We were delighted to be involved with the Learning Revolution in October and were busy bringing carnival arts to people all over London. From knitting at the South Bank to carnival costumes in Brixton, samba reggae in Notting Hill to singing in Old Spitalfields Market we worked with a wide range of artists and arts organisations to bring participative opportunities to hundreds of Londoners. Find out more about by watching the audio slide show……

We’re finally coming down from our Fertilizer festival buzz, but luckily we’ve had lots of love from audiences about this year’s good s**t from Poland to keep us pepped up: “It was bloody brilliant!” “Killer show!” “I love Polish jazz”.
Want to re-live the atmosphere? Check out our podcast with the touring trio of Sing Sing Penelope, Jacaszek and Contemporary Noise Sextet and our short video interview with the amazing Pink Freud.

A big thank you to all of you who came to see us on tour or in London – you made our artists very happy. A massive thanks to all the artists too, it was great to have you at Fertilizer! And thanks too to our funders: Arts Council England, Sound and Music, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM), not just for their money but for their all-round support in helping us deliver the festival.

As far as the future is concerned, we’re already plotting and planning in true Fertilizer style, keeping our ears to the ground for the latest underground sounds. We’ll keep you updated with our plans, but in the meantime if you have any suggestions for future Fertilizer outings, please do get in touch. Let us know if there’s good s**t anywhere in particular you’d like us to check out and bring back to UK. This is not a competition; there are no prizes to be won – but you might end up seeing your dream festival come to life and how cool would that be?!

After working through some 75 proposals from poets around the country, we’re really pleased to announce that we’ve commissioned Joshua Idehen, Sifundo & Jamal Msebele, Hannah Silva & Alexis Kirke and Sound of Rum to create new material for the Phrased & Confused stage at Summer Sundae Weekender (14-16 August 2009).   Find out more about them and their work here

Fertilizer 2009… Good S**t From Poland is nearly upon us!! And here at the Fertilizer HQ we’re busy putting together the final touches, ready to hit you with a plethora of underground sounds and leftfield new music. The venues are booked, the artists have their flight tickets and we’re ready to go with this year’s festival in London’s East End.

The mash up of sounds and influences has to be seen (and heard) to be believed this year as we bring you everything from the finest Polish hip hop, to electronica, post rock psychedelia and even an orchestra of tiny instruments. To find out more about the acts showcased this year check out their biogs on our website. And for the first time we’ll also be spreading good s**t across the UK as the Fertilizer tour bus heads for Norwich, Bristol, Oxford, Liverpool and Gateshead for a series of very special shows featuring Sing Sing Penelope, Jacaszek and Contemporary Noise Sextet.

Plus thanks to Sound and Music this year Fertilizer has been able to commission a unique British Polish Jazz collaboration between Pete Wareham of Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear fame and Poland’s prog-jazzers Pink Freud. Pete is at the heart of the new breed of improvisers who effortlessly blends rock, electronica and beats with Jazz which makes him the perfect partner for Pink Freud who epitomise Gdansk’s tradition of improvisatory drawing on a truly eclectic range of influences, including jazz, rock, folk, jungle and drum’n’bass, making them one of the most interesting and spontaneous jazz groups we’ve come across in recent years.

Pete has been out in Poland to practise and perform with Pink Freud and you can follow his time over there through his regular updates on Twitter. The guys will be playing 2 exclusive gigs during the festival the first at London’s Cargo on Wednesday the 13th of May and then at Howard Assembly Rooms in Leeds the next night, Thursday the 14th.

And this year it’s easier than ever to keep up with everything Fertilizer. Why not become our friend and receive exclusive updates on the festival, read interviews with the acts and be in with a chance to win some goodies? You can also join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

I’ll leave you with our first in our new series of the Fertilizer Phrasebook, which aims to equip you with all the phrases you’ll need to have a good time at this year’s Festival:

No. 1 - Zatańczymy? – which means ‘Shall we dance?’

Phrased and Confused heads off on tour this May, taking an irresistible mix of song-writing genius and spoken word to venues in Bracknell, London, Norwich, Derby, Stockton and Exeter.

We’ve invited some of our favourite songwriters and poets to climb aboard the tour bus, get lyrical and explore the spaces between poetry and music. Expect a night of blissed-out pop, dark satire, exuberant wordplay and new collaborations from four very different artists working together for the first time.

Championed by Steve Lamacq, and described by the Guardian as ‘Canada’s best kept secret…the most unjustly overlooked band in Canada’, music collective Woodpigeon are rapidly gaining a cult following for their laid back and lush folk pop.Next up, the brilliant, darkly funny satirist, Murray Lachlan Young who is a regular at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, penned the cult hit ‘simply everyone is taking cocaine’, supported the Pet Shop Boys and is a resident rhymer with the BBC’s Saturday Live.

With nods to Patti Smith, John Cooper Clarke and Tom Waits poet Aofie Mannix and accordianist Janie Armour mix live and recorded sounds to create beautifully haunting soundscapes. We first worked with Aoife and Janie when they wrote new work for our Phrased and Confused stage at Summer Sundae festival last August.
We’re also pleased to be unleashing on a national audience for the first time Dead Poets, a cheeky fast-paced and laugh-out-loud mash up of ‘proper’ poetry and sharp-eyed MCing, courtesy of Mr Mark Grist and MC Mixy.

For more information and the full tour dates visit www.phrasedandconfused.co.uk and join our Facebook group.

Life as the hub’s Fertilizer Festival Intern has been fantastic so far, nearly 3 weeks in and I feel like I’ve been here 3 months! That is due to not only to being made to feel very welcome and at home by the lovely directors and hub ‘family’ but also from the fact that there’s been plenty of work to get stuck into right from day one! It is just what you would want from an internship, plenty of hands on experience and responsibility, lots of expertise and friendly advice to call upon and a fantastic network of contacts and organisations within the arts and creative world to tap into.

I’m really enjoying working on the Fertilizer Festival, it’s a brilliant project and is allowing me to combine all my interests; promotion, live music, marketing and online and digital promotional techniques. I’m really looking forward to the Festival landing in May, and experiencing some underground and slightly left field music from Poland!

I’ll leave you with a few of my favourite links from my first few weeks at the hub…

• Firstly my favourite band at the moment Strawhouses who I’m sure I am now beginning to annoy my fellow hubites with by talking about them so much.

• The Fertilizer Festival on Twitter… please follow us!

• hub operations manager Andi’s RT @Shunt project which I very much enjoyed at The Shunt Lounge.

Tom Johnson, hub Fertilizer Intern 2009.

One of the hub’s associates, John Hart, is taking to the road soon, as part of a 10th anniversary tour by UK folk legends, Edward 11. We’re all off to the London date in London’s Cargo, on 4 February. In a perfect example of how – unlike other consultants and researchers – everyone at the hub all ‘think’ and ‘do’, John will spend a good portion of February on the road.

The links between Edward 11 and the hub team go back years; John and Julia, the hub’s director, first met too many years ago, when the latter was Events Manager at The Stables in Milton Keynes, and her responsibilities included lugging the band’s kit in and out of the tour van. We wait to see if she’s still got the muscles to shift those amps…

Check out the news from the recent Music Education Summit which we produced for the Mayor of London’s office; check out this link to interviews carried out by Radiowaves’ team of young reporters:

more at: http://www.radiowaves.co.uk/story.aspx?lngStoryID=40021

Listen here to the Mayor’s Music Education Summit Playlist, which forms part of the first ever GLA Music Education Summit, produced by the hub, and taking place on 14 January 2009. Chaired by Jim Naughtie, the event will bring together over 200 leading figures from music education in the capital, including musicians, orchestras and other music organisations; venues and promoters; music colleges and other education providers; local and borough music services; and policy makers and funding bodies.

The Playlist features tracks by young musicians from across the capital, and will form the soundtrack to the summit, which takes place at City Hall, and which will culminate with the initial hand over of instruments donated via the GLA’s No Strings Attached Instrument Amnesty, delivered in partnership with Time Out.

Young musicians giving live performances throughout the day include a choir from the Royal Academy of Music; students from Yford School, an 18-strong saxophone ensemble from the Centre for Young Musicians; a jazz trio from Guildhall School of Music and Drama; and vocalists and MCs from Bigga Fish and Urban Development.

We had a blast at the Summer Sundae Weekender in Leicester this summer with our Phrased & Confused stage project 2008. We’re hugely excited that we can now share a short film with you that captures the experience. It contains everything from live music and spoken word performances to some back stage interviews and feedback from real life punters.

Take a look and marvel at the magic a P&C stage can create! Big thanks to the producer and director of this film, Stuart Silver and to everyone who agreed to take part.

Phrased & Confused @ Summer Sundae Weekender 2008 from the hub on Vimeo.