We’ve been a little quiet for the last couple of weeks, due to a combination of our annual visit to the Glastonbury Festival and the swine flu thing.  Glasto was great this year, for once we weren’t wading through the mud and coming home exhausted to clog up the washing machine.  We did our usual once a year outing with ‘The Sisters of Percy’ – our walkabout impro nuns in the Kidz field and beyond.  Harry, Lee and Sandra had a great time, ‘spit washing’ the queues for the showers, developing circus skills, stealing children’s shoes (we gave them back!) and generally spreading our unique non-denominational anarchy and creating a lot of smiles.  Such a joy to do, just playing around, improvising and leaping around in our bright blue and orange habits and generally having a laugh.  Check the picture below.

The Sisters of Percy at Glasto

Unfortunately, both Lee and Sandra managed to pick up the dreaded swine flu whilst we were away, which has really knocked us about, but not fatally, luckily, which is why we’ve been absent for the last couple of weeks.  Of course this hasn’t stopped us and we’re planning all kinds of developments in the coming months.  We’ve decided to let ‘The Edge’ go a little and are putting together a steering committee to decide how we move it forward as the interface between art and community we always wanted.  So we will be developing a programme of ‘outsider art’, community events and dinners and talks, starting in the Autumn.  Watch this space.

On a more troubling note, we had a visit from a young student from BCU the other day, who promotes punk and hardcore gigs in the city.  He is frantically trying to find a venue for his gigs and is frankly struggling.  We gave him what advice we could (we always will give time and help to people who are trying to make things happen), but we also struggled to identify a list of possibilities.  This pointed up two issues to us, firstly that small scale and grassroots events are entirely unsupported in the city, which is tragic in the second largest city in the country, but also that it seems that there are fewer young people promoting and organising their own events. Why is this and what can we do to change it?  What has happened to the DIY/Punk ethic that we grew up with?  Please let us know if you have solutions to either of these problems – or if you can prove that it is incorrect, and please get in touch if you can think of any suitable venues for our young entrepreneur.

Finally, we’re hosting the Fizzpop hackspace group at the Edge every other Wednesday evening – for free of course, please check out their site if you would like to get involved.  Just to remind everyone, we give  space at the Edge for those that we feel need it and are appropriate to what the space is about and we do this with no support or funding, the Edge is funded entirely by Friction’s earnings through their activities, projects and workshops.  Being independent, and really artist-led, rather than artist-managed, is a real struggle in these difficult times, so if anyone has any ideas how we can remain independent and continue to offer the support we do to the artist and non-artist community, please feel free to get in touch.

As our sadly late friend Ken Campbell used to say – Skyward Ho!