I celebrated 70 days of sobriety in a way that made total sense to me but caused others distress - by getting both sides of my nose pierced with very little sterilisation in the green room of the Piehouse whilst setting up for a trans persons surgery fundraiser! Some of my best friends in Piglet were downstairs sound checking, and the music was ringing in my ears like a sign of things to come. Life is full, all the time, so much it feels like it might burst at the seams at any minute. Exhaustion is washed away by the rushing floods of emotion that come with being sober, being present, being open, and witnessing music or art pretty much everyday. My nerve endings are fried, I am radiating belief, I have never been so tired. I am making art, I am writing, I am singing around the flat, I have a journal for the first time ever. This year I started practicing tarot. I want to feel it all, its my time.
At work, as I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a lot of talk about how fucking hard it is to do what we’re trying to do. Countless hours of unpaid overtime. Moving boundaries. Notifications always on. From unexpected pie deliveries that suddenly need to get put in a freezer, to being too tired to see your mates every night, to late nights trying to work just how that spotlight actually works (no one knows!) - doing this work is a lot, theres no denying it!
I am blessed to acknowledge that 15+ years of labour, my own entire life’s work, has led me to my dream role - holding down a space with the rest of the co-op for the community I adore, witnessing the many worlds of alternative underground London drifting through its doors, and there’s a lot I would do to see it succeed.
When I was a kid, everything I wanted to be involved a total lack of normality and an extremely consuming schedule. I wanted to be on stage performing 7 shows a week, or on tour hitting up 50 cities a year. I wanted to devote myself wholly to whatever my purpose was on this earth. As a kid I was a committed tortured artist staying up for days at a time filling sketchbooks so quickly at one point it was one a week. I moved to London and I chased intensity around like it was playing hard to get, filling every second with stuff. It’s not that I love work. I don’t see myself as a slave to capitalism even though I think it would be easy to think that looking in at me from outside. It’s that I love making, being, and as a working class artist I know full well that without structure, safety, security, and work - there will be no art.
My parents both worked a lot, my mum doing night shifts and my dad working long hours on a building site. I had a job from the age of 13, and a full time job alongside my degree - sometimes working as much as 65 hours alongside Goldsmiths studies. Work has always been a big part of my life, I have never not worked, and this is less of a shared experience then you might think in London. I stand in full solidarity with the unemployed survivors of the city on benefits or stolen goods or anything in between, and I stand in direct opposition to the rich kids able to experience life as a responsibility free playground. Neither has been my experience. My experience has been 45+ hour working weeks for most of my working life, with a brief gap filled with well paid but short lived gogo gigs (RIP).
At the moment, I’m sat in the Piehouse. I’m shivering. I’m shaking my head. It’s a lot. I’m touching wood for luck maybe 6 times a meeting, just ask the other co-op members. I’m drowning in overtime hours I might not get paid for as I learn quickbooks, VAT returns, payroll, new rotaing software. We are experience a learning curve so steep it’s a straight line to the sky. We pretty much live in the arches as we tackle never ending job lists. It’s beautiful. I love it. I hope it never ends. It might look like hell to everyone outside looking in, but for me I can see the warm sun rising up on the horizon - I do this work now so that later, it will be glorious, and I will be able to enjoy what we have made.
I hate the bureaucracy of running a venue, but my revolutionary discipline allows me to understand the co-ops role in the wider movement, and therefore my role in holding down this venue. This weeks clock says I might touch 50 hours. The pay is average. I am part of a future much bigger than myself. Today is 8 hours of admin. Tomorrow is 8 hours of grant writing. But then in six months, it’s functioning logistics and money for the community. In a year, its growth and ambition and far beyond anything we could of imagined when we got the keys in March 2025. In 5 years time maybe we decide to extend our contract, and in 10 years time maybe some other kids with no experience take the keys and begin their legacy work.
I was revolutionised in a squat. I sat in a circle for hours and cried with my sisters and siblings about how we need space to organise. I learnt graft, discipline, patience, love, and I learnt that if you want to win you better be in it for the long game. We occupied a building to demonstrate that without space, without safety, there is no revolution.
We need space to make art. If abolition is the practice of imagining otherwise, where will you sit and imagine. You need people. Music. You have to taste the tiny clues of uptopia to dream it into fruition. This is the feeling that pushes me through the difficult parts of managing a venue. This is a collective project, that you’re likely a part of too. Showing up for us, for the co-op, for the venue, for you, it feels huge.
The bigger picture is so much bigger than we could have ever imagined, you can barely make out anyone’s faces.
