(M.H.S) Sunscreen ‘24 (by John Ledger and Benjamin Parker) is a spoken word soundscape based on Baz Lurhmann's song 'Everyone's got to wear sunscreen'. Released a quarter of a century ago, it harks back to a moment when we genuinely believed 'things would only get better'. Fast-forward 25 years, and Luhrmann’s ‘school of 99’ have lost their younger years to a War on Terror, a global recession, a global pandemic and a cost of living crisis. In 1999 climate change was still something the world thought it could prevent.

The ‘self-help’ of Sunscreen is now used to call for a Mental Health Strike. Sunscreen ‘24 re-imagines ‘(Everybody’s Free to Wear) Sunscreen’ as ‘therapy’ based around collective care; therapy for a world trying to get out of free-fall. 

The Mental Health Strike 24 marks the 40th Anniversary of the UK Miners' Strike. But this is a 'what if' strike, mere shadowplay in darkness of our times, that hopes to become an hyperstition, and move from fiction to reality. Hope as a mere shadow, never leaves the hopeless.

M.H.S Sunscreen '24

Dialogue between artist John Ledger and Leeds-based artist curator, using Greenwich, London as ideal territory in which  to discuss the tangled up nature of personal and societal lost futures, dead ends, and possible closures to the dead ends.

Greenwich

The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe: Champagne Supernova

(John Ledger and Michael Hill) walking around old haunts (Around South/West Yorks), conjuring memories, and futures of the past, on the eve of the 2015 Uk General Election. Taking routes where long gone bus routes used to take us.

Lost Bus Routes and Pre-Election Rambles

This is part in a series of map-making’s of meanderings and musings that coincided with decisive events for the wider society. My thoughts on the past (my past),  present, and longings for a future decisively different from the present loosely congregating around these events. This part covers Manchester, Barnsley and London

The Big Smoke (And Mirrors): Stories From Forgotten Space

Writings From HMS Brexit is an 'absent' performance in a disused pub in the eerie landscape of West Yorkshire. 

1. Glorified Lifeboat - John Ledger (through the [e]motions, on nearby towns and cities)
2. Shattered Exit - Jonathan Butcher
3. The Tale of Two Countries - JD Taylor
4. I am Run By Time - Mere Pseud

The location is a disused pub, looking back over a dislocating time; an erosion of time and place; a vacuum filled by unfulfilled ghosts from the past. Always in homage to the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, this series of prose speeches is strange due to the absence of the speakers. Only their half-finished endeavors will be visible; half finished pints and coats flung over the seats – as they proceed to dissect a body that has become to be known as ‘Brexit Britain’.

Writings From HMS Brexit

A spoken word piece I ommited from the full Writings From HMS Brexit performance (listen here https://soundcloud.com/theunrealisedproject/writings-from-hms-brexit-1    ). This piece is based around my home town in the early months of 2017.

Ends (Writings From HMS Brexit

(M.H.S) Sunscreen ‘18 (John Ledger and Benjamin Parker)

As we approached 1999 we were reaching the end of the first decade after ‘history had ended’. The mid 90’s hedonism had begun to fizzle out after neoliberalism had exercised its ‘teenage kicks’ through the Gallagher’s, the Blair’s, and the Spice Girls, and a strange soft sadness replaced it; society seemed confused at ‘the end of history’ and seemed to be waiting in expectation for a new millennium free of poverty and global wars, one in which we’d nip climate change in the bud. 

Coincidentally 1999 was the first year I began to recognise signs of anxiety and psychological distress within myself. I remember at one point taking the self-help advice given in the unlikely No1 pop chart success ‘(Everybody’s Free To Wear) Sunscreen’  (comprised of a speech given by film director Baz Luhrmann over a musical composition) seriously. I guess this is why it went to no1, it’s philosophy, one you could arguably call ‘Californian’, was one I’ve always seen as a self-help philosophy in a ‘post-politics’ age, where so many people felt strangely anxious and depressed, but didn’t know why.

Fast-forward 19 years, and Luhrmann’s ‘school of 99’ have lost their younger years to a millennium that has been (now, let’s be honest) an unprecedented mind-fuck. Meanwhile the 1990’s illusion of post-politics has fizzled out, whilst we began to realise the Real ideology wasn’t about ‘just being yourself’, and was more about everybody being out for themselves, at the cost of collectivity, and community. 

The ‘self-help’ we need isn’t just for the self. Sunscreen ‘18 re-imagines ‘(Everybody’s Free to Wear) Sunscreen’ as ‘therapy’ based around collective care; therapy for the post-post political. What if this is what we’d had before the millennium? More importantly: what if we have it now?

M.H.S Sunscreen '18

M.H.S Sunscreen '18 (The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe)

This was a sound piece I made for the Globalsapiens exhibition in Sheffield in 2011. It is playing on the ever-more intrusive nature of railways tannoy announcements/security warnings. Within this exhibition, each artists’ work was in a cell separated from the other artists’ works. The work was a socially/environmentally concerned nature, yet still being trapped in the confines of artist as individual/artist as ego, thus making us actually unable to make anything more than solemn and negative comments about things spiraling out of control that we couldn’t escape from either. The tannoy announcements (made by texting to the BT landline and then recording the automate texts) sound like they are in a train station, yet these constant and intrusive announcements are insertions of the already dominant cultural-psyche in relation to believing that there’s nothing we can do to change the world for the better.


Soundscape for exhibibition (John Ledger, 2011)

The Retro Bar at The End of the Universe is an artist-led thinking and doing collective. Roughly originating in 2014, it formed from a sense of stuck-ness, within our hauntological and 'non stop-inertia' [Ivor Southwood] times. Originally evading the command to materialise within the steroid-pumped gentrification/photoshop-isation of a 'cult of self-belief' Britain, the collective is now working on other ways of engaging and acting, that try not be fast food for a neoliberal appetite. 

Our Soundcloud page contains projects from individual collective members, and will also begin to feature podcasts and other collaborative works in the coming year.

The Retro Bar at The End of the Universe

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