Programmed by the hub and the PRS for Music Foundation, other speakers confirmed so far include Stuart Brown (BFI Southbank), Regis Cochefort (Paul Hamlyn Foundation), Laura Ducchesci (De La Warr Pavilion), Will Dutta (Chimera Productions), David Francis (Dartington), John Kieffer (Sound and Music), Penny King (Arts Council England) David Metcalfe (Forma), Jo Ross (Oxford Contemporary Music), Andi Studer (Cenatus), Alexandra Tomkinson (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) and Andy Wood (Como No).

The event, which draws on the hub and PRSF’s learning from its New Music Plus… leadership development programme, will explore the artistic, audience and organisational development opportunities created when independent producers collaborate with arts organisations to programme new music.

Places at the event are limited, so if you’d like to attend, email us here at the hub as soon as possible.

Our compere for the evening was the fantastic poet Ross Sutherland . Click here to see him escape our tech run through to give us a sneaky reading of one of his poems from his Things to do Before you Leave Town collection.

Also featuring in the line up were Last Mango in Paris (seen here in sound check), 30birdproductions.org, poet, musician and editor of the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets Jeet Thayil, actress and writer Pauline Melville and poet and performer Zurab Rtveliashvili.

Music in the bar for the evening was provided by the love and hate DJs Jason Phipps and Ruth Barnes. Their blog which includes a mix tape and play list is well worth checking out.

As part of the evening we asked members of the public and team members to read selections from well over 100 Mills and Boon books which we gave out to the audience at the end of the evening. You can catch Jason and Ruth’s readings in this short video here. . You can catch many more of the readings on our blip tv site here including readings by hub director Julia Payne &amp, and hub producers Jenny Harris and Matthew Linley. Contained within each Mills and Boon book was a book mark detailing the case of one of the writers being championed by International Pen, an ‘on the tube home’ reminder that even thought the Insulting Cabaret is a lot of fun the work of Pen continues to be very real and important.

You can also catch some photographs from the evening of our love / hate survey here

As ever a long evening – but a very successful one!

Insulting Cabaret was produced by the hub (www.thehubuk.com) for International Pen (www.internationalpen.org.uk) as part of Free the Word festival.

What do you love to hate? Any secret loves to confess? Where do you draw the line when speaking your mind?

After last year’s sell-out success, the irreverent and provocative Insulting Cabaret returns to Southwark Playhouse on 16th April, as part of International PEN’s Free the Word! festival of world literature, and in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the organisation Writers in Prison.

Hosted by live literature’s rising star Ross Sutherland, this year’s Insulting Cabaret takes as its theme Love and Hate and gathers together an international array of some of the most talented voices in writing and performance today, including spoken word supergroup Last Mango in Paris, Indian poet and musician Jeet Thayil, writer and actress Pauline Melville, performance company 30Bird, and Georgian surrealists Irakli Kakabadze and Zurab Rtveliashvili.

Expect a memorable evening of lyrical and surreal poetry, live music, DJs, visuals, Swizzels love-hearts and plenty of Mills and Boon!

Tickets are available from Southwark Playhouse on 0207 7407 0234 or online at southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

Do you have a guilty secret stashed on your bookshelf? Some Barbara Cartland bosom-heavers in the selection of stuff you picked up at the car boot sale? A dusty pile of Georgette Heyer in your attic that you claim came with the house? It’s time to come clean.

We need your Mills and Boon novels, your Silhouette smut, your bad romances with cheesy titles and even cheesier covers for The Insulting Cabaret at Southwark Playhouse on Friday 16th April at 9pm.

This year our compere Ross Sutherland will be hosting an intoxicating mix of music, poetry, comedy and spoken word from around the world under the banner Love vs Hate. You know us, we like to take a theme to its extreme, so your books may get read, they may get made into paperchains, who knows? But you’ll get a warm feeling knowing they’re going towards a good cause and a great evening.

So next time you’re passing a charity shop or jumble sale have a forage for us and if you do manage to acquire any, please let us know via insultingcabaret@gmail.com and we’ll arrange to collect them from you. We need as many novels as we can lay our hands on before the event on the 16th April so get searching and purging!

The Insulting Cabaret is produced by the hub. It’s part of International PEN’s Free the Word! festival of world literature, and celebrates the 50th anniversary of the organisation Writers in Prison. For more information and to buy tickets visit www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.

Black/North SEAS Club discusses music in Tromso from Jenny Harris on Vimeo.

SEAS Club is back on its travels and has sailed into the port of Tromso in the very north of Norway. Surrounded by mountains, Tromso bills itself as the gateway to the Arctic and you certainly get the feeling of being very north indeed.

This week Seas club is cohabiting in Kunstforenig with Anna Lise Steneth’s enlarged “The Kiss and Waste Project”, the official festival information centre and the Seas Canteen & Bar. This neo-classical building was designed by Lars Solberg as a museum in 1894 and therefore can hold us all effortlessly. It’s a welcoming informal place and most importantly has extremely thick walls and is set back from the sea so we can make as much noise as we like! Today to launch Seas Club we’ll be joined by Georgian VJ and film director Wato Tsereteli from Tbilisi and Tuesday local VJ’s Elizabeth Brun &a Erica Restoften will sprinkle their magic over our eclectic playlist.

We’re also running webcasting workshops over at the local youth centre Tvibit so hopefully you’ll get to see some of our work by the end of the week!

We had lots of great audience contributions to the Phrased & Confused tent – workshops with some of our poets, and fridge poems a-go-go.  We’ll be posting more video and photo soon but in the meantime here are our daily Summer Sundae Podcasts from the festival stage which should give you a flavour of what we got up to.  Check out Joshua Idehen falling through his chair in Episode 1 (we’ll be sending it in to You’ve Been Framed!)

Episode 1:

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Episode 2:

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Episode 3:

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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?!