A Lancashire-based celebration of the British jukebox and teenage culture of the Fifties and Sixties has received a boost from Arts Council England.
Jukebox: The Teenage Revolution, a project run by Lancaster-based arts and heritage charity, Mirador, and Lancaster University Library, has been awarded a £37,000 grant to support artworks looking back to the future.
Welcome to Lunashire and Broken Records – The Phantom’s Playlist will have their first outing at Lancaster University’s Library Festival on September 13 and 14 to coincide with Heritage Open Days.
Welcome to Lunashire is an immersive virtual reality journey where festival visitors are invited to don a headset and be transported back to the world of the Fifties and Sixties complete with coffee and milk bars, fantastic nightlife and out-of-this world fashion.
It has been created by Tom Diffenthal and Lauren Paige Dowling of You’re Most Welcome Ltd. In 2018, Tom co-produced an awardwinning film for Walking In Others Footsteps, a previous Mirador project.
There will be another interactive opportunity at the Library Festival courtesy of Broken Records – The Phantom’s Playlist, a ‘choose your own adventure’ style game housed within an abandoned antique jukebox set against the backdrop of Britain from the Sixties into the Nineties.
This darkly funny game is the creation of Matt Tully, an associate practitioner with Lancaster’s awardwinning theatre company, imitating the dog.
Welcome to Lunarshire and Broken Records will also feature in November’s Light Up Lancaster festival, alongside Jukebike, the third artwork supported by the ACE grant.
Produced by Dan Fox of Ulverston-based Sound Intervention, the Jukebike is an electric trike carrying a jukebox-style sound system playing music of the Fifties and Sixties and projecting digital images from the era.
Dan is also the creator of Voices From The Hood 2 which will feature in Morecambe’s Vintage by the Sea festival on August 31 and September 1.
Situated in the former Morecambe Visitor Information Centre at The Platform, Voices from The Hood is a chance for festivalgoers to relax under vintage salon hairdryers and listen to sounds and voices from the Jukebox project’s archive while flicking through a magazine reminiscent of those game-changing decades.
The original Voices from The Hood was produced as part of Mirador’s Walking In Others Footsteps project and appeared in Lancaster, Preston and Barrow.
The new artworks are the latest element of the Jukebox: The Teenage Revolution project which has been running events in Morecambe, Blackpool and Lytham St Annes since the spring.
Ditchburn Equipment Ltd based in Lytham was one of the UK’s first manufacturers of jukeboxes and impresario Jack Hylton, whose archive is at Lancaster University, was one of the first people to back the venture in the Fifties.
Jukebox: The Teenage Revolution project, is also supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players; Arts Council England, the Granada Foundation and Garfield Weston Foundation.
About Lancaster University
Lancaster University is a collegiate university in the UK city of Lancaster and a member of the N8 Research Partnership: an association of the eight most research-intensive universities in the North of England.
Lancaster University is a highly ranked UK university with a global reputation for excellence in research and teaching. Lancaster is consistently ranked among the top 15 in all three major UK university league tables and continues to build a growing reputation both nationally and internationally.
About The National Lottery Heritage Fund
As the largest dedicated funder of the UK’s heritage, The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future as set out in our strategic plan, Heritage 2033.
Over the next ten years, the Heritage Fund aims to invest £3.6billion raised for good causes by National Lottery players to bring about benefits for people, places and the natural environment.
The Heritage Fund helps protect, transform and share the things from the past that people care about, from popular museums and historic places, our natural environment and fragile species, to the languages and cultural traditions that celebrate who we are.
The Heritage Fund is passionate about heritage and committed to driving innovation and collaboration to make a positive difference to people’s lives today, while leaving a lasting legacy for future generations to enjoy.
Follow @HeritageFundUK on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #NationalLotteryHeritageFund www.heritagefund.org.uk.
About the Garfield Weston Foundation
Established in 1958, the Garfield Weston Foundation is a family-founded grant-maker that gives money to support a wide variety of charities across the UK. The Foundation’s funding comes from an endowment of shares in the Weston family business – a successful model that still exists today. The Weston family have a consistent aim. The more successful the family businesses, the more money the Foundation can donate.
Each year the Foundation gives away its income and donations have continued to grow. Since it was established it has donated over £1.5 billion, of which over half has been given away in the past ten years. In the most recent financial year the Foundation gave away over £100 million to nearly 1,800 charities across the UK.
About Arts Council England
Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture.
We have set out our strategic vision in Let’s Create that by 2030 we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish and where every one of us has access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences.
From 2023 to 2026 we will invest over £467 million of public money from Government and an estimated £250 million from The National Lottery each year to help support the sector and to deliver this vision. www.artscouncil.org.uk
