If you regularly travel between the Northern and Jubilee lines at Waterloo Underground station, your commute is about to get a lot more interesting.
Until July 10, the stretch and its travelator is home to Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, a new audio work by London-based composer, artist and DJ Ain Bailey in collaboration with experimental vocalist and movement artist Elaine Mitchener.
Commissioned by TFL’s contemporary art programme, Art on the Underground, the seven-minute work is an autobiographical sound map of London. Built around the names of more than 70 closed cultural and community spaces that have shaped Bailey’s life, it’s an ode to lost clubs, record shops, LGBTQI+ bars and community landmarks across the city.
The work takes its title from the Blitz-era song Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner by broadcaster and actor Hubert Gregg, which Mitchener reinterprets with a multi-layered vocal performance.
Among the spaces referenced are Candy Bar, the Soho lesbian bar that closed in 2014, and where Bailey regularly spent time with friends and helped run the club night Precious Brown with DJ Marilyn Clarke. “It was an important physical space which offered us an opportunity to essentially experiment,” Bailey tells Broadsheet. “We created PB as a response to not being able to hear in one location the eclectic music we were into in LGBTQ+ venues at the time, ie jungle, broken beat, disco, jazz and beyond.”
The work also pays attention to places such as the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre and the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in Farringdon, which closed in 1992. “It had a beautiful terrace,” Bailey says of the latter. “And space for a club night in the basement. It felt perfect.”
For Bailey, the work began with Art on the Underground’s partnership with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme, which aims to protect London’s cultural spaces from closure. “It had me thinking about those spaces across London that I used to frequent and that were important to me across the decades,” she says.
Creating a sound work for a functioning Tube station was a unique experience, says Bailey. “Elaine and I thought about the transitory nature of the audience and how to somehow create a work that might spark curiosity as they use the travelators.” Some sounds were off limits for operational reasons, but Bailey says the travelator hall itself became part of the composition: “It is a beautiful auditory space and I’m super happy how the work resonates in and across the space.”
The project is also accompanied by visual artworks which draw on archival imagery of the London venues mentioned. It also includes a partnership with experimental arts organisation Iklectik, now in residence at Peckham Levels, which will host a Sonic Stories listening workshop on July 4.
Despite its historical nature, Bailey hopes that the project will get commuters thinking about the present. “Honestly, I don’t think this artwork is going to suddenly create a force for radical change,” she says. “I’ll be happy if it contributes to ongoing conversations and community organising that is happening as we speak.”
Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner will be available to experience on the travellator between the Northern and Jubilee lines at Waterloo Underground station until Friday July 10.
