DIAMOND LIFE

Diamond Life dips in and out of 60 years of Hull’s music history. Below is a transcript of the Diamond Life immersive sound walk.

LUCY BEAUMONT: Welcome to Hull, it’s a very nice place. If you’re from here…Welcome to Hull, you already know it’s a great place!

And if you’re new to Hull, you’re in for a treat!

I’ve got a few things I’d like to share with you, whilst we take a walk around the Old Town of Hull - you might call it a personal tour! Here’s a few instructions before we set off.

If you’re planning to listen whilst walking the Old Town with me, make sure you switch on Location Services on your iphone or android.

Scroll down the Diamond Life page and you will find a map of the route. Click on the ‘drop a pin’ icon on the left of the map. The blue dot locates you on the map, so you can see where you are on the route. The walk is circular and will take about an hour. You can pause the cassette at any time.

Get your headphones or earbuds at the ready and we’re off.

This cassette is called Diamond Life, a drift in and out of 60 years of Hull music history. Walk safely and remember we will be crossing a few roads.

As we walk, look out for a series of 10 orange signs. Orange, because you know, one of Hull’s colours is orange. These signs are the Reveal Hull Way Points. Use your phone camera at the orange signs to scan the augmented reality markers for bonus added extras!

That’s it, let’s start walking, we’re off to Priny Quay.

We’re covering 60 years of Hull’s music history in one hour! Where better to start than February 1970. Hull was an industrial town with a thriving fishing industry. Whitefriargate was the main shopping hub for the town, with a raucous nightlife at the weekends.

Mick Ronson was in his early twenties in 1970, when John Cambridge came looking for him. Mick was painting lines on a rugby pitch for the Parks Department and wasn’t keen on a return to London. But the offer of an opportunity to play with David Bowie was a chance to be in a rock and roll band and a few days later he was recording a John Peel session for Radio 1. Result!

MICK RONSON: My musical roots really go back a long way. I was trained classically. So I played classical piano and violin and recorder. And then I wanted to be in a rock and roll band. I was playing the violin and I didn't want to play the violin. I wanted to be a cello player. Before you can play the cello, you have to play the violin first, then the viola, and then you're allowed to play cello. So then I was listening to people like the Shadows or Dwayne Eddy. And Dwayne Eddy, when he played the guitar, because he played everything on the bass strings, that was kind of very close to the cello or something. So then I decided that I would play the guitar. So when I got a guitar, I played everything on the bass strings like Dwayne Eddy.

LUCY: Hull’s sound was influenced by incomers and outgoers, a place at the end of the line where no-one must get above their station, although many went in and out of it. In the 1960’s an all female band, Mandy and the Girlfriends, blazed a trail outwards from their working class roots…

LYNDA HARRISON: My name is Lynda Harrison and I was one of the founder members of Mandy and the Girlfriends and that would be 53, 54 years ago now and I'm here to talk a little bit of how it all began in 1965 and how different it was for girls then…

We weren't called a band, there was no such thing as bands then, it was groups. Bands were brass bands. There was a female band, Ivy Neela, but she had a big band, I think she had about a 20 piece band. So we were a group. None of us were really musicians but we had that teenager's dream, all because all of us used to go and dance or bop to our favourite groups on a Saturday night. And obviously all boy groups, and we all wished that we'd been born boys so that we could be part of a boy group, that's true that.

LUCY: Lilly Bilocca was a cod skinner in the fisheries industry in Hull. Following the death of 58 trawlermen in 1968, she campaigned nationally to improve conditions, leading a group of women that became the ‘Headscarf Revolutionaries’. Her work and that of other women eventually resulted in changes on fishing trawlers, notably the use of radios onboard. Hull spirit is a tough spirit and tracked the social changes that were taking place in industrial Britain in the 1960s.

The tipping point between the late sixties and early seventies was pivotal for Hull…younger people watched Top of the Pops and started to dream of being in a rock and roll band. Meanwhile, Mick Ronson and the other Spiders from Mars toured the globe, setting off at Paragon Station, Hull.

COSEY FANNI TUTTI: My name is Cosey Fanni Tutti and it's 1971. I'm walking home to where I live in Prince Street, which is in the old town of Hull. Walking down past Feren’s Art Gallery to the top of Whitefriargate. And I turn right, down the cobbled streets, very, very, very quiet. Everyone's gone home from work and the shops are closed. And I walk down and I turn left and then I turn right down Dagger Lane. It's a bit dark. There's hardly any street lights. And then I turn left into Prince Street. It's wet. The cobbles are wet, always usually wet and very cold. And I walk down and there's just a light at the end of the street, where the little shop is. I come to the door of number eight Prince Street. There's a rainbow around the doorway. I put the key in the door and enter number eight. And the dog runs down the stairs to greet me. Close the door and I'm home.

LUCY: If you’re walking the route with me, you’re most likely in Prince Street now. In the early 1970’s the Old Town area of Hull had become run down. The Georgian houses along Prince Street were tucked between the docks and the archway to Hull Minster. Number 8 Prince Street was the unlikely HQ and home of Coum Transmissions, a music and performance art collective. The disparate group was founded by Mancunian Genesis P-Orridge, who later, with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter Christopheron became Throbbing Gristle.

Let’s stop outside number 8 Prince Street and listen to Cosey.

COSEY: Coum Transmission was basically, it was a collective of artists or ‘an artist’ in inverted commas. It was a collective where everyone was welcome to come and express themselves and join in. Or just come and talk to us. There were people from lawyers, secretaries, down to people that had seen us in the streets and wondered what we were doing. There was one young lad whose father was the landlord at Punch Hotel near the City Hall. And because he lived in the town, he'd see us doing pieces at the junction of Whitefriargate, you know where monument fisheries used to be.

It's always difficult to describe how something is created. Because it usually just forms over time or it can be instantaneous. Let's go and do this. But we had a lot of props and they were very colourful to say the least. Like the pram that we used to take with us, with the props in it to do things in the street. That became a little object in itself and ended up in the Ferens Art Gallery in an exhibition.

We lived upstairs mainly and came down for water. That was the only source of water, on the ground floor. It was great. We just made it our own. We decorated it in our own way with basically materials that we were using for the actions we were doing and anything else and posters that we'd made for the different performances of Coum. It was a fantastic building. People used to come and stay. Had Hell's Angels living there at one point and an ice cream man living in number 9, which kind of opened off from our bedroom. The bedroom was the bay window that you see. The only bay window in that row of houses. That's where our bedroom was. And off that was another room where Spidey, Ian Evits, lived for a while. Above the extension, as you went down the stairs, this is another bit that's gone now, was what we call the drum room. And that obviously had a drum kit in it and it had all sorts of other things that we used within the performances like shop dummies, all kinds of things, materials. But that had a hole in the floor. So you could look down into the kitchen and you could talk to people while they were cooking food. Or do a duet because we had a piano in the kitchen as well. So you could play the piano and someone could be drumming just above you.

The thing with Hull and people from Hull, were they're very forthright and determined to do what they want to do and that goes from whether you're just going to be just working in office and don't want to know all this stuff or whether you're going to be a creative person and you're out there doing it. So you get these two people, these two sides of Hull. And I think there's an understanding in a way. There might sort of be some conflict but there's usually a way around that to talk to one another and there's that understanding.

LUCY: Coum Transmissions eventually morphed into Throbbing Gristle, when Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti moved to London, becoming the pioneers of Industrial Music. But this could not have happened without the test-bed platform that Hull provided. Later on Hull Time based Arts, Hull Art Lab and Hull Artist Research Initiative continued the tradition of playing with the city as an art space.

We’ll walk down Prince Street now and into Trinity Square.

We are now in Trinity Square, at the heart of the old town. We can rest a while here if the weather is nice, or if not pop into the Trinity Indoor Market on the left hand side of the minster.

The folk revival in music started after the second world war and this area of Hull played an important part in that story. The Folk Union One Club started in November 1963 in the Old Blue Bell, just off Market Place. The family who played a key role in this were the Watersons, who went on to become one of the most popular folk bands in the UK.

Eliza Carthy tells us more…

ELIZA CARTHY: I'm Eliza Carthy, I am a daughter of some fairly famous Hull folk musicians. I am a folk musician myself. I play the fiddle, I sing traditional, English largely, songs and I also write my own material, I've got my own band. This year I celebrate 32 years performing.

MARTIN CARTHY: My name is Martin Carthy, I've been involved in music since I left school, since I walked out of school when I was 17 and I fell in love with a guitar which rather got in the way of wanting to play in this traditional music because there was nobody to look up to, have to make stuff up.

LUCY: Lal, Norma and Mike Waterson were orphans brought up by their Grandmother. As Mike Waterson told the BBC:

“We were brought up by Grandma, a generation back where we didn’t listen to the radio, we didn’t listen to the TV, we sat round the fire and we sang…we used to have poetry and were given a poem - sixties Hull kids - and you had to come back next week and know it. And it was a shilling for ones that could remember it.”

MARTIN CARTHY: I became aware of the Watersons when they organised a concert to spend some money they'd got. They had to spend it before they had it taken off them. They actually contacted the one folk agent there was, he was a fellow called Malcolm Nixon, and he had run Ewan MacColl’s Folk club which was then called The Ballads and Blues. As all folk clubs were known at that time, this is the 1950s, in fact 1940s. The Miner’s union, the National Union of Mineworkers, the boss of their folk club at one time was a man called Arthur Scargill and he was very keen on British folk music.

LUCY: Martin Carthy visited Lal Waterson in Hull. At the time he was getting to know her sister Norma in 1972. He was impressed with the quality of Lal and Mike’s songs and was instrumental in getting the work recorded in London in May 1972. Bright Phoebus was a breakthrough record, blending traditional folk with acoustic and electric instruments. Martin and Norma married, creating one of the most influential dynasties of the folk resurgence.

MARTIN CARTHY: We all met up in this little theatre. This woman came up behind me and I turned around and fell in love like that, and she took one look at me and fell in love like that. She was Norma Anderson in those days. And we got married and this was 19, about 1961, I think, when we first met and it was 1972 when we finally got married.

ELIZA CARTHY: People come up to me all the time and they talk to me about Folk Union One and about The Bluebell. And I quite often get people who are significantly younger than my parents, coming up to me and saying “when I was 14 I used to sneak in”. I get the impression that Folk Union One was a mecca for young people. You know they say “oh well you can't get young people interested in folk music” and it's just not true. It was a movement you know. It was just the most vibing and brilliant place for young people to go and discover most kinds of music.

MARTIN CARTHY: Especially folk music.

ELIZA CARTHY: Most of the people that went to it were young. I mean there's a reason that there's this sort of terrifically massive audience of older people now and that's because in the 50’s they were all teenagers going mental for English folk music. The Watersons in that place created this atmosphere that completely welcomed that and encouraged it. And as I say I get people coming up to me all the time these days, telling me exactly how it changed their lives.

LUCY: And with that, as we walk around the old town, we can ponder the curious proximity both in time and place of the rebirth of English Folk and the beginnings of industrial music in Hull. You see, we’ve not really carped on about it have we?

BOY BEATS BUS: What do you like about Hull?
WOMAN: Hull? I like its theatre, the park.
MAN: I guess it's just kind of like, it's a small place, that just, people are open, it's their thing really. I know, it's kind of like a city where everyone really cares.
BOY BEATS BUS: I will have to say that the bus station and the train station, and that they are quite good, they are quite good actually. This whole centre is quite good, and you just, there are quite polite people.

LUCY: We are now walking past the famous Hepworths Arcade. If it’s open, pop into the famous Dinsdale Joke Shop, the inspiration for a Selfridges shop window and decades of pranks. Here we will cross over safely and walk the short distance to Scale Lane. Turning right into Scale Lane we will see many of Hull’s famous pubs. The Manchester, Fretwells, The Lion and Keys and then the new bridge over the river.

Hull has always been a town full of music, back in the 60s a conversation in the loo at the Sombrero Club started a new band. This was the birth of Mandy and The Girlfriends, where East met West Hull girls.

If you’re by the Lion and Keys pub now, take a load off and sit down on one of the benches and listen to the fabulous Lynda from Mandy and the Girlfriends.

LYNDA HARRISON: It actually happened for me and my friend Karen who was the organ player, purely by accident. Two other girls, Leslie and Hillary, they used to go to Hull's night spots and watch their bands that they loved. They were groupies actually, groupies of the time and we didn't know them at all. They had a dream like we did to be in a group, even though we couldn't, we had no talent, we couldn't play an instrument, couldn't sing that we knew of. It happened that there was a group called Mandy and the Moon Rakers. And Mandy, she fronted the group. Hillary and Leslie, one night, collared her in the toilet of the Sombrero Club and they said to her, "Have you ever thought of having an all girl group?"

It was about three or four weeks after that, that there was an ad appeared in the paper, and the ad said "female members for all female group wanted". Hillary rang the number and found out it was Mandy of Mandy and the Moon Rakers. She was a little put out by this because obviously it was her idea, well her and Leslie's idea. Leslie and Hillary got the job but they couldn't play an instrument. I mean how ridiculous is that?

LUCY: Mandy and the Girlfriends became successful and toured in the UK and Germany. They were chaperoned by a certain Mrs Smith

LYNDA HARRISON: Mrs Smith is Mandy's mother. Mandy was called Mandy Smith. Mandy's mother, she was the manager of the group. She came round to Karen's one afternoon with Mandy. She said this is what I've decided to do. You and Linda and Mandy can go on in the clubs. Nowadays we see it on the road. So then you can actually be called a girl group because there's three of you and that will, you know, set the scene for when Hilary and Leslie have learned their instruments and can join you. I said I can't because my dad won't let me and Mrs Smith said it'll be alright, and I said no it won't, We all worked in shops, we were all shop workers. I got home from work, we worked until late at night. I got home about eight o'clock and I looked through the crack in the kitchen door and it was Mrs Smith, Mandy's mum, the manager of the group. She had a turban on and no teeth in, and my dad hated that, and I thought, how the hell has she got across the threshold? Anyway I listened for a bit and I could hear my name being mentioned and I took a deep breath, did the sign of the cross and I walked in, and my dad said it looks like he said you'd better go upstairs and get changed, it looks like you're singing at The Bar Room pub tonight.

LUCY: Moving from dreams to reality, women in Hull shaped and founded new musical and performance projects, often arising from working-class backgrounds. Northern humour and the DIY aesthetic under-scored the experimental work that later Hull became known for. It’s always been a place where someone will give you a gig or a chance. Cosey Fanni Tutti sums this up.

COSEY FANNI TUTTI: I mean, Hull in the 70’s was very drab. I mean, 70’s anyway was all beige, brown and orange. So to come to the top of Whitefriargate and see these fluorescent colours and people in strange costumes It was a really wonderful way to get to meet people in Hull. It really was. And then to get to take part if they wanted to or to just watch what was going on.

LUCY: That’s it ‘taking part’ and a determination to ‘tell it like it is…” This is the essence of Hull, which led to it becoming City of Culture in 2017.

Jodie Langford continues this authentic line of women musicians and poets in Hull.

JODIE LANGFORD: I love yelling into a microphone and people yelling back, it's just an unreal experience. It's really, it's really hard to describe but it's just such a it's such an amazing outlet and I think it really does connect people and yeah it fascinates me so much it's just something that I've always wanted to do that I now do and yeah it's amazing.

LUCY: Right, let’s get moving again. If you live in Hull or work here, you can’t escape its deep connections with water, both the river and the sea. Let’s walk over the moving pinball flipper that is Scale Lane Bridge, and travel from the Old Town to the more industrial side of Hull. Hull as a city is always a work in progress and the tide of the River Hull mirrors people coming in and out.

ROLAND GIFT: Hello, my name is Roland Lee Gift, but most people know me as Roland Gift.

I moved to Hull from Birmingham, I was about 11 at the time.

We drove up in a 1950s taxi. There was my mum, this guy called John that was living with us, and I had a German shepherd called Jack. The four of us drove up through the night to Hull.

In the morning I went into Pearson Park, and it was quite magical actually because there was a lot of mist, and that kind of mist that sort of hugs the ground. It was quite different, it was quite different to Birmingham. Where I used to live, it was a very mixed district, and that was one of the things I noticed about Hull, it was very white. I lived in a place that was such a mono-culture, racially, and that was interesting. It wasn't problematic, but it was kind of interesting. It was different culturally, it was quite different.

It was in Hull that I first started playing music, I guess, to audiences. In fact, It was in the Hull Community Theatre Workshop that was run by Pam Della, and we did this 1930s night, and that was where I first sang on stage. I sang "Miss Otis Regrets" which I think might have been a Cole Porter song, and then also I sang the Al Jolson song "Mammy." That was the first time I actually sang on stage, but I'd been in plays with the Hull Community Theatre Workshop. In a way, that was my introduction to showbiz, really. I didn't really get on in school very well, but I did like the drama class. I liked art and drama, which is all I've ever really done for a living.

LUCY: It’s at this point that we define the Hull Sound as undefinable - because Hull is the place you come to play, experiment and find out stuff about yourself, in many cases through joining a group or a workshop. This carries on today, through organisations such as The Warren and Hull Truck.

Hull produced a steady stream of bands throughout the 1980s. Red Guitars, The Housemartins, Indians in Moscow, Everything But The Girl and The Akrylykz, they were all made or assembled in Hull.

Lou Duffy Howard from the Red Guitars continues the story.

LOU DUFFY HOWARD: My name is Lou Duffy Howard, I am a musician, I've lived in Hull for many years and I've been really lucky for most of my working life, for my grown-up life, to have had a really good time with playing music. I feel really grateful for that. I came to Hull because it appealed to me because Mick Ronson was from here and he was one of my hero-guitarists, but I'd never expected to have such a great musical life. So I came to Hull University and I studied law, the wrong thing for me. But I did finish, I did finish my degree…

I had a very, very cheap bass. It was literally from Woolworth's. And I remember going in and John, John Rowley, one of the Red Guitarists, I remember him saying to me, "Come on, Lou, let's get you more of a round sound." And I was like, "A round sound? What's a round sound?" And he was twiddling the knobs on the amp. I think by the next gig he brought me his Hoffner violin bass to borrow, and I used that until I went out and bought a more expensive one.

We knew that Good Technology was a really special song. Every other song is a completely Red Guitars song, which stemmed from Alan and Jerry's musical writing partnership. But Good Technology, the song, which was a bit different than the way we ended up recording it, but the essence of the song was written by a guy called Stuart Ross, who was a bass player in a very early version of the Czechs, I think. So it was a kind of slightly different song than everything else, but we all knew that it was a fantastic song, you know, something really special about this.

LUCY: One of the most well-known voices from this period is Roland Gift. Roland moved through a number of Hull bands before making it with the Fine Young Cannibals.

ROLAND GIFT: Muff Winwood came up from Sony. When we went to see them in their offices first off, it was a bit strange, because they were taking the piss out of me from coming to Hull. They were very disparaging about Hull. Then when we did the showcase, Muff Winwood was like, "Oh, I didn't realise it was you guys. I didn't know that." We did the two showcases for London and for Sony. Then the TV show, The Tube, used to feature unsigned bands. They were going to be in the Midlands. We performed ‘Johnny’. They shot our performance in the Zella Studios. That became the video for ‘Johnny Come Home’.

That's when things kicked off for us really.

LUCY: In October 1984 the Housemartins played their first gig at Hull University, referring to themselves as ’the fourth best band in Hull’ behind Red Guitars, Everything But The Girl and The Gargoyles. Commercially, they propelled themselves well above this and their station with three top-ten albums and six top-twenty singles in the UK.

The Housemartins were shaped around the core songwriting team of Paul Heaton and Stan Cullimore, the latter responding to an advert in the local paper. Heaton’s pithy and sharp lyrics rapidly propelled them to the hit parade via a John Peel session in 1985.

The Housemartins split in 1988, with Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway forming The Beautiful South. Their debut album ‘Welcome to the Beautiful South’ was released in 1989, generating 3 hit singles including Song for Whoever, with the inimitable opening line “I love you from the bottom of my pencil case”.

DAVE WINDASS: Dave Windass here. It’s been my task to interview all the musicians you’ve been listening to. I’ve not managed to track Paul Heaton down yet, so if you bump into him, can you let him know…

There’s something off-kilter about the music that comes out of Hull. Sarcasm, self-deprecation and absurdism is abundant – a hangover from the gallows humour that got thousands of trawlermen through their tough existence in Arctic waters. Leftfield lyrics are aplenty, dissonance is the accepted norm and there’s a fearlessness that is only possible in a lonely, disregarded place.

Any port is going to be a city of song. There is a strong tradition of folk and sea shanty in this place built on the River Hull and the Humber Estuary. Traditional songs continue to be blasted out in watering holes hosting singarounds. It is a tradition that was mined by The Watersons, revisited by The Hillbilly Troupe and can still be heard in the bands and artists of the here and now.

LUCY: Near the Millennium Bridge, we are walking within the walls of the citadel built in the 1680s. This was a huge structure, formed in a triangular shape, now echoed in the footprint of The Deep. The Old Town was confined to the west side of the river and ships approaching would have seen the South Blockhouse on the East side as they came into dock.

299 years later, in 1979, Basil Kirchin moved to Hull. Kirchin’s experimental sound and music work dates back to the 1960’s, with film scores exploring jazz, orchestration and taped sounds. He was able to continue his work in Hull exploring field recordings, children's voices and cut up sounds and is now seen as a precursor to the ambient work of Brian Eno. Kirchin was rediscovered during Hull’s City of Culture year in 2017, with re-releases of his ‘Quantum’ and ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ recordings on Trunk Records.

JONNY TRUNK: I’m Jonny Trunk from Trunk Records. And I’m here to talk about Basil Kirchin. He moved, I think it was about 1979, and he made a life for himself in Hull, even though he was spending most of his time indoors with his beloved wife Esther, he would still be part of the music scene in Hull through Keith Hurd's Fairview Studios where he was there using a studio as often as possible.

I think they had an arrangement where he used to come along and just sort of get on with stuff and had a great team of enthusiasts around him to make the modern music he was hearing in his head.

I found Basil in 2003, I say found, it was literally finding. I'd collected records for a long time, I'd collected film music for a long time, I'd collected what's known as library music for a long time. If you don't know what library music is, it's non-commercial music. It doesn’t go in shops, it's given away to TV production companies, radio companies, that sort of thing. So it's music given away to be used cheaply but commercially for TV usage.

So things like the mastermind theme, that's a piece of library music.

LUCY: On the other side of Millennium Bridge is @thedock, formerly known as the Central Dock or Southend Wharf, which was rebuilt in 1843. It’s a listed site but has cleverly been converted into an open stage. As we wend our way through the Centre For Digital Innovation, we can see the transformation of Hull from a fishing economy to a broader enterprise and innovation city. Of course, Hull’s connection to the sea and fishing in particular will always remain.

Humber Street is where fruit and veg from all over the world would have lined the pavements. Barrows of spuds would have been wheeled up and down, with a sign for Craven A cigarettes on the right. At Number 65, R. Wrigglesworth & Son were importers of Canary Bananas, just opposite what is now Dino-Star. You might gasp at the metamorphic changes that have occurred in Hull, since way back. Talking of which, see if you can find the Reveal Hull sign! It’s bright orange and has an augmented reality surprise!

Jodie Langford and Nigel Taylor bring us right up to the present day music scene and what it is like…

JODIE LANGFORD: I think Hull is a very creative city. I think it's it's overflowing with creatives and passion for art music and culture. I think that I've been inspired by a lot of the members of the Hull community and I think we've all got each other's backs and we all support each other. There's a great support network and I think we're also a city where if something isn't happening we'll find a way to make it happen and we all bundle together and put ideas together. If I look anywhere in the street I can spot someone that's a creative or someone that I know or people that have helped me on my journey.

Futurewise, I'm just buzzing to be collaborating with Scott. I love being in the studio with him going “I've got a few words but I don't really know what else to do” and he creates beats, so I think just continue releasing music with him. I want to get an album out, I want to get an album out so bad, because this will be my second EP that I'm releasing and then I've got six singles. But I want to release an album. I want to expand our live performance so that it's not just me and a DJ. I want dancers, I want crazy costumes.

NIGEL ‘KOBBY’ TAYLOR: So at the moment, I'm working on a remix EP with Ebo Taylor and the Saltpond band. So Ebo Taylor is also my granddad, but he's also an Afrobeat. I would say he's incredibly successful for Afrobeat. And they've entrusted me to take some of their old music and remix it, so I do quite a lot of remixing.

So yeah, I always wanted to be a DJ, but growing up, it's not like now where you've got MP3s and you can get MIDI control. It was just expensive and I really wanted to be a DJ, but there was just no way I could afford the decks, the vinyl. It was too expensive. So I just took the cheapest option, which was rapping, which was basically free, pen and paper, and away you go. And then when I came to Hull to go to uni, I just kind of met a few people and people were like, "Oh, you'd be really good at rapping and give it a try." I think it's just because I had a London accent and maybe just the way I talk. So they were like, "Oh, you can convert that into rap." So I just ended up going to The Warren, just by chance. And I met a Stu Blackster, big up Stu, and David Hannah. And they just basically helped me create a song. And then from that, I took it home and I couldn't believe this was my voice on this track.

LUCY: Holding on to a music career for any length of time can be a struggle, and where you live and make music can have a massive impact. Here’s Steve Cobby from Fila Brazillia.

STEVE COBBY: I think economically I saw loads of friends leave town and really struggled just to live, that you know, in the capital or a bigger city and I thought well you know like Pork Recordings just hit straight away in Hull, and you know to talk of the town, you know, you won't get that in with Birmingham or you know, so that was nice. You know I like that about it but, and then my roots are kind of essential to me so my family extended family and biological and all my friends, isn’t something that I was kind of in a rush to ditch. It's amazing how many of them come back…

LUCY: On our walk we’ve dipped a toe into some of Hull’s sixty years of music. Maybe, if you’ve enjoyed it, ping somebody the link for us. It’s a curious journey through remixers, revivalists, song-makers, solos and sound artists. It’s about the people, the place, the humour, the sea, the soul, the sound and the songs.

STEVE COBBY: The Lamp was just its natural home for sure, for the Pork nights and then The Room we had a residency there as well for a long time, from when it was a coffee club, you know, when it was just like a little coffee club and the first all-nighters there. It was unlicensed, which were amazing actually. The first unlicensed all-nighters in England was in Hull, and nobody ever mentions that in the history of club culture ever. There's a certain generation that will talk about The Room really affectionately because they were all coming in, they're all coming in for the all-nighters and it was a really nice crowd and it was, you know, the sets were good, I would say that, you know, because we were playing. I mean it was a bit like the Haçienda, everything suffers a bit like, with its own success, so when it's just like two/three hundred people it's, it's killer, and everybody knows each other and you're looking forward to going and then I guess all your nights were watered down because you're to get 700 people in…

LUCY: The compact nature of Hull as a city always created intimate venues and special places that have become synonymous with its thriving music culture…

Places, such as The Blue Lamp, The Blue Bell and the legendary New Adelphi have supported new talent and welcomed back those who had made it…

Here’s Paul Sarel, the current manager of The New Adelphi

PAUL SAREL: The importance of the Adelphi is that it's been here for 40 years for a start, and we still do things in the spirit of Jacko, and Jacko obviously started the club in 1984 with the idea of putting on new independent bands and artists. He'd always backed the underdog and we continue to do so, and we always say, you know, if you turn up with some cymbals strapped between your knees, a hurdy-gurdy, and you can bring a few mates to a gig and you tell me it's artistic, we'll take a punt on you and put a gig on, you know, it's... As long as you think it's good and artistic, we'll do it baby!

LUCY: And it’s holding on to venues and special places that keeps music alive and thriving.

PAUL SAREL: We're getting some younger people involved to help us transform into the next 5, 10, 15, and these young people are all energised, they're invested in the idea of a grassroots venue and independent music, so despite the fears of what's going around the UK and around the world at a minute, of venues closing down, I think we're lucky enough to have a really strong community of people coming to shows and being involved with shows and, you know, long live the Adelphi is what we say.

In most recent times, in the last couple of months, we've seen a really nice influx of young people coming back to shows. Probably after, you know, the Covid times, there was a bit of a drop-down on young people, but we're starting to see 16, 17, 18-year-olds and they're forming bands as well, such as a really brilliant band called Wench, who are playing quite a few shows.

WENCH: My name is Hebe and I play bass in Wench. My name is Sev and I play guitar in Wench and I also sing. I'm Kit, I play drums for Wench and I also sing and shout a lot.

Wench for me is, we don't really stick to a genre so we wouldn't call ourselves punk or this or that or grunge or whatever. Wench is more like an embodiment, it's more like a genre, we are a genre. It's formed of rebellion and anger and it's taking all of our experience with our music. Angry female music is how I describe it. There's a lot of feminine rage and just angst. It's very angsty music. It's not to say that all of our music is completely screaming. A lot of it is yes. But there is, some, there's elements of folk, there's elements of like, I don't know, all sorts really.

First me and Kit met at college. I came to one of your gigs I remember. I'm in another band called Avis where I'm like, "shameless plug." Kit came to that gig and I was like, "Yo, you're in my music class." And they were like, "Yeah." And then we just made a band. But it's crazy because I was manifesting a feminine rage type of band for many months before. I'd been going around the college going, "Hello, do you play instruments?" I had no friends. I started college like a month later or something. And I was just going around to anyone who looked kind of interesting. Who just, you know, sort of just looked a bit musical even if they just had headphones on!

We are in the process of recording a single with The Warren, which is going to come out at some point in the near future. And speaking of The Warren, we love you Warren! We love you Warren! We've also received PRSF funding which means we will be recording three songs minimum up to March.

Yeah. So plans for the band? I mean I want to go to, like London, Manchester. Make it. Glastonbury. Yeah, you laugh but… Next year, next year. But yeah definitely in our ambition we really want to do festivals. We really want to get, like out there, in other cities and stuff like that. I think it'll be great to go. This is very, I'm dreaming big here. It would be so cool to go to, like Tokyo, or something. Or would it? I just like the whole Japanese culture and everything. I feel like for Wench, it would be great. It would be so awesome. I know, America! I want to travel the world with Wench. That's the dream. Within the next five years I want to get to a different continent. Yes. Within the next five years. Yeah, that would be very cool. That's doable.

I think another good thing about like, Wench, or like what we're trying to do is, we're trying to say, women belong in the music scene as much as men do. And like, if you're a woman and you play an instrument and you want to be in a band, do it.

PAUL JACKSON: I mean, every time a new song hits the world, the world changes a little bit. When a bunch of particularly good songs hit the world, they’re capable of changing it quite a lot. You know, when Bob Dylan was journeying out songs, for example, he'd done his bit to sort of gently nudge the world in the right direction when a lot of things were combining to push it in the wrong direction. I think music's very important. And one of the things that has to be preserved, which should be considered sacrosanct in art terms, is the folk tradition of young people writing about the world they live in and their interactions within it.

I like to think The Adelphi stands for that and would always be a place for young people to go through that. I think it's a good and very beneficial thing for young people to do. And that there aren't enough places giving encouragement for them to do that.

LUCY: Somebody once told me that there are only two sets of traffic lights between Liverpool and St Petersburg and both of them are in Hull! Well, we will take that if it encourages more people to stop for a bit won’t we?

Maybe take a rest now and look back at the dock, or over the A63. It’s nicely covered in the rain. Take a selfie, if you like. Tag it #revealhull

BOY ONE FROM BEATS BUS: What does Hull mean to you?
WOMAN: Everything, everything…
BOY ONE FROM BEATS BUS: What do you like about it?
BOY TWO FROM BEATS BUS: Yeah, what do you like about it?
WOMAN: Well I used to work in the fishing industry, a long time ago. Worked in the fish factory, I used to be up and down this road like a yo-yo!

LUCY: What is Hull, we asked them all!

ROLAND GIFT: Hull is like an old flame…

PAUL SAREL: Hull is Independence, DIY, Low-Fi, High-Fi, Disco-Floor-Fi.

COSEY FANNI TUTTI: Hull is totally. I think it's unique. Everyone says that about their city, but I think there is something, yeah, Hull is special.

LOU DUFFY HOWARD: Hull is being confident to do your own thing.

NIGEL ‘KOBBY’ TAYLOR: London's cool. It's busy. It's fast paced. But, Hull, it's just friendly.

JODIE LANGFORD: Hull is the fiver that you find in the pocket of an old jacket.

ELIZA CARTHY: What do you think Hull is Dad?
MARTIN CARTHY: It’s a chip shop 60 miles up a railway siding, and that’s the way they like it and don’t you forget it!

WENCH: Hull is not that good for transport! (laughter).

LUCY: Hull is a place where no-one will ever let you drink alone. I am Lucy Beaumont, narrator and also from Hull! Signing off…

Diamond Life is part of Reveal Hull by Mutiny, 2024