Arthrob

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Arthrob were an underground arts collective active in London during the second half of the 1990s.

[edit] History

It was founded by Chilean brothers, Ernesto Leal^[1] and Juan Leal. The Leal’s had been born in Chile but their trade unionist family were forced to flee the Pinochet regime and they eventually found a new home in Scotland thanks to the National Union of Mineworkers.

During the 1980’s the brothers ran clubs in their adopted home town of Edinburgh and later in London. They were responsible for many acid house parties including the infamous Zoom Records party in Clerkenwell, London.

Arthrob began life in1995 as a vehicle to organise events to provide innovative and often debauched book launches for Irvine Welsh and Hanif Kureshi. The organisation quickly took on a life of its own.

The goal was to bring culture into clubs and clubs into culture. They drew on their experiences of different cultural and artistic communities and threw them together in a series of club nights and events. This seemingly ad-hoc formula worked - just: Arthrob events were often gloriously untidy affairs but the chaos only heightened the immediacy and excitement.^[2] It was this that was key to their success.

The organisation was soon defined by the originality of their cross genre events – art for what has become known as the chemical generation. A typical event would comprise of theatre, book readings, bands and fine arts together with DJs and dancing. Visual installations were often provided by graphic design studio Tomato. Amazingly the approach worked and Arthrob garnered much underground credibility and mainstream press coverage which lauded a pluralist approach to culture which encompassed both the reworking of modern classics and the commissioning of new work.

As Arthrob’s success built, the Leals brought together a board of creatives known as the Arthrob trust to guide the organisation in new directions – its members were drawn from the worlds of the arts, publishing, architecture, music, film and television. The organisation’s raison d’etre remained the creation of new audiences and, just as it had been instrumental in taking literature, performance and then films and digital arts into the club environment, they increasingly crossed boundaries even taking a tour bus of novelists on a kind of rock and roll literary road trip under the banner Defining a Nation.^[3][4] Their continuing success relied on the maintenance of their own high standards, a participative approach which excoriated any notional barriers between performers and audience; and by encouraging groundbreaking and experimental work.

In 1997 Arthrob expanded their activities which had, anyway, always hinted at the possibility that they might transcend the generic nightclub environment: They founded a record label backed by Warner Bros. Records offshoot Coalition Recordings. During the label’s short lifetime it released an very eclectic roster of artists from the contemporary classical music of Michael Gordon to Pelirocco, Fini Dolo, Towa Tei with Kylie Minogue, Silva Bullet, Crude Reality, Hubert Hudson and Belle Mouki, Glamorous Hooligan, Daz-i-kue, Sonia Shon, Girl Talk, Frantic Language, Fonda Rae, Da Lunartiks, Saul Williamson and The All New Accelerators. The label also released a remix album of Steve Reich’s music and a soundtrack compilation of classic acid house to accompany Sarah Champion’s^[5] collection of short stories ‘Disco Biscuits’.

In 1998 they devised and, in conjunction with the Random Collective produced seven theatre events in one afternoon in seven different venues around East London in celebration of the Bertolt Brecht centenary. Entitled The Seven Deadly Sins each site specific event took a different sin as its theme. The venues were varied - Hoxton Hall, The Old Axe public house hosted a strip show; The Lux cinema, the old Hoxton Boxing Club, St Monica's church hall and a former Barclays Bank in Shoreditch High Street played host to a reading on greed by Bill Drummond though many of the audience couldn't fit in this deliberately claustrophobic setting. The event was directed by Jan-Van Den Bosch and as well as Bill Drummond there were performances by Iain Sinclair, Miranda Sawyer, Neil Bartlett, Bella Black, Hanif Kureshi, Ben Richards and Tam Dean Burn.

Plans to create an Arthrob theatre space to showcase new writing talent were quite far advanced but unrealised as was an ambitious plan to create a vast live arts centre in the derelict GPO building in central Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Festival.

Despite this the Arthrob continued to be a source of innovation well into the new millennium.

[edit] Notes and references