01/02/2025
Artist Ian Giles is a student of countercultures, and recently curated an exhibition about the squatting communities of the seventies and eighties on Brixton's Railton Road, home to anarchist bookshops and at one point, the activist pirate radio station Our Radio, which beamed out on Wednesday evenings in 1982 radical news and information, before the authorities had it closed down permanently. Now, reports the Guardian newspaper, Ian has persuaded a hippie rock collective, who recorded the first gay rights anthem in the UK, to reform for a new recording of the song by the group "Everyone Involved". and and Wales. Now, the anthem has been rerecorded by the original members of Everyone Involved, as part of an exhibition of the same name by London-based artist Ian Giles. A film of the recording session, when the band reunited at RAK Studios in London, is currently screening at Southampton’s God’s House Tower, alongside wall hangings by the artist. The hand-stitched quilts and cartoon-like paintings pay decorative tribute to the queer rights movement, while also creating an intimate, cosy feeling for the audience. Giles says that such intergenerational dialogue “continues beyond the work” – and inspires him in his own projects. Making this film, he discovered that the members of Everyone Involved are the same “radical hippies” that they were in the 70s. Sometimes, activists become more straight-edged as they get older, “but actually, in a great way, they’ve all had these wonderful, creative lives.”
