 Review

Whilst popular in mainland Europe, the kind of festival Houghton was offering to Britons was very alien indeed: a 24-hour music license, 18 age limit and a line-up almost solely consisting of DJs. To most festival goers, a DJ-only festival sounds strange, but allow me to sell this idea: I became totally immersed in Houghton and want to convince you to do the same next year.

The non-hierarchical nature of Houghton and DJs in general produced an atmosphere where the attendees can interact and focus on each other. Although some people felt compelled to revere the superstar personalities upfront such as the boyish Ben UFO or the swarthy Ricardo Villalobos, others felt much more comfortable turning round to friends and strangers, a surprising number of whom came from Oxford, and dancing together. One particularly odd experience was witnessing a ice cream trolley being joyridden through the Nicolas Jaar crowd. I encouraged the rider to go give a tub to Nicolas Jaar but, by the time he got on stage, Jaar had swiftly left. The ‘Hidden Corners’ and ‘Magic Carpet’ tents were particularly friendly. Dancers mingled to house and disco from Gideon and Ben UFO’s unexpected but delightful mix of obscure jazz, afrobeat, synthpop, reggae and funk records.

Hunee playing at the Hidden Corners tent

The DJ feels no compulsion to play only their own music, instead they simply play what is good. Bands will often self-indulgently force listeners to hear their lacklustre deep cuts, the DJ on the other hand will play the best they have to offer in a selection and flow tailored for the crowd: no set list can constrain them. The Houghton lineup showed the magic that this freedom can produce: Hunee did a fantastic mix of afrobeat and tech house, Caribou played classic dubstep and jungle, and Nicolas Jaar reminded people of his abilities to combine the oblique with the dancable. However, the personal highlight for me was Andy Weatherall’s show stopping mix that was both consistent and eclectic. Weatherall ranged from euphoric techno tearjerkers like ‘Loser’s Hymn’ by Talaboman to what sounded like a tongue in cheek remix of The Human League.

The 24-hour music license was also a stroke of genius. It offered a range of settings to make each experience more memorable: sunsets watching Nicolas Jaar, daytime boogies to Horse Meat Disco, Joy Orbison in the dead of night and Villalobos for the sunrise. This allowed performers to DJ for hours. Craig Richards and Ricardo Villalobos performed a jaw-dropping eight and a half hour set. These lengths allowed one to get completely immersed in one set for hours or to jump from venue to venue guilt free: the anonymised DJ couldn’t judge.

Ricardo Villalobos and Craig Richards approaching the end of their eight hour set

The setting, in the depths of the Norfolk countryside, was also perfect. With no phone signal there was nothing to do other than engross in the festival’s delights. The impressively well executed sauna in a yurt offered some welcome relaxation. The sculpture tour, although difficult to get on, was a nice way to unwind from the high octane events just a stone’s throw away. However, the best part was by far the venues. The Quarry was a writhing pit of joy and happiness drenched in magenta, and The Pavillion was a certified wonderland. Villalobos’ trademark minimal techno brought the woods to life in the early morning as stammering vocals and dreamy synths seemed to make the trees pulsate a neon green to the hard beat.

All in all Houghton was an incredibly fulfilling experience, one that left me not wanting anymore. I could have seen more acts, I could have stayed up later, I could have seen more sunrises, but what I had seen was so amazing that I don’t feel bad for what I missed. That to me is the true sign of a great experience: complete satisfaction. Even if you’re not that interested in electronic music, I advise you to go Houghton next year. For a festival so focused on music, Houghton as an experience seemed to completely transcend music altogether.

Credit to all photography goes to Jake Davis: fb.com/hungryvisuals

‘Half Breed’ at the Fringe Review: ‘Beautifully articulated’

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Natasha Marshall’s moving one woman play masterfully combines humour, pain and self-actualisation. She offers incredible insight into the impact of racism at a personal level, as Jaz, the only mixed race girl in an almost all-white West Country village.

With impressive versatility, she flicks between laughter and panic, her cognitive dissonance palpable as she examines the pressure to laugh along with your own dehumanisation. She often speaks cheerfully about deeply upsetting events, and we realise that this dismissal of the importance and severity of her own experiences has always been required of her. Marshall perfectly communicates the difficulty of trying to stick up for yourself when everyone else is laughing along with those attacking you, as well as of trying to pursue your ambitions with so much to cope with. As Jaz goes over the lines of a Shakespeare monologue for a potentially life-changing Drama School audition, racial slurs and invasive thoughts invade, drowning out her attempts.

The single actor and sparse set in no way limit the play’s immersive impact. Marshall becomes gossiping villagers, obnoxious lads, and Jaz’s loud-mouthed but fearfully intransigent best friend Brogan, transporting us to this claustrophobic village. All characters are embodied with thick accents and impeccably caricatured body language. The lighting is also extremely effective in drawing the audience into each scene. When Jaz has taken drugs, her increasing disorientation is accompanied by swirling purplish lighting, and strong emotion causes the lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling to throb in time with her laboured breathing.

Perhaps most impressive is Marshall’s ability to create complex and moving relationships between characters who can only be portrayed alternately. Jaz’s grandmother, in fact, is only briefly embodied, but from her priorities, and Jaz’s perceptions of her, we receive a vivid image of a strong, generous woman, always protecting and uplifting her granddaughter. She is desperate for Jaz to pursue her passions, and rushes to wash racial slurs off the wall before she comes home. Jaz’s muddled sense of worry, guilt, responsibility and love for her grandmother are beautifully articulated.

Jaz’s relationship with Brogan is even more compelling, an old friendship propped up by traditions of piling rocks at the foot of a tree they frequent to mark their presence, and avoiding acknowledging racism. Marshall examines the sad truth of how both fear and courage, as well as simply how busy life can become, can divide friends. Jaz’s fear stops her from saving Brogan from her boyfriend Mitchell’s abuse, but her later courage is also symbolised as destroying the piles of rocks under their tree, when she stands up to Mitchell as he tells the story about chasing a Pakistani woman and her children out of the Co-op. The fact that standing up for herself is represented as this destruction of friendship indicates how isolating prejudice can be, even from well meaning people.

At this moment of conflict, the lighting and simple set of reflective, hanging lamps become particularly effective. The mirrored shades fall and seem to shatter as she breaks the unequal peace that Brogan has encouraged, leaving the simple light bulbs shining unencumbered. As the first movement on stage other than Marshall herself, this creates a startling yet poignant moment.

Half Breed offers a heartbreaking yet often humorous account of the personal cost of racism, forming a beautiful coming of age story about finding a voice, and learning to stick up for yourself and those you love.