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Nick Awde Hill (born 29 December 1961) is a British writer, artist, singer-songwriter and critic. He lives in London and Brussels.
The son of the international lawyer who formulated laws integral to global shipping of containers, he was raised in Nigeria, Sudan and Kenya before being sent to the Jesuit Catholic boarding school Stonyhurst College in the UK. His parents divorced when he was a teenager. After the divorce, his father moved to Northern Ireland and his mother moved to Germany. Despite the above, most of Awde's teenage home life was spent in Soho and the West End of London. He studied Arabic and the Hausa language at London's School of Oriental and African Studies. After graduation, he worked for several years on building sites and English instruction in Spain. Afterward, he became a journalist.
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 comic relationship that existed between comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore of Beyond the Fringe; 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 2007 two other plays followed, premiering at the Edinburgh Festival. 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 pastiche 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. Awde's 1994 follow-up Margaret Thatcher: The Musical failed to find backing. Awde's 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 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.
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 Gerald Berkowitz, in 1999 he set up theatreguidelondon.co.uk. He worked on The Voice during a key period of the fight for black empowerment in the UK, frequently with immediate impact, as when he wrote a front-page headline that contributed to a riot in Brixton the following day and attempted siege of the local police station. [1]
As an illustrator and cartoonist, over the years he has worked for 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. He has done illustration work for Spanish educational publishers and has run a wide range of cartoon strips in specialist publications such as Boogie (music press, Spain), London Student, Untitled, The Wharf and The Stage.
Hill's rock group Desert Hearts 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. 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. Sub-titled 'Love Songs from the Underground', 1996's I Saw Satan on the Northern Line was released as a 'CD without music'. Designed in the format of a CD lyrics booklet, it contains often comic observations on modern life. The band came out of hibernation in 2010 with the release of Close to the Edge B/W Rocket Man/Meryl Streep , a mini album laced with Mellotron keyboard arrangements.
November 2008 saw the first MelloFest take place at the Fiddler's Elbow in Kentish Town, London. Organised by Awde, MelloFest One featured two Mellotrons onstage along with discussions and live Mellotron-inspired music from guests, plus the official launch of Awde's book Mellotron . [2] Talking about their music and in some cases also playing it were: David Cross (King Crimson), Nick Magnus (Steve Hackett Band), Martin Orford (IQ), Jakko Jakszyk (21st Century Schizoid Band/Tangent/Level 42), Dave Cousins (Strawbs) & Robert Kirby (Strawbs/Nick Drake/Paul Weller), Robert Webb (England) and Tony Clarke, producer of the Moody Blues. [3]
A more concert-based second MelloFest Two, complete with three Mellotrons onstage and a Stylophone, took place at The Luminaire in London on 2 May 2009 featuring Clarke, Orford, Webb, Maggie Alexander, Mark Rae, Andy Thompson and a virtual appearance from Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater demonstrating the new Ellatron iPod/iPhone Mellotron app.
MelloFest Three is the Nick Awde & Desert Hearts EP Close to the Edge, released in early 2010. MelloFest Four will be the band's follow-up album MelloRetro. MelloFest Six is 2011's A Christmas Carol Unplugged at the Union Chapel, north London, a music biz update of Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol arranged by Awde, written by Chris Bartlett and starring Noddy Holder of Slade. Musicians appearing in the show at the Union Chapel, north London, are Robert Webb, Simon Scardanelli, Andy Thompson, Knox of The Vibrators, Marc Atkinson, Grace Solero and member of parliament and deputy transport minister Norman Baker. The stage director is Saul Reichlin.
As Nicholas Awde, Hill has written or edited 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 has commissioned many authors, particularly from the Caucasus, editing and designing their books for other publishers. He is also a long-standing consultant on the Caucasus, and, with Fred James Hill, runs the publishing companies Bennett & Bloom (academic) and Desert Hearts (general arts).
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Peter Edward Cook was an English comedian, actor, satirist, playwright and screenwriter. He was the leading figure of the British satire boom of the 1960s, and he was associated with the anti-establishment comedic movement that emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1950s.
Dudley Stuart John Moore CBE was an English actor, comedian, musician and composer. Moore first came to prominence in the UK as a leading figure in the British satire boom of the 1960s. He was one of the four writer-performers in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe from 1960 that created a boom in satiric comedy. With a member of that team, Peter Cook, Moore collaborated on the BBC television series Not Only... But Also. As a popular double act, Moore's buffoonery contrasted with Cook's deadpan monologues. They jointly received the 1966 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance and worked together on other projects until the mid-1970s, by which time Moore had settled in Los Angeles to concentrate on his film acting.
Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. It debuted at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival and went on to play in London's West End and then in America, both on tour and on New York's Broadway in the early 1960s. Hugely successful, it is widely regarded as seminal to the "satire boom", the rise of satirical comedy in 1960s Britain.
Pete and Dud were characters played by the comedians and entertainers Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical musical instrument developed in Birmingham, England, in 1963. It is played by pressing its keys, each of which causes a length of magnetic tape to contact a capstan, which pulls it across a playback head. As the key is released, the tape is retracted by a spring to its initial position. Different portions of the tape can be played to access different sounds.
Alan Bennett is an English playwright, author, actor and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George (1994). In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award.
Thomas Augustine Arne was an English composer. He is best known for his patriotic song "Rule, Britannia!" and the song "A-Hunting We Will Go", the latter composed for a 1777 production of The Beggar's Opera, which has since become popular as a folk song and a nursery rhyme. Arne was a leading British theatre composer of the 18th century, working at the West End's Drury Lane and Covent Garden. He wrote many operatic entertainments for the London theatres and pleasure gardens, as well as concertos, sinfonias, and sonatas.
William Boyce was an English composer and organist. Like Beethoven later on, he became deaf but continued to compose. He knew Handel, Arne, Gluck, Bach, Abel, and a very young Mozart, all of whom respected his work.
Robert Kirby was an English arranger of string sections for rock and folk music. He was best known for his work on the Nick Drake albums, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter, but also worked with Vashti Bunyan, Elton John, Ralph McTell, Strawbs, Paul Weller and Elvis Costello.
Ian Richard McDonald was an English musician, composer and multi-instrumentalist, best known as a founder member of the progressive rock band King Crimson in 1968, as well as the hard rock band Foreigner in 1976.
A kontigi or kuntigi is a one-stringed African lute played by the Hausa, Songhai and Djerma. A 3-string version teharden is used among the Tamashek.
Michael Bartlett is an English playwright and screenwriter for film and TV series. His 2015 psychological thriller TV series, Doctor Foster, starring Suranne Jones, won the New Drama award from National Television Awards. Bartlett also won Best Writer from the Broadcast Press Guild Awards. A BBC TV Film of Bartlett's play King Charles III was broadcast in May 2017 and while critically acclaimed, generated some controversy.
Chris Bartlett is a Cheshire-based playwright and arts journalist.
Pete and Dud: Come Again is a stage play about British Beyond the Fringe comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, which was written by Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde. The comedy-drama had a sold-out run at the Assembly Rooms as part of the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it was shortlisted for a Fringe First Award by The Scotsman, before moving to London's West End at The Venue in March 2006; this version starred Kevin Bishop as Moore, Tom Goodman-Hill as Cook, Colin Hoult as Jonathan Miller, and Fergus Craig as Alan Bennett. It was published in playtext form by Methuen.
"Close to the Edge" is a song by the English progressive rock band Yes, featured on their fifth studio album Close to the Edge (1972). The song is over 18 minutes in length and takes up the entire first side of the album. It consists of four movements.
The Hausa are a native ethnic group in West Africa. They speak the Hausa language, which is the second most spoken language after Arabic in the Afro-Asiatic language family. The Hausa are a culturally homogeneous people based primarily in the Sahelian and the sparse savanna areas of southern Niger and northern Nigeria respectively, numbering around 86 million people, with significant populations in Benin, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Togo, Ghana, as well as smaller populations in Sudan, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Senegal, Gambia. Predominantly Hausa-speaking communities are scattered throughout West Africa and on the traditional Hajj route north and east traversing the Sahara, with an especially large population in and around the town of Agadez. Other Hausa have also moved to large coastal cities in the region such as Lagos, Port Harcourt, Accra, Abidjan, Banjul and Cotonou as well as to parts of North Africa such as Libya over the course of the last 500 years. The Hausa traditionally live in small villages as well as in precolonial towns and cities where they grow crops, raise livestock including cattle as well as engage in trade, both local and long distance across Africa. They speak the Hausa language, an Afro-Asiatic language of the Chadic group. The Hausa aristocracy had historically developed an equestrian based culture. Still a status symbol of the traditional nobility in Hausa society, the horse still features in the Eid day celebrations, known as Ranar Sallah. Daura is the cultural center of the Hausa people. The town predates all the other major Hausa towns in tradition and culture.
Fergus Craig is a British stand-up comic and actor in theatre, television and radio. He studied at the University of Manchester. Craig is one half of the double act Colin & Fergus, with actor and writer Colin Hoult.
The Big Gay Musical is a 2009 gay-themed musical-comedy film written by Fred M. Caruso and co-directed by Caruso and Casper Andreas. The film follows a brief period in the lives of two young actors, one who is openly gay, the other closeted to his parents. The openly gay actor struggles with whether he should be sexually promiscuous or seek a life partner, while the closeted one wonders if he should come out to his conservative, religious parents.
England were a progressive rock group active in the late 1970s, and briefly reformed in 2006. The band is notable for their album Garden Shed released on Arista Records, and for keyboardist Robert Webb playing a Mellotron sawn in half.
Geoff Unwin is an English musician and composer. He was an early user and promoter of the Mellotron, a tape-based sampling keyboard, and co-wrote the theme music for the first On the Buses film.
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