EXCLUSIVE: Helen McCookerybook Club Artyfartle interview (Part One)

I am particularly impressed with the concept of Helen McCookerybook's Club Artyfartle, so as soon as I had the opportunity, I gave her a ring to see how the most recent one had gone...

JON: I just wondered how the Club Artyfartle went

HELEN: It went really, really well actually.  It was a cold afternoon and I wasn’t expecting anybody to come, and also … it was really weird because I set up a Facebook group and loads of people said they were coming on that, and they didn’t turn up, and it was completely different people who came.  We had about 50 people who came, it was a really good turn out for a Sunday afternoon.

JON: I didn’t know you had a Facebook group….. you should tell me things and I will plug them

HELEN: Oh I am just hopeless at being organised – you know some people are really, really good and they jump on opportunities and I’m just really hopeless at stuff like that. I can’t join up all the things that you are supposed to have and do and things, and the only reason I set it up was because someone asked me if we had one….. it went really, really well.  It was a lovely audience – it was completely unplugged and so people had to really listen in to what was going on, you know. I took a nice carpet – a little carpet, rug – and put that on the floor, and the four of us… we were different performers: Lucy Sieger is very extrovert, she’s from Glasgow and her songs are very, very popping and quite jazzy and Magnetic Paul is quite introverted and his songs are about sort of relationships and things like that.  Acton Bell is…well mostly her songs – she mostly plays cover versions of Herman’s Hermits and Searchers songs and this was her debuting her own material which she said she felt really uncomfortable with because she felt like she was being really critical about some of her friends, and it was actually very funny and very perceptive, you know. She brought an electronic keyboard because she was going to play some Mozart, but she lost her sheet music so she ended up having to play another song instead.

JON: That’s so sweet

HELEN: It is sweet isn’t it… and she’s from Bolton and she said “I thought I’d play some Mozart,” she says and we were all looking all over the place for her sheet music and we couldn’t find it so she just sat and did another song.  In the middle of it Joan did a presentation….I sent you some photographs, did you get them? 

JON: Can you explain, what are they? 

HELEN: Well her and some friends in her square – she lives in a square in South London– they get beer cans and they put photographic paper in the back of them and they puncture a tiny hole in the beer cans and they stick them on lamp posts or up high in trees and things.  I think they have to point south-west and they leave them there for six months, and gradually over that time light sort of seeps in and they track the sort of journey of the sun across the sky, day after day, week after week, and month after month and after six months they take them down from the trees and they take the papers through a printer, like a normal sort of computer printer, and it comes out like that.

JON: Good Lord…

HELEN: So, they are kind of time-based DIY photography really.

JON: This is truly, in the real sense of the word, magical isn’t it…

HELEN: It is totally magical and no two images are the same and some of them you can just about see car headlights if enough cars have been passed in the six  months, you know you can just about see buildings and things, but it was a really fascinating talk and she passed around some of the beer cans and it was quite fun see the audience looking at them as if they were really complicated pieces of machinery, you know.

JON: Well I’ve always said that magic is what happens where art and science meet.  This is a perfect example of that. 

HELEN: And it fitted in really well with what we were doing ‘cos what we were doing was very….her partner came along and said that he really loved hearing music with no microphones, that it made you feel really connected with the people who were singing, and it was very kind of .. I think he felt quite touched by it actually. Just the kind of fact that you were rooting for people, you know.

JON: I think the whole thing sounds absolutely wonderful

HELEN: Well it was, it was such a gamble at the beginning I just sort of thought, well perhaps nobody will come but there are five of us actually performing so we can all watch each other. But we had a good turn out and a lot of musicians, there was the drummer from a band call the Gymslips came, who were a kind of post-punky band, and the drummer from the Dolly Mixture came who were a band who were around at the punk time, a member of the group called Strawberry Switchblade came.

JON: I remember them

HELEN: Yep… it was really funny, we pulled in a few musicky people…and somebody from a band called Up, one of the musicians from Up came, and then quite a lot of young people, quite a lot of older people, and it was a really nice winter afternoon. It’s a nice pub that does nice Sunday dinners and things, and a lot of people hung around afterwards and talked and, yeah, it was really successful, but in a very weird and gentle way. 

We continue tomorrow...