NOISE Festival

It’s very early :AM on Wednesday 27th February and I can’t sleep. I have trouble switching off at the best of times but tonight my head is especially busy. So I’m lying there not sleeping, listening to John Williams film scores, playing through images from the day before in my head trying to process what just happened to me…

12 hours earlier on Tuesday I’m in Trafalga Square and I’m bear hugging Sam Fisher. He’s one of the other artists from Noise Festival’s 2006 showcase and we’re lined up in Noise hoodies with the other ‘all-stars’ holding placards of our artwork for a photo shoot to promote the 2008 campaign. We’ve got a lot to get through before our launch party starts at Number 11 Downing Street so we should be focusing but all the two of us can do is chat raw comedy and perve on hot tourist girls. We’ll be at this all day in different locations; security guards will keep harassing us, the photographer’s frustration with London red tape will grow and I’ll keep getting hit in the face with my wooden placard because the wind is strong and I’m not.

Now I’m outside the black gates of Downing Street catching up with Annabel, the woman who first got me to submit my work to Noise and I’m losing my cool. I thought I’d be all aloof and unaffected by it all, I thought I’d remain fashionably cynical but history is coming off the walls and seeping through my parka. I’m about to go as an invited guest into a place that has literally decided the fate of the world, probably on more occasions than any of us will really know and I don’t know what to do with myself.

Radial screen wipe to me dodging Gordon Brown’s kids (or were they Alistair Darling’s?) on the stairs of Number 11 as I’m geeking out over the vintage wallpaper and the framed political cartoons hanging on them. Then I’m getting my wine on in the State Drawing Room surrounded by expensive suits and ties, torn between admiring the gold and black lacquered antique Chinese cabinets or the don-like cool of Wayne Hemmingway as he cuts through pretension with his speech. He passes the mic on to the Noise Artists. I just about keep myself together through Bradley Philip’s speech but half way through Leah Capaldi’s I freak out. What am I doing here? I’m too short to be in this room! Is this what Frodo felt like at Elrond? Leah finishes and I look around at all the Noise artists applauding along with me and it hits me who they all are; they’re ambassadors, representatives, role-models for creative youth… and I’m one of them. I start to feel a little taller.

The rest of it is a montage of photo opps and handshakes and fantastic shoes, hot solicitors and perfect clutch bags and people I’ve only ever read about in the Guardian over the shoulder of some office worker on the 192 bus. Badly Drawn Boy is showing me pictures his kids drew as we parlay about Stockport’s hat museum while Vengeance Cru spit bare grime lyrics in the corner. You couldn’t write this shit better.

As the party finally comes to an end I sit down for the first time of the night on a chair in the hall of Number 11. I catch myself staring at the collection of mobile phones left for safe-keeping on the front-desk, marveling that none of them have been stolen yet and then I hate myself for being impressed by the absence of petty crime. Badly Drawn Boy leaves by the front door and shouts to me ‘keep up the good work mate!’ ‘Yeah, you too mate!’ I shout back in a voice a few notches too loud because of the free wine and I think… is this my life now?

Jump cut to me and artist Jessica Emmett speeding back to Euston in a taxi with Denise Proctor from Noise Festival and I’m racing my mouth off. I can’t stop talking. I keep thinking of the bike ride at the end of E.T and ‘Champion’ by Kanye West and the rollerbladers from Eastern Bloc countries who send me their friends’ rap songs to make up for not quite knowing the English for ‘thankyou, you inspire me’. I’m looking at London at night speed by, high on the power of Whitehall and the mischievous thrill of wearing a FRSH fitted hat, a hoody and Glow Dunks in front of MPs who already knew me as ‘2hands’. It’s dawning on me that I got here because of pencils, I feel like a hero, none of it will fit in my head and I find myself wanting to know what the plural of ‘epiphany’ is.

So I’m in bed again, now at the beginning of the Superman Theme getting chills from the brass crescendo and then the bed starts shaking. Then the bedside table starts shaking. Then the room joins in. I realise I’m in an earthquake and become sharply aware that there’s a bookshelf above my face and I hope I don’t get 11 volumes of Blade of the Immortal on my head, or one volume of The 3 Musketeers, when something else hits me…

There’s a power in what we do creatively. This isn’t a job, it’s not an easy career choice recommended to us at the benefits office, this is power like steam, or chi or fission; it drives and sustains. It moves people and forces change and keeps us awake at night. It doesn’t come from government quotas or an A Level syllabus we generate it ourselves, we channel it, direct it, focus it and it carries us upwards on a spiral. The people at Noise Festival recognised this in all of us, probably before some of us did ourselves. For the past few years they’ve each worked the hours of two jobs with no help to make sure everyone else in the country recognises it too.

The after shocks fade, my bedroom starts to settle again and as the burglar alarms start to go off down the street I realise why I can’t sleep; it’s the power. A while back I doubted mine, I let people convince me it wasn’t there and slowly I started to forget I ever had it but Noise helped me find it again.

I can’t thank them enough.

-2hands

read more of Andrews Blog @ www.wonderfist.net

Guess Who Gave a Speech in Downing Street?
Yes that’s right kids,
I did.

And i had to stop half way through cause i was overcome with emotion.

NOISEFESTIVAL.com put me on at the Liverpool Biennial 06 and are re-launching their site for this year, they had a big publicity day which ended up with two NOISE artists giving a couple of speeches along with Wayne Hemmingway, Yvette Cooper (Chief Sec to the Treasury), Andy Burnham (Sec of State for Culture, Media and Sport) and my new esteemed friend Bradley Phillips.

I still cant believe it, we were walking around London with our publicity crew of cameraman and photographer and organisers and people were jumping out of cars taking photos of us,,,maybe we'll be in next weeks heat magazine. haha. 

It was seriously unbelievable.

Then we ended up in No. 11 Downing Street with Norman Rosental, Tim Marlow, Stella Vine, Badly Drawn Boy and Danny Brown...but to name a few of the hundred people I met that night.

You stand there in a room full of people you read about in Frieze with your expensive wine that you actually really ENJOY drinking and it hits you...

I can actually make a difference, I mean a big difffernce. Look at all these people who believe in me.

And since then I’ve been walking around like i own the world.

 I feel like it's all mine.

xxxx

P.s.

Big shout out to my fellow NOISE artists i met on mon. You all made the experience ground shaking ( like the earthquake later on) . Looking forward big time to hooking up with you in the future.

Massive thanks to www.NOISEFESTIVAL.com. Art friends submit your work and wait for what happens. It's these peoples job to give you the exposure you deserve.

 Photos and speech to come.