Tony Cealy is one of the creators and narrator of SONGSTREETS, a new app launching this spring, providing users with fascinating new way to explore Brixton.
SONGSTREETS takes you on an interactive, theatrical journey through this south London neighbourhood, following in the footsteps of its residents in this unique guided tour. Inspired by Aboriginal Australian song lines, a 60,000-year-old tradition of mapping the land, SONGSTREETS was made in response to a Brixton community project led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musician Jessie Lloyd in Autumn 2022.
More information on the project can be found here
What can you tell us about new app SONGSTREETS?
This app is amazing! You can download it and get to hear some fantastic Brixtonite characters, and those characters will tell you stories, memories, songs, conversations in a way that allows you personally to delve into the hearts of these beautiful Brixton people. You can do it any time, day or night, 24 hours a day. You can pause, rewind, you can revisit different spots on the walk… It’s a wonderful experience for somebody to learn about Brixton and its rich radical history.
What inspired the creation of the app?
81 Acts (the community forum set up to commemorate the 1981 Brixton Rising) approached Border Crossings to do a piece of work connecting Brixton to their Indigenous festival, ORIGINS, and Border Crossings came up with the idea.
This amazing Aboriginal Australian artist, Jessie Lloyd, was going to come over and co-develop a piece of work with Brixton communities. She came over in October, Black History Month, last year and she spent several weeks meeting local people – artists, residents, tenants, cultural organisations, elders, school children – in different places – libraries, theatres, in our community hubs and hot spots.
And she was admitted. She was able to have a conversation with them in relation to her own background and her grandfather’s background as a Black man who’d been unjustly treated, called a rioter and imprisoned. She’d talk with them about how to navigate around the place, but also what songs come to mind, what songs remind you of a particular place.
She was able to work with a wide range of people in the community and get them to share their stories of Brixton and what music meant to them. Out of that residue that was left by Jessie Lloyd, with the amazing Thor McIntyre-Burnie from Aswarm, working with Border Crossings, the idea of the app and the way it works was created and put together.
Tell us a little more about working with Jessie Lloyd?
Working with Jessie Lloyd was really interesting, because she was able to use her music to share her own story and her grandparents’ story of oppression and what they had gone through. And it was definitely relatable. A lot of the people that she met here in Brixton could identify with and connect with her straightaway, because she was able to just pick up that guitar and share a song, and then after the song she was able to have a conversation, which really brought Australia and Brixton together in that moment.
She has a really wonderful spirit of being able to formulate a song based on someone’s story, someone’s history, someone’s heritage. It was just a really incredible time. It felt like she was here for a long while, but it went so quickly, and I wish I could have spent a lot more time with her and her family.
What was it like narrating, and what did you learn about Brixton and its community in the process?
When we were doing the work with Jessie, I had no idea that we were going to be doing the narration. So when the app was being created and we realised that we were going to be weaving stories and having a central narrative, I just thought “Oh, I’ll just throw in a few words here”. But then the actual sense of narrating was really exciting, because it’s about telling stories and it’s about giving a description for the listener of what they’re going to experience, what they might see, what they might smell… Narrating for me was just a real joy. It was very natural, because I’m from Brixton and I know a lot about Brixton, but it was a really great experience.
In terms of what I learnt about Brixton… there’s always something new that you can learn about Brixton! I think one of the big things was that Brixton has this rich radical history from the 60s and 70s. And Brixton’s always been known as a place of entertainment, going back as far as the 1700s, it’s been a place where people have gone to seek entertainment, in those old-time music halls and variety shows… It was a stopping-off place where people could get lodgings and then perform in the local pubs. So for me Brixton has always got this sense of a rich performance spirit within it.
What’s been the biggest challenge in getting the app launched?
Wow. Well, just coordinating the material and making that into a coherent narrative was very difficult. We had so many different kinds of narrative, and it was about trying to create one narrative that would sew up and connect all of the stories and songs that we had collected into this app. That felt like a really big challenge, especially for Thor in stringing it all together.
What would you say to anyone thinking of downloading SONGSTREETS?
I would say that if you want to hear a little bit about Brixton, if you want hear real stories of Brixton from real people – the characters, the memories, the smells, the essence, the heart of Brixton – this is the one. If you think about it, Brixton is the Windrush borough, and that’s huge this year with the 75th anniversary.
When people came over on the Windrush they came directly to Brixton. So I would say to anybody thinking of downloading SONGSTREETS is that it’s a really powerful way to learn about these communities, history, culture. It’s an amazing experience, and if you want to really think about Brixton, this is the app that you shouldn’t leave home without!
