Artist of the Week - Steven Hadley

Working on this project feels in many ways like coming full-circle for me, as I began my professional career in a small arts centre called The Citadel in St. Helens. The Citadel used to regularly promote folk music gigs, so I was introduced at a tender age to Martin, Norma and Eliza Carthy, Kate Rubsy, Ashley Hutchings, Dave Swarbrick, Shooglenifty and many more. It’s fascinating to now partly be back in that world after many years have passed.

My own relationship with the arts, as I suspect is the case for everyone, is complicated and deeply subjective. I’m fascinated with the idea that an emotional attachment to a song, lyric or image can be deeply personal and wildly idiosyncratic, and yet the cultural artefact in question can be adored by millions.

I recently went to see U2 in Belfast, where I live now (an old loyalty, dating back to their work with Brian Eno on The Unforgettable Fire, an album I bought – and still have – on vinyl in 1984) and found myself smiling when they played ‘One’, a song for which I have the aforementioned deeply personal and wildly idiosyncratic associations, but which was also sung aloud word-for-word by a stadium full of people who also loved it for their own reasons.

I even found myself wondering whether there was anyone there who loved the song because so many other people did, in much the same way that I have friends who forbid themselves to like things that are ‘too popular’.

Because of all this, and so much more besides, my idea of audiences, being in an audience, being the audience, developing the audience, engaging the audience is, well, complicated. I’m as interested in people’s motivations for wanting to, say, get more people into opera as I am in the machinery of how one might go about getting them sat in an opera house at 7.30pm on any given evening.

Whilst Raymond Williams famously said, ‘Culture is ordinary’, I would argue that the system of public subsidy we have for the arts in the UK is fascinatingly complex. Not complex in terms of the endless managerial tedium of audit and accountability, but complex in terms of the philosophy, ideology, beliefs, power, value and traditions bound up in that simple phrase ‘the arts’.