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Banner Theatre is a community theatre company based in Birmingham, England. The theatre was founded in 1974.
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Banner Theatre is a community theatre company based in Birmingham, England. The theatre was founded in 1974.
Founded in 1974, the theatre works with marginalized and disadvantaged communities using a combination of documentary theatre, music and recorded voices. The aim of the company is to create issue-led productions based on real-life experiences and in support of disenfranchised sections of society, performing to community and trade union audiences in pubs, clubs and community centres and at rallies, festivals and conferences.
A founder member of the company was former BBC radio producer Charles Parker, who with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, created the radio ballads, award-winning musical documentaries broadcast by the BBC in the 1960s and now available via Listen Again on the BBC Radio 2 website. These have been a major influence on Banner's work and have recently informed development of a new form, the 'video ballad'.
Another founder member, and current artistic director, is Dave Rogers. He has written many of the company's songs and written or co-written most of their shows. Some 80 of his songs are published in Singing the Changes (Bread Books 2005) as well as social background and photographs from Banner's archives. Others have been released on Banner albums such as Black and White in the Red, Elixir of Life and Wild Geese.
Banners have been an important feature of the trade union movement, and provided the inspiration for the company's name and logo.
The touring version of this video ballad was created for the 20th anniversary of the 1984-5 Miners Strike, and this DVD marks the 25th anniversary.
This video ballad debunks the media myths surrounding asylum seekers in Britain, and examines the role of big business in their exploitation. The stage version toured extensively in the Midlands during 2007 and was filmed in 2008.
The Wild Geese DVD is a recording of a performance of a video ballad production created by Banner and filmed at Luton Library Theatre in 2006. Stories of migrant workers coming to the UK over many years, and the recent experience of refugees and asylum seekers, are told through video and archive film, with live music and song.
The Wild Geese CD was launched for the company's 30th anniversary and also contains songs from its 2005 production Migrant Voices.
Released in 2002, this CD project was based at fire stations in Essex, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. The album mixes jazz, folk and African/Caribbean music and song, with the words of black and white firefighters to expose racism in the British fire service.
Elixir of Life is a cassette produced by Banner Theatre in 1992 and released as a CD in 2005. The collection includes songs about the "classless society", Ireland, unemployment, the media and resistance. "Ewan's Song" celebrates the life of Ewan MacColl, who was a long-standing friend and supporter of Banner Theatre, and an inspiration to political artists and writers.
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James Henry Miller, better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a British folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor. Born in England to Scottish parents, he is known as one of the instigators of the 1960s folk revival as well as for writing such songs as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Dirty Old Town".
Joan Maud Littlewood was an English theatre director who trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and is best known for her work in developing the Theatre Workshop. She has been called "The Mother of Modern Theatre". Her production of Oh, What a Lovely War! in 1963 was one of her more influential pieces.
"Scarborough Fair" is a traditional English ballad. The song lists a number of impossible tasks given to a former lover who lives in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. The "Scarborough/Whittingham Fair" variant was most common in Yorkshire and Northumbria, where it was sung to various melodies, often using Dorian mode, with refrains resembling "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" and "Then she'll be a true love of mine." It appears in Traditional Tunes by Frank Kidson published in 1891, who claims to have collected it from Whitby.
The radio ballad is an audio documentary format created by Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker in 1958. It combines four elements of sound: songs, instrumental music, sound effects, and, most importantly, the recorded voices of those who are the subjects of the documentary. The latter element was revolutionary; previous radio documentaries had used either professional voice actors or prepared scripts.
The Dubliners were an Irish folk band founded in Dublin in 1962 as The Ronnie Drew Ballad Group, named after its founding member; they subsequently renamed themselves The Dubliners. The line-up saw many changes in personnel over their fifty-year career, but the group's success was centred on lead singers Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew. The band garnered international success with their lively Irish folk songs, traditional street ballads and instrumentals. The band were regulars on the folk scenes in both Dublin and London in the early 1960s, and were signed to the Major Minor label in 1965 after backing from Dominic Behan who was paid by Major-Minor to work with the Dubliners and help them to build a better act fit for larger concert hall venues. The Dubliners worked with Behan regularly between 1965 and 1966; Behan wrote numerous songs for this act including the song McAlpine's Fusiliers created specifically to showcase Ronnie Drew's gravel voice. They went on to receive extensive airplay on Radio Caroline which was part-owned by Phil Solomon CEO of Major Minor, and eventually appeared on Top of the Pops in 1967 with hits "Seven Drunken Nights" and "The Black Velvet Band". Often performing political songs considered controversial at the time, they drew criticism from some folk purists and Ireland's national broadcaster RTÉ had placed an unofficial ban on their music from 1967 to 1971. During this time the band's popularity began to spread across mainland Europe and they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States. The group's success remained steady right through the 1970s and a number of collaborations with The Pogues in 1987 saw them enter the UK Singles Chart on another two occasions.
Albert Lancaster Lloyd, usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. While Lloyd is most widely known for his work with British folk music, he had a keen interest in the music of Spain, Latin America, Southeastern Europe and Australia. He recorded at least six discs of Australian Bush ballads and folk music.
Margaret "Peggy" Seeger is an American folk singer and songwriter. She has lived in Britain for more than 60 years, and was married to the singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl until his death in 1989.
Isla Cameron was a Scottish-born, English-raised actress and singer. AllMusic noted that "Cameron was one of a quartet of key figures in England's postwar folk song revival – and to give a measure of her importance, the other three were Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd, and Alan Lomax". She was a respected and popular folk music performer through the 1950s and early 60s as well as appearing in several films; she focused almost exclusively on her acting career from 1966 onwards. Cameron provided the singing voice for actress Julie Christie's part in the hit 1967 film version of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, but changed career direction and became a film researcher in the early 1970s before her early death in a domestic accident in 1980. One of the traditional songs in her repertoire, "Blackwaterside", recorded by Cameron in 1962, was subsequently popularised by notable "next generation" U.K. folk music performers Anne Briggs, Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny.
John Gerard "Jez" Lowe is an English folk singer-songwriter. Lowe was born and raised in County Durham, in a family with Irish roots. He is known primarily for his compositions dealing with daily life in North-East England, particularly in his hometown of Easington Colliery. He attended St Francis RC Grammar School in nearby Hartlepool and later studied languages at Sunderland Polytechnic. He performs both as a solo artist and with his backing band, The Bad Pennies. In addition to singing his songs, Lowe accompanies himself and The Bad Pennies on guitar, harmonica, cittern, and piano.
Kathryn Williams is an English singer-songwriter who to date has released 14 studio albums, written and arranged for a multitude of artists, and was nominated for the 2000 Mercury Music Prize.
John Tams is an English actor, singer, songwriter, composer and musician born in Holbrook, Derbyshire, the son of a publican. He first worked as a reporter for the Ripley & Heanor News later working for BBC Radio Derby and BBC Radio Nottingham. Tams had an early part in The Rainbow (1988), and may be best known for playing a regular supporting role in the ITV drama series Sharpe, as rifleman Daniel Hagman. He also co-wrote the music for each film alongside Dominic Muldowney.
Charles Parker (1919–1980) was a Bournemouth born, BBC Radio producer based in Birmingham from 1954-1972, who specialised in Documentary Radio and Theatre. In particular, he is remembered for his collaboration with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger on the 1958-1963 series of Radio Ballads, which won an Italia Prize for Radio Documentary in 1960 and is seen as a landmark of study in oral history.
The Critics Group, also known as The London Critics Group, was a group of people who met to explore 'how best to apply the techniques of folk-music and drama to the folk revival' under the direction of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, with some participation from Bert Lloyd and Charles Parker. Running for eight years from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, it was not a conventional musical group or band as it had no permanent line-up. Members would perform with each other on an ad-hoc basis as situations demanded.
"Numb" is a song by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys from their ninth studio album, Fundamental (2006). It was released on 15 October 2006 as the album's third and final single, peaking at number 23 on the UK Singles Chart. Up to that point, it was only the duo's second single in 39 releases to miss the UK top 20.
Philip Donnellan was an English documentary film-maker.
"The Shoals of Herring" is a ballad, written by Ewan MacColl for the third of the original eight BBC Radio balladsSinging the Fishing, which was first broadcast on August 16, 1960. Ewan MacColl writes that the song was based on the life of Sam Larner, a fisherman and traditional singer from Winterton-on-Sea, Norfolk, England. Liam Clancy, who performed the song for decades, tells a more nuanced story, saying that MacColl "tape recorded all the old fisherman up along the east coast of England. And he never used one word of his own. ... He rhymed the lines that the fishermen had given him, and he made it into a song..."
Jack Warshaw is an American folksinger, songwriter and musician, best known for his 1976 protest song "If They Come in the Morning," aka "No Time for Love." He moved to England in 1965 to start a career as an architect but stayed because the folk music scene and the Vietnam War intervened.
The Iron Muse (A Panorama of Industrial Folk Song) is the title of two albums released by Topic Records, the first as a 12-inch Long Play vinyl record released in 1963 and the other as a CD released in 1993.
"The Manchester Rambler", also known as "I'm a Rambler" and "The Rambler's Song", is a song written by the English folk singer Ewan MacColl in 1932. It was inspired by his participation in the Kinder trespass, a protest by the urban Young Communist League of Manchester, and was the work that began MacColl's career as a singer-songwriter.
Samuel James Larner was an English fisherman and traditional singer from Winterton-on-Sea, a fishing village in Norfolk, England. His life was the basis for Ewan MacColl's song The Shoals of Herring, and his songs continue to be recorded by revival singers.
