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FREEISSUE 26

OPEN HOUSE — YOUR HOUSE

NO HANDS – FEBRUARY 2013A sad week as one of my childhood heroes passes away; Richard Briars. The excitable voice of the Rhubarb and Custard cartoons and, of course, the idealist Tom from The Good Life.

Like Tom, we at No Hands, decided to drop out and do it ourselves. We wanted to try to recreate some of the lovely times we've had at great and generally unassuming nights in Bradford over the years, aiming to be self-sufficient and sustainable. All the money we get goes on keeping the night going, generally paying bands expenses, promotion and maintaining the dj gear.

Like Tom we do it because we are enthusiastic and passionate about what we do. Tom has his set of ideals where we have just tried to enjoy being with our friends, play some music we love and provide a night where we can all have fun together in a safe and non-judgemental environment.

As Tom is reliant on the weather to keep his dream alive we too are reliant on the people who contribute and who come down to dance, drink and watch bands.

So at some point in the night raise your glass to Richard Briars and also to yourself. Thanks for coming and being part of it.

EDITORIAL: Dominic Sheard

Email: mail@nohandsbradford.co.ukWeb: www.nohandsbradford.co.ukFacebook: Search ‘No Hands Bradford’Twitter: @nohandsbradford

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CONTRIBUTE TO NO HANDSIN ANY WAY, OFFER SUGGESTIONS, CRITICISM,WRITE SOMETHING, DRAW SOMETHING, DJ, PLAY .. ANYTHING REALLY .. THEN GET IN TOUCH BY TALKINGTO US OR BY USING THE FOLLOWING METHODS OFCOMMUNICATION —

WWW.ISSUU.COM/NOHANDSYOU CAN READ THE BACK CATALOG OF THESE ZINES ONLINE HERE

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUSTBy Dave Owen

News has emerged that Bradford is to lose its last independent record store. Discovery (formally TheWax Museum) on Westgate, Bradford specialises in the rock/goth scene, but sells music across allgenres; a damp, musty Aladdin’s cave serving Bradford’s crate diggers for almost 30 years. In the late 80’s and 90’s it seemed that the owners would buy anything that anybody was willing to sell to themand unlike the “Cash Generators” of today there were no questions asked, if you were happy with the 50p per record that was on offer, you had a deal, no ID required. When records were bought for 50p and sold on for a pound, this could mean one of two things - you were either going to find a load of shite, or some absolute bargains and it’s the latter that had the tendency to create excitement.

There’s something quite unique about finding rare, sought after records for a pound. It’s difficult to explain to non-music collectors; it’s a magical feeling, a feeling of excitement and often a feeling of disbelief that among the pile of third rate 80’s drivel lies this thing of beauty. A double take often ensues at this piece of black plastic with a hole at its centre and label containing the all, important information, the information that confirms what was first suspected - a real treasure has been found.

There were many of these treasures at Discovery, indie bootlegs, dub, reggae, hip hop and disco classics, early Chicago house and Detroit techno rarities, old school hard core and jungle collections, original pressings of vintage acid house tracks, to name a few. Hours were spent sifting through the same piles over and over again, hoping that a record that had somehow been overlooked would appear. There were times when there was nothing to be found. There were other times when there was so much on offer that a trip to bank was required to withdraw £50/£60/£70; those magic words “there’s a new pile over there love”, were literally music to the ears.

The magic of finding a rare record at a bargain price is becoming a rarity in itself. Internet sites such as ebay and discogs have put paid to that and it seems that everyone is clued up these days where making a few quid is concerned. Obtaining music has become easy with the rise of the digital formats; a couple of clicks on a mouse and the music world is at your disposal. Hours can be spent sat on your arse in your bedroomdownloading music to your heart’s content, but the allurement of the record store is incomparable and when the day finally comes that Discovery ups sticks and leaves it will be a sad day for a city once rich in independent music stores.

Caz runs the Discovery record shop in Bradford. PHOTO: Mark Bukumunhe

RIP DISCOVERY RECORDS :(

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In January 2013 I was invited through Gasworks(a London-based art organisation) to take part in a five-week artist residency at PiST/// in Istanbul. PiST/// is a two-person, not-for-profit, independent art organisation run by partners Didem Osbek and Osman Bozkurt. We had met previously when the artist collective I am part of, Black Dogs,participated in No Soul For Sale at Tate Modern in 2010. We were both dubious of the logic underpin-ning the event: a showcase of non-institutional and independent art activity that, oddly (to us at least), took place in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern as part of its 10th anniversary celebrations. PiST/// appreciated Black Dogs’ critical contribution thatinvolved totalling up the entire (non refunded) costs of all the artist groups that took part and making this known to the public via the question ‘How Much did Tate Modern NOT spend on its birthday party?’

An element of my proposal for the residency was to continue the practice-led research I have been conducting - as an artist, musician, writer and through my role as Fellow in Music at Bradford University - into self-organised, DIY, non-institutional and underground cultural production. My interests are in the social, political and economic resonances of activity that defies easy categorisation as either ‘work’ or ‘leisure’, and the alternative (non/post capitalist) worlds that such activity suggests. I planned to do somedigging around the art and music scene to find sites in which self-organised culture was emerging in Istanbul. In my experience: where there is alternative music and artist-led activity, alternative politics and radical social imaginaries are never far away.

I had visited Istanbul twice before. In 2009 for the art biennial, with my girlfriend and partner (in art crime) Yvonne Carmichael, and then in 2012: to play with my band That Fucking Tank. In both cases I came away wanting to know more, feeling like we had only experienced the commercial, slick surface of a city that must have more to offer interms of independent, non market-led, non-institutional activity.

On this trip I began my search for the murky underground through a number of venues,cafes and art spaces that I had either visited previously or that were recommendedby friends involved in the independent music and art scene. Many of these were very pleasant and populated by excellent people that I subsequently got to know better. At Peyote I saw some interest-ing local bands (Mondual, Ah! Kosmos, Grup Ses Beats) and great DJs. In Kutu Café I met a group of friends that play in bands (Ricochet and KimKi O) and run a magazine called Bant that covers independent and leftfield art, music and film. At the Istanbul Biennial press launch I was pleased to see an audience member challenge the sincerity of the politicised rhetoric used by the curator and organisers. The question came from an artist-activist, Niyazi Selçuk, who had performed a number of actions highlighting the corrupt nature of the sponsorship relations that sustain Istanbul’smarket-led art scene. Later in my trip I met a young artist collective called Kaba Hat who had recently rented a dilapidated space in an area of Istanbul earmarked for gentrification and in which they plan to hold an exhibition reflecting on this context.

As well as via these dispersed but interlinked individuals, groups and spaces, I experienced the grassroots culture of Istanbul just by walking through the streets. These are peppered with musicians, food vendors and street performers at almost all hours of the day and give the impression of a city brimming with non-institutional, people-led art, music and culture.

As I began to ask more questions of my hosts and new acquaintances, however, a slightly less comprehensive picture of DIY activity in Istanbul began to form. Where are the social centres? Where are the non-profit, non-slick music venues? Where are the artist-led spaces, the community squats and the co-operatively run businesses? Where do the punks and weirdos hang out? Where are the volunteer-run spaces that are defined andmanaged by their users? Although these sorts of places are relatively few and far between(and mostly off-the-map) in the UK, they can be

BOSPHORUS REFLECTIONSRevealing the Conditions Conducive to DIY Culture

by Andy Abbott

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found with a bit of persistence. We have, for example, the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford, Wharf Chambers and Cornerstone in Leeds, Suma in Halifax, Bloc and S1 Artspace in Sheffield to name a close-by few. In mainland Europe such places are more commonplace, from the network of tiny-but-numerous artist-run studios and galleries of the Netherlands that appear in every disusedtower block and industrial area, to huge formerly-squatted alternative cultural centres like Metelkova in Ljubljana. But, despite my best efforts to uncover them, I found the Istanbul equivalents to be evasive.

So, a lot of the conversations I had with local practitioners and musicians turned to why-in a city of 14 million people that spans two continents - independent, collectively-run, self-organised spaces of the sort dotted across the UK and Europe are non-existent or unknown to even the interested underground art and music community. The responses I received varied from the self-depreciating and personal - ‘Turkish people are too lazy and self–interested to organise collectively and make things happen; its not in our culture’; to the pragmatic and structural - ‘Rent is too high to allow anything that isn’t for-profit tosurvive, the city is corrupt and there is a Turkish mafia that demand paying too’; to the political - ‘There is a genuine threat of censorship and even imprisonment for stepping out of line and challenging the neoliberal agendas of the government.’

Furthermore, I began to pick up on how these hostile and marketised conditions shaped and standardised the cultural activity I was experienc-ing. I became more aware of the over-produced and professional, reserved character of many of the bands I saw. A symptom, I began to hypoth-esise, of a lack of basements and low-cost rehearsal spaces in which bands have the freedom to play as wild and as long as they like, such asthose we have in Leeds (and one of the contribut-ing factors to John Peel’s now famous observa-tions that LS6 postcode has more bands per square meter than anywhere else in the country). Likewise, the majority of the art that I saw, even in the independent spaces, was object-based and gallery and collector-friendly, rather than performa-tive, dematerialised, socially-engaged or interven-tionist. Istanbul’s overcrowded, 24-hour,super-paced, rapidly-gentrified nature occludes the cracks, gaps, pauses and void spaces that are

plentiful in postindustrial cities in The North of England, and from which the most interesting and socially-transformative art and culture emerges.

Although my experience in Istanbul was incredible, and I haven’t outlined here the many positive and wonderful things about the city and my experi-ences there, I returned with a renewed apprecia-tion of what we have in Bradford. Spaces like the 1 in 12 Club and The Polish Club in which we can host experimental gigs and free club nights; emptyshop units, mills and warehouses that can be used by artists and collectives as impromptu galleries and studios without the fear of them being turned into hotels next week; a tradition of worker’s resistance, class-composition, self-management and grassroots organisation from which we can draw inspiration and tactics to explore the space(concrete, social and imaginary) between that dictated by the state and the market. In short, a culture where free time, free space and free thought is available to those willing to seek, grab a hold and make best use of it. Such spaces in which to self-organise and experiment, to do our thing without being at the mercy of either private or public forces are, as my Istanbul experience illustrated, not universal. As such, they deserve our full appreciation, utilisation and, in an environment where the drive for profit threatens to enclose all of life, defence when and where necessary. Bradford might seem on the surface a little empty and still at times, but underneath it’s got as much going on as places forty times its size.

www.andyabbott.co.uk

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Watch Bradford City walk out at Wembley in the League Two final on Sunday the 24th of February and you could be excused for thinking everything is right at the City's football club. It is not.

The club's achievements this season are near impossible to put into context.

Only once has a club from so far down in football played in a final so high - Calais in the French League Cup final in 2000 and they were runners-up. By the time you have this in your hands, dear reader, Bradford City may have gone one better.

Or they may not have. The task is massive but apt for a club which faces a massive challenge to stay relevant within the City it represents.

The idea that football clubs should represent the area around the ground - and Bradford City play at Manningham's Valley Parade - is an archaic and never entirely accurate one. There are occasions where eleven lads born within a stone's throw of the ground played for the team but - as with the throwing of stones - those incidents are overblown and in the past.

The struggle for relevance for Bradford City comes from all sides. The community in Manningham is a rich and diverse one. Anecdotally it is largely Asian which comes with it the consideration that that community is not interested in football.

This in itself in an inaccurate statement. "Not interested in Bradford City would be more accurate" and the community have seen through the tokenistic attempts to engage interest by appointing ambassadors and signing players like Pakistan captain Zesh Rehman.

That community itself is changing but the club's failure to successfully engage - regardless of how well meaning they may consider their attempts to be (and I would doubt that they are sincere) - sees them drawing from a community which is increas-ingly disporatic. My decade of writing Bradford City website BfB told me that supporters were equally likely to be based in places like York, or Harrogate, or Wakefield as they were in a BD post code to say nothing of those fans in London, LA or Laos.

Bradford the City's inability to offer employment at all levels has let to people moving away and while a fan may drive from York to Bradford for games every two weeks there is a natural tendency - "Support your local club" - which suggests his or her children would follow another team.

The modern supporter is mobile and football clubs on the whole have yet to grasp this idea that the fan who attends games at Christmas and when back visiting family is an increasing a part of the future with the week in week out fan from up the road. For Bradford City - trapped between communities who are seemingly losing interest - this problem is especially pressing.

The next generation of supporters is not coming in as great amounts from the community around Bradford as it used to and the generations growing up away from the City may not sustain as City fans. This is why Wembley represents an opportunity for the club and perhaps a final one to command massive media attention and - in the wake of that - look at ways to inspire that supporter base who threaten to turn away.

BRADFORD CITY AT WEMBLEYby Michael Wood

and planning a new future for the club

Who: Lou Phelan, Richard Brass, Adi Crowtherand Sue CopperthwaiteWhen: Friday 25/01/2013Where: No Hands: Grrrl month at the Polish ClubWhat: Severe weather warnings - SNOW

SNOW HANDS!

As the snow worsened outside, we started to wonder if we should have made the journey from Hebden Bridge at all, but it was Grrrl month, and back at the Polish Club. This was not the time to be faint hearted.

As Lou and Triona took to the turntables, the alcohol started easing our worries, butas soon as their set was over and when the first large snowman was built, off we went,concerned but optimistic.

Firstly, Richard expertly got the car onto Morley street which was covered with thick snow. We decided Manchester Road would be our best bet, though we almost didn’t make it past the ice rink (quite fitting), needing a push from our Adi.

We made it to the bottom of Manchester Road at about 11.30 and 2 hours later made it to the junction with Mayo Avenue at the top! Yes, 2 hours!

During these 2 hours, Adi got out several times to help push other cars, along with other heroes and fellow travellers, some wielding shovels, and impromptu snowball fights ensued.

After passing Mayo Avenue, the traffic thinned out, and we were on our way, Although the snow was still falling and the roads were treacherous in places, inside the car we were happily sustained by Richard’s crisp stash, the camaraderie and“indie sounds of the 90s” coming from the radio. (a future set for No Hands, perhaps).

We made it through to Hebden Bridge a princely 1 hour later, where the car was abandoned in the valley for a slippery track up our respective hills, home.

Although the journey home had taken 3 hours, and was longer than the time we spent at No Hands, we’d do it all again.

by Sue & Lou

NEXT TIMEFriday 29 March 2013

THIS TIMEFriday 22 February 2013

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THE POLISH CLUB, EDMUND ST, BRADFORD BD5 OBH

£3 ENTRY FOR LIVE MUSIC UPSTAIRSFREE DOWNSTAIRS FROM 8PM

FREE ZINE + DJS + DANCING TIL 2AM