Nick Awde

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Nick Awde (born in London, UK, December 29, 1961), is a British writer, artist and singer-songwriter. He was raised in Nigeria, the Sudan and Kenya before being sent to school in the UK. He has since been based in London.

Contents 1 Plays and fiction 2 Desert Hearts 3 The academic side 4 Select biblioliography

[edit] Plays and fiction

With Chris Bartlett he co-wrote the comedy drama Pete and Dud: Come Again, a hit at the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2005 before transferring to London's West End at The Venue, in March 2006, then doing a 90-date tour of the UK the following year. The play examines the highly influential comic relationship that existed between comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - along with Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller they kickstarted the satirical comedy movement in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s with Beyond the Fringe, before branching off on their own. Set in a chat show during the early eighties, the play tells their tale from the perspective of Dudley Moore, by then an international film star. In June 2006 Pete and Dud: Come Again transferred for a short run in Auckland, New Zealand, as part of the Bruce Mason Centre's first Best of British Festival. Classic rock group 10cc shared the bill.

In 2007 two other plays have followed, premiering at the Edinburgh Festival: Unnatural Acts at Assembly and Blood Confession at the Gilded Balloon. Written with Chris Bartlett, directed by David Giles and starring Jessica Martin and Jason Wood, Unnatural Acts is a comedy about two flatmates, a gay man and a straight woman, who try to have a baby together. Written by Awde and directed by Jon Bonfiglio, Blood Confession is a violent drama about an interrogation, about a child murder from 25 years ago, that goes horribly wrong.

In 1993, Awde wrote, composed and produced Andrew Lloyd Webber The Musical, described as "a bizarre mix of spoof and satire" by The Virgin Encyclopedia of Stage & Film Musicals. A pastich of the life of top musical composer Lloyd Webber, in loving homage to Mel Brooks' The Producers, it ran in a variety of fringe venues across London with several casts. It is now available in book form. His other stage works are Eros and the Skull (Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 1988) - a multi-created one-man show about the French poet Baudelaire - and Semtex & Lipstick (King's Head Theatre, London, 1992) - a drama for actor and actress about love and political torture. He also co-designed costumes for historical drama Tewodros (Arts Theatre, 1987).

In 2003 he published his first novel, The Virgin Killers as part of The Public School Chronicles series. It is a complex thriller about murders of priests at a Catholic prep school in the wilds of Lancashire that lead to a trail of Jesuit and Freemason conspiracies deep within the British Establishment. Intended as a thinly disguised political comment on the state of the nation, the book, unusually for a thriller, also contains a historical appendix - a groundbreaking timeline linking events in British and Irish history to the constitutional oppression of Catholics, Jews and other Non-Conformists within the United Kingdom and Ireland right up to the present day.

He has been a theatre critic since the early 1990s, and has been writing for The Stage newspaper for most of that time. Together with fellow Stage contributor Gerald Berkowitz, he set up in 1999 www.theatreguidelondon.co.uk, the first UK-based theatre website to be run exclusively by professional critics.

As an illustrator and cartoonist, over the years his more high-profile work has included newspapers such as The Voice and The Weekly Journal - where he was the regular profile illustrator for several years - City Limits and The Guardian newspaper. His cartoons also illustrate comedian Llewella Gideon's The Little Big Woman Book.

[edit] Desert Hearts

His rock group Desert Hearts has just come out of hibernation (since 1993) and is about to release Sweet Revolutions, a CD of world pop songs laced with Mellotron keyboard arrangements. Guest musicians include The Vibrators guitarist Knox, New York singer-songwriter Dean Friedman and ex-Camel drummer Andy Ward, and the album complements Awde's book of interviews with rock stars: Mellotron: The Machine and the Musicians who Revolutionised Rock.

The group had always been called Desert Hearts and initially operated as a rock three-piece that also played under the name of Dr Wu in 1990 before becoming a more complex four-piece in 1991 with Awde on vocals, guitar and violin, Andy Matthews on bass and vocals, Leo Katana on guitars, plus a string of drummers (aka the Spinal Tap Syndrome). Both line-ups put out band-produced cassettes, amongst the original material were also covers of King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man, Strawbs' Hero and Heroine and Neil Young's Hey Hey My My. Dropping the Dr Wu tag, Awde went into the studio in 1993 to produce sessions with Andy Ward - Awde provided vocals and played all other instruments - guitars, bass, keyboards and violin. Some of the songs were released as a Desert Hearts band-produced cassette, including the satirical epic rocker Rumble Fish, the Steely Dan-tinged Meryl Streep and a bizarre cover of Elton John's Rocket Man (complete with howling wolf chorus).

[edit] The academic side

As Nicholas Awde, he has written or edited more than 40 books on non-European languages and cultures, including a Chechen Phrasebook, a Georgian Phrasebook, Women In Islam: An Anthology from the Qur'an and Hadiths, An Illustrated History of Islam and an Arabic Dictionary. He has written three other dictionaries for Swahili, Serbo-Croatian and Hausa, as well as 15-plus dictionary-phrasebooks.

He believes in collaboration as a way of forming bridges between cultures, and this is reflected in the large number of co-authors he has worked with - most of who come from economically- or war-ravaged countries such as Chechnya, Somalia and Afghanistan. He has commissioned many more authors in the same spirit, particularly from the Caucasus, editing and designing their books for other publishers.

He is also a longstanding consultant on the Caucasus, and, with Fred James Hill, runs the publishing companies Bennett & Bloom (academic) and Desert Hearts (general arts).

[edit] Select biblioliography

• Mellotron: The Machine and the Musicians who Revolutionised Rock (2007)
• Pete and Dud: Come Again (2006), written with Chris Bartlett
• Women in Islam: An Anthology from the Qur'an and Hadiths (2005 [1985])
• The Virgin Killers (2003)
• London: An Illustrated History (2002), written with Robert Chester
• Andrew Lloyd Webber The Musical (2000)
• I Saw Satan on the Northern Line: Love Songs from the Underground (1996)
• Chechen Dictionary and Phrasebook (1996), written with Muhammad Galaev
• Arabic: How to Read and Write It (1986)