Radio Nights - Artangel

Video: Excerpt from Radio Nights

4 minutes 17 seconds

Radio Nights is a documentary film by artist David Blandy and young people from The Avenues Youth Project in Queen's Park, London.

It investigates the invisible world of the listeners and broadcasters of West London's rich radio culture, from late night call-ins to underground MCs tussling for airwaves, from the pirate innovators of the 1980s to the Grime stars of the future. It uses the West London Trellick Tower as a visual metaphor for the invisible connections created between people by radio.

The film was developed over 15 weeks from November 2004 to March 2005 and the project evolved from David Blandy and The Avenues' previous collaboration with Artangel: Backslang. Many of the young people who helped to make the film Ya Get Me? for Backslang went on to work on Radio Nights. The full documentary features interviews with a wide spectrum of pirate radio boradcasters and listeners, with contributions from Trevor Nelson, Sweetie Irie and Jazzie B amongst many others.

Radio Nights formed part of Artangel Interaction’s Nights of London series of artist-led collaborations with people who have a special view on a hidden side of the nocturnal city. The film was premiered at The Gate Cinema, London Thursday 14th April 2005 and has since been screened at Cube Cinema, Bristol.

This excerpt from Radio Nights can also be wacthed on Vimeo and Youtube.

Image: Still of Aceson— a pirate radio listener— speaking to Radio 4 listener Neil, taken from David Blandy's Radio Nights (2005).

Nights of London

Running for just over a year, Nights of London was a thread of projects exploring the nocturnal life of the city. It ran through cinemas and galleries, was hosted on websites, burned onto CDs, written into letters, performed in nightclubs and broadcast via radio channels, before concluding in an old East End town hall that – for one night only – was filled with bat experts, musicians, cabaret artists and paranormal researchers. We heard stories from the unorthodox side of nightfall. We learned about ways of life that, despite their physical proximity, are all but invisible to most of us, most of the time.

Nights of London projects include:

Night Haunts

Nick Silver Can't Sleep

NightJam

When Night Draws in

To the Man in My Dreams

Radio Nights

About David Blandy

David Blandy

British artist David Blandy first worked with Artangel on Backslang in 2003, followed by Radio Nights in 2005. In 2013 he made the Open Longlist.

David Blandy (b. 1976) uses video, performance and comics to address identity formation and its relationship to popular culture. Blandy studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art (1995-98) then the Slade School of Fine Art (2001-3). He has exhibited at venues nationally and worldwide such as Bloomberg Space, London, UK; The Exchange, Newlyn Art Gallery, UK; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China.

He is represented by Seventeen Gallery and his films are distributed by LUX.

Images: (above) David Blandy at Iaspis; (left) David Blandy and associates at BBC Radio 1Xtra.

Who made this possible?

Credits

Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.

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The audience outside the recording studio at PJ Harvey's Recording in Progress, January 2015. Photograph: Seamus Murphy