VIDEO – Songs For Breaking Britain

I’m totally delighted to finally be able to share the 4 minute mini documentary MilkTime Productions (hire them!) made of Songs For Breaking Britain. For those of you who don’t know, the show is made up of stories collected from members of the public from 3 cities around the country (answers to open questions about living here, now, today); turned into punk music. We – that is me (vocals and lyrics), Sean Arnold (guitar and vocals) and Keir Cooper (drums and vocals) tell you about the people we met, and the things they said.

This is a punk show about what we hear when we make the choice to listen.

The point of this video is we want to tour it whilst collecting more stories. Touring the process as well as the show. Picking up new songs for each city we visit. This video shows you a bit of the process, and I hope it’s going to help us not only show audiences, but programmers, too, what they get if they get the full package – the full show plus a day story collecting and a day writing a song for their city which will go into the show. That way we can collect stories for Wales and Scotland, NI, as well as more places in England (and any sunny parts of left-over colonialism welcome too… Gibraltar, Isle of Wight anyone?). If this looks interesting to you – just drop me a line at contact@hannahnicklin.com

The show is also wanting to tour, like, as a band. If you’re a promoter who puts on DIY gigs and want to put the show on, also drop me a line. contact@hannahnicklin.com You can also listen to an un-mixed recording off a desk of the same song featured in the video at the bottom of this post (that song is the quiet one of the set! There’s also some rad shouty stuff)

“[has] the audacity to be simple in concept but big in heart.” – Audience Member
“loud and moving and loud.” – Audience member
“a punk rock agit prop social documentary” – Maddy Costa (in audience mode, not full reviewer mode)

Here’s some more on it:

Hannah and her company are collecting stories — stories from people just getting by, people who don’t think they’re important, anyone who will stop and talk to them in the street. Bored of the media selling our stories back to us, they are mixing up the old idea of the ballad by sharing stories and passing them on with a modern form of righteous storytelling: punk music.

Three chords, rhyming couplets, lots of noise. Songs from the marketplace, from the street, of romance, graft, boredom, everyday defeat.

This is a punk show about what we hear when we make the choice to listen.

(This show has been supported by and developed at OvalHouse, Theatre in the Mill, ARC Stockton, and Slung Low’s HUB. With support from Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts, and Third Angel. And with additional collaborators Hannah Jane Walker and Alexander Kelly. Hannah Nicklin and Company is Hannah Nicklin, Keir Cooper, and Sean Arnold)

And here’s that song in full (not mixed properly, and taken off a desk with not properly mic’d drums, but a brilliant job by Ivan Mack at Theatre in the Mill nonetheless – thanks Ivan!)