Barbican Guide
May 21

‘I’ve done two projects so far in my career where I’ve started and then thought “How the fuck am I going to choose the songs?” – and that was Quincy Jones and Paul Weller.’

With a CV spanning 70 albums, a Grammy Award, and a reputation for crossing genres, Jules Buckley is no stranger to arranging for some of the biggest artists in the world. But even the co-founder of genre-smashing ensemble the Heritage Orchestra admits to feeling a little daunted at the prospect of his latest project with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Paul Weller’s first live concert in two years will see the Modfather joined by the orchestra for an exclusive performance of tracks from his brand new album, plus back catalogue highlights that demonstrate just
why he’s been charting for five decades.

With Buckley at the helm, you know this will live up to expectations. He’s known for bringing a touch of Ibiza to the Proms with his Heritage Orchestra and BBC Radio 1 DJ Pete Tong, as well as working with grime acts such as Stormzy and Wretch 32 as Conductor of the Metropole Orkest, with whom he performed the 2016 BBC Prom with Quincy Jones. Since he joined the BBCSO as Creative Artist in Association in 2019, he’s developed some boundary-breaking projects, including the unforgettable concert with Lianne La Havas here in February 2020.

Buckley tells us that while his earliest memories of Weller’s work came from hearing The Style Council on the radio as a child, his real appreciation came when solo album Stanley Road was released in 1995.

The music that’ll be performed at this concert was chosen through a gradual process. Buckley began by listening to listening to everything Weller had released. ‘I think we were moving flats at the time and I had to sand the floor in my old flat in order to get the deposit back. So I spent days just listening to all of Paul’s albums as I sanded, making notes on my phone of any title that I thought really would lend itself to being placed in this setting.’

Then, over the course of a few video calls, he and Weller honed the list. ‘There was a feeling that we wanted to really focus on the latest work. That was very important because Paul, as an artist, is always moving forward. We didn’t want the gig to feel like a retirement concert. But at the same time, Paul’s got so many killer tunes that we had to bring in a lot of the classic tunes too. So we’ve ended up with a “mix tape” of music that takes the audience through the old and the new.’

Among the new material will be Weller’s new album, Fat Pop, recorded during the first lockdown in 2020.

‘I’ve heard it and it’s a phenomenal album,’ says Buckley. ‘The musicians playing on it, the production choices, the lyrics... Paul is up there. He’s not got many peers.’

Paul Weller, Jules Buckley & BBC Symphony Orchestra takes place on Saturday 15 May.

The popular Live from the Barbican series brought music from our Hall to your living room for months. Yet while our resident orchestra has regularly performed live streams from St Luke’s, its absence from the Barbican has been tangible.

Cellist Jennifer Brown joined the LSO aged 26 in 1982, just two months after the Centre opened. She describes the Barbican as like ‘home’ for the LSO members. She and horn player Angela Barnes, who joined in 2005, usually share a dressing room. Both say they’ve found the time of the pandemic extraordinary.

‘Over the last year, I’ve had the time to practice every single day – which is probably more than at any time since I was a student,’ laughs Brown.

And, while there have been frequent rehearsals, recordings and livestreams, they both have missed performing in front of a live audience.

The pair say live streaming brings the same pressures for accuracy compared with being in a recording studio when multiple takes are possible. ‘It’s about living in the moment,’ says Barnes. ‘And in some ways, the microphones and cameras feel a bit like a substitute for a real audience.’

However, the prospect of performing in front of people again is tantalising for the musicians. ‘I’ve got goosebumps just thinking about it,’ says Brown. Barnes adds, ‘It’s going to be incredible. It’ll feel joyful and energising on both sides. Even if there are just 500 people in the Hall, I hope that firstly they feel safe, but also that they’re as excited as we will be. We just can’t wait to get back to making live music.’

Limited numbers of performers allowed on the stage mean there will be musical arrangements that some people may not have heard before, which will be interesting for performers and listeners.

The first concert back will be a live streamed performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde – the composer’s poignant song cycle contemplating the transience of life, which feels particularly apt following the ordeals of the nation over the last 12 months. Written in his final years, shortly after he was diagnosed with a heart condition, and following the death of his daughter, it travels between moments of joyful lightness and dark melancholy.

Led by Sir Simon Rattle, the orchestra will be joined by mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená and tenor Andrew Staples for what will be a long-awaited return to the Hall.

After that exciting return, 18 May heralds the day when finally, audiences will be able to see one of the greatest orchestras in the world in person, as we welcome music fans back into the Hall.

Being shown as part of our Architecture on Film series, Into Great Silence is extraordinary. Over its almost three hours’ duration, you’re transported to a place of quiet contemplation, rhythm and routine. There’s no music other than monastic chants, no narration, no interviews. The effect is that rather than being about the monastery, the film becomes a monastery itself.

‘What originally fascinated me was that I view a monastery as a machine through which the handling of time is transformed,’ says Philip Gröning. ‘Similarly, as filmmakers, the mode of expression we have is time: how strictly we handle it for the audience is what sets cinema apart from all other mediums.’

Time is something that has interested Gröning for many years. Into Great Silence is very much a mediation on our experience of the fourth dimension. And in a meta way, the film’s creation was a decades-long journey.

‘I had the idea when I was 24 and had just finished film school,’ recounts Gröning, whose current work is more focussed on visual arts than Cinema – he recently exhibited a huge VR project about Oktoberfest in Shanghai and Munich. ‘I won an award for young filmmakers and was proving to be successful. But [fame/success] took up all my energy and I wanted to get out of the industry and retire to write novels or something.’

A Roman Catholic upbringing led him to seek out Orders of monks that were completely silent, but he discovered there weren’t any. However, he did learn of three that are ‘pretty much silent’, the Carthusians being one of them. ‘I wanted to see what it was like living in these conditions and thought I should make a film about it too.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly for devout people who shun the outside world, there wasn’t much enthusiasm among the monks for his idea. But, after being turned down by many monasteries, finally the abbot of the Grand Chartreuse in the French Alps invited Gröning to stay for two weeks. ‘I knew immediately that this was the place I wanted to film,’ he remembers. ‘But they said, “it’s not the right time just now, but maybe in ten years’ time”.’

Laughing now, he recalls that his 24-year-old-self found it almost impossible to conceive of making progress on something that far in the future. So, he continued creating, making films such as The Terrorist (1992), Philosophie (1998), expecting nothing further to come of his idea. But he stayed in touch with the abbot. ‘I liked him a lot. Every four or five years I would travel to the monastery and talk to him – I found him very philosophical and trustworthy.’

Then, one day in 2000, at 7am, he got a call from the monastery. It was the administrator, asking if he was still interested. It had been 16 years.

‘I hadn’t even really been thinking about it. Perhaps that’s why I got the opportunity – that I’d stopped talking about it with the abbot. He trusted me because I didn’t talk to him about it, and because he saw the films I was making. I think he saw that I had a very serious approach to my work.

‘When he finally gave me permission, he’d known me for 17 years. I’ve heard that all the big French filmmakers had wanted to go to the monastery – but they wanted to think about the film, not the philosophical idea of being in a monastery; they wanted to observe the monks, almost as if they were strange creatures.’

The void

So Gröning decamped to the Alps to film: for six months in total – four during spring and summer, followed by two shorter phases in the winter. He lived as a monk, occupying a cell as they do, and filming daily life. The only condition they imposed on him was that he was not to use artificial light.

‘When I arrived, I had a feeling of there being a huge void,’ he recalls. ‘It’s what anyone would experience – we spend so much time pushing to have our life filled with things that distance us. Then suddenly you’re there in these beautiful surroundings, with an incredible view from your room, but you don’t speak to anyone. The only contact you have with others is going to church.

I didn’t move into my cell for a week because I thought it was so perfect – I didn’t feel it was right that I was there. So, I just started shooting the empty cell from outside, and lived in a different room.’

Slowly he adapted. And after time, he found a great joy in his experience. ‘There’s a real pleasure in not worrying what you’re going to do each morning. As an artist you have to figure out “what am I doing” every day, but that was already decided for me at the monastery because they do the same thing every day. I felt very at home there.’

He says the most interesting thing he noticed was how his perception of time changed. It hit him after a moment of despair. He’d taken the same shot of the cloisters with the sun changing on so many occasions and thought to himself he couldn’t bear to take another similar view. But he resisted the temptation to go into the village to find new shots – because the monks don’t have that luxury and he wanted to have – and reflect – an authentic experience.

‘After a while I started to notice the presence of objects and the things that accompany us – their own journeys through the years and centuries; for example, a stone was formed millions of years ago.’

It was this appreciation for the minutiae of daily life, of noticing everything’s progress through time that instilled a sense of calm in him. And so when it came time to leave, he was very sad.

‘The sheer synchronicity of waking up to the sound of the bell and having a moment before going to church, during which you light the little fire in your cell; you look out of the window and see the fires being lit in every other cell. It gives you a sense that everyone is doing the same thing at the same time without being in communication with one another. There’s a sense of community – a community of hermits.’

The film was released in 2005 – 21 years after its conception. It’s won many awards, including a special jury prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and Best Documentary at that year’s European Film Awards. But more importantly to Gröning, the monks who saw it loved it. One even gave him awooden statue that looked like an Academy Award wearing a cassock. The director says that’s the prize that meant the most to him.

To watch the film is a transcendental experience, and one you’ll probably never encounter in a cinema again. Without words, it invites you to ask questions of yourself, of the way our society operates, of our relationship to objects, and to time.

Ultimately, as Gröning concludes: ‘People ask who the main character is, and the answer is the audience, because the main character in a monastery is the person who will be changed by the monastery.’

Into Great Silence takes place Sun 23 May

Architecture on Film is curated by the Architecture Foundation in partnership with the Barbican

A very spooky feeling crept up on singer-songwriter Kate Stables as she mixed This Is The Kit’s fifth album, Off Off On.

She’d written the songs over the previous 18 months, but as the final mixes were taking shape, the first wave of the pandemic hit – and suddenly, her lyrics took on a whole new meaning.

‘Suddenly, the world was different, and my lyrics mention things like coughing, being in hospital, stopping and starting.’ She shakes her head. ‘Yeah, it was very weird.’

The songs were written mainly on tour – either with This is The Kit or solo with The National. Stables says being away from home helped because isolation and space are essential for her writing process; she’d been thinking about the state of the world (‘because even before Covid, things were a bit of a mess’).

‘Humanity is a long timeline, and it’s easy to feel frustrated and worried about the future, so I wanted to find hope in that, not wanting to believe everything is screwed – there’s a reason for hope, solidarity, and sticking at things together.’

She says she also went through a period of self-reflection, trying to recalibrate the way she approaches certain things. ‘As much as we have to work on the outside world and community, we have to do that internal work too and allow for personal growth.’

After it was released, critics seized on the connection with what the world was experiencing at the time. Many picked up how Off Off On was a neat summary of our stop-start lockdown experiences; Elisa Bray in the Independent wrote: ‘The themes too, of resilience and starting again (‘Started Again’), homesickness, needing space, and the perennial question of the work/ life balance (‘Slider’), love and solitude (‘Shinbone Soap’), and anxiety (‘This is What You Did’) could not be more pertinent.’

How does it feel to have people see your work through a completely different prism than intended?

‘This always happens with everything you make as an artist,’ says Stables, who was nominated for an Ivor Novello award following the release of the band’s last album, Moonshine Freeze, in 2018. ‘Whatever you present to the world will be seen through people’s individual goggles and through the eyes of the current times. Even when I’m looking at my own work, I can’t help but see it through that lens.

‘I can’t remember the exact quote, but Alan Bennett said that all writers at some time or another would encounter this experience of “predicting the future”. When you’re working with ideas, words or language, funny coincidences happen. Some people might explain it in cosmic universe terms; others might consider it probability. ‘

This is the Kit: Live from the Barbican takes place on Sunday 30 May.

Housed under 23,000 square feet of steel and glass, the 1,500 species of plants and trees of our Conservatory require regular care and attention. So Head Gardener Marta Lowcewicz and her team have been doing their best during the challenging on-off-on rhythms since March last year.

‘We’ve had to adapt in order to follow government guidance for our own safety. The two of us have been working over five different shifts to keep caring for the plants – which have to be watered because it’s a garden under glass and the rain can’t get in – and the fish and other wildlife, which have to be fed.

‘Over the summer, the Conservatory was open to the public every day, so we tried to catch up on some of the jobs we couldn’t do when we had to be at home. But it’s almost impossible when you lose a whole year of planting.’

Over nature’s quieter period, winter, Lowcewicz and her colleague Sarah Fox carried out pruning and other maintenance to prepare the plants for their spring burst of growth. ‘The Conservatory is a constant work-in-progress,’ she says. ‘Unlike when you come to see an exhibition, concert or play and you see the end result, this is more fluid, more alive.

‘The plants here may be tropical and temperate, but the principles are the same as a garden at home – you have to find the perfect spot for the plants. Maybe it doesn’t like the place you thought it would, so you have to move it; it’s a little bit of trial and error, based on your knowledge. We have to think about creating an environment that’s good for the plants and aesthetically pleasing for everyone.’

As well as the lush foliage of the main floor of the building, there’s also a succulents and cacti room on the east side. It’s definitely worth a visit. You’ll also find an overwintering collection of cymbidiums (cool house orchids).

For perfectionist Lowcewicz, preparing to readmit visitors has been an awful lot of work. ‘While in my head there’s always things I’d like to do, or something I want to be updated, I think we’ve done our best in getting the Conservatory ready for reopening,’ she says.

The Conservatory is open from Monday 24 May.