The annual community songwriting workshop

The 2023 Workshop took place in nearby Stoke Newington earlier this month.  Today we’ll present a film of the workshop and perform the songs written during this workshops, and then open up to a Q&A with the delegates.

The purpose of our workshops is to connect with the Hackney community which hosts our festival,  and to create opportunities for our members to broaden their skills as song writers. This year we joined up with students from East London Arts & Music College, and had coaches Boo Hewerdine and Charlie Dore to help the songwriters with the songs.

This years objectives: 

1) For the songwriters: An opportunity to learn the skill of writing a song based on another person's experience, and to co-write with experienced songwriting coaches.

2) For the students: An opportunity to share their stories and hear them transformed into song-form in the style of the songwriter.

We were very happy to be backed by Arts Council England, Hackney Council and SESAC .

“SESAC has its emphasis on representing a smaller group of songwriters so that we can be as supportive and empathetic as possible.  To that end, we seek to present our writers with Showcase opportunities, co-writing opportunities and to put them in environments such as these - environments where writers are able to utilise their skills to take important issues to a larger audience and, of course, to provide the narrators with a vehicle to tell their story as they think it should be told”  John Sweeney , Jan 2023

Huge thanks to our writers : Michele Stodart, Simeon Hammond Dallas, Gareth Dunlop, Annie Dressner, Dan Razza, Danny Hepworth and  Ryan Johnston.

And the ELAM students Ria, Eshan, Kitty, Jevani and Joshua