BBC Introducing: Reading's Jessy Blakemore on her debut single
"When I was co-producing these tracks I really wanted it to feel as if you were in the room with me as I was writing." Jessy Blakemore hopes her newly-released music has captured the intimacy of the songs she first composed in her bedroom in Reading.Her debut single burna is the first sign that she has captured the realness she was aiming for, something "super stripped-back, super honest, and super raw".The up and coming alt-pop artist is signed to record label Black Butter Records, who helped bring artists like Rudimental, Gorgon City, and J Hus to public awareness.
Blakemore first drew attention to her own talent via TikTok and Instagram clips of her typically stripped-down performances - her Kendrick Lamar and Shiloh Dynasty covers have so far been viewed more than a million times each.
She recently took her own songs to a larger stage, such as supporting SZA at BST Hyde Park, and appearing at The Great Escape and Cross The Tracks festivals.Surreal experiences have stacked up as the momentum has ramped up - after one gig actor and musician Idris Elba said her performance was like "watching magic", and her face has appeared on digital billboards in London."I could not believe it - like wow, what a compliment, it was insane," Blakemore says of Elba's declaration, while the billboard was "so bizarre" but made her feel "super proud".She adds: "I'm trying to turn my nerves into excitement... it's a super scary thing. "I've never released music before. I'm just trying to roll with it, take it all in my stride."
Blakemore counts Frank Ocean, Amy Winehouse, and Bon Iver among her influences.She loves Lauryn Hill too, particularly her 2001 MTV Unplugged performance, divisive upon release but largely since re-appraised as intimately capturing an artist baring her soul."I've honestly watched and listened to that Unplugged so many times," Blakemore says."I just think it's really nice to invite people into your world, into your space, into your mind."How does she find that process herself?"It's something I've had to learn to do, especially with performing. "It's very easy to be vulnerable in your own space, when you write a song in your own room, but taking it to a stage and performing it is so different."
Blakemore's single burna explores infidelity from a male perspective, a songwriting decision she says "opened up this whole new world", but she constantly draws inspiration from those around her."I love whenever I'm on the train or on the bus. I'm always so nosey, listening to other people, because people sometimes say the most poetic and profound things in their daily lives," she explains."So I'm just trying to pay attention to how my friends talk, asking loads of questions, kind of collecting data!"Jessy Blakemore releases her debut EP in September. burna is out now.
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The Sun
23 minutes ago
- The Sun
Naga Munchetty ‘had talks with Sky News' but her ‘tough & difficult reputation' scuppered bid to escape ‘toxic' BBC
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BBC News
41 minutes ago
- BBC News
How the Grateful Dead built the internet
Before the the internet took over the world, psychedelic rock band The Grateful Dead were among the first – and most influential – forces at the dawn of online communication. The Grateful Dead weren't just a band. They were a lifestyle. Originally a local blues outfit known as the Warlocks, they soon ascended to the rank of house band for, and by the late 1960s became a force to be reckoned with on the national touring scene. The Dead, as many call them, helped define San Francisco's characteristic counterculture, fusing folk and Americana influences with Eastern spirituality – as well as forward-thinking experiments with futuristic tools. But the Dead shaped far more than rock, psychedelia and '60s drug culture. Thanks to a group of music-loving tech enthusiasts, the Dead popularised what some call first real online community. Generations later, the ideas formed in this pioneering digital space still reverberate through our daily lives. Fans of the Dead, known as "Deadheads", were inspired by the band's embrace of all things technological, from their pioneering sound systems to their immersive multimedia visuals. Many fans were technologists and engineers themselves, working in Silicon Valley or at universities around America with access to early internet technology – which they were using by the late 1970s to swap hot commodities like Grateful Dead setlists and illegal drugs. In the 1980s, years before the World Wide Web, a virtual online community emerged called the Well (the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link). Centred on the San Francisco Bay Area of California, the Well not only thrived in its own right, but proved to be one of the most influential factors in the birth of the internet as we know it today. And its long life was in large part thanks to fans of the Grateful Dead. The Well was borne out of a project started by writer, activists and businessman Steward Brand, who began producing a print publication he called the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s. Inspired by the back-to-the-land movement which was seeing thousands of hippies across America start up communes, the Catalog was designed to provide "access to tools" – its slogan – that anyone could use to build their lives around the ecological and spiritual principles of the movement. That meant that alongside the physical tools it offered for sustainable living – like solar stills, looms, and seed kits – it featured an array of books and pamphlets by thinkers – like Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan – meant to provide insight into how to lead better, more thoughtful lives. The Catalog was enormously influential, and not just on hippies. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs called it "one of the bibles of my generation" in a famous 2005 speech. "We are as gods and might as well get used to it," the Catalog argued in the introduction to the spring 1969 edition, proposing the Catalog and its offerings as a means to develop an "intimate, personal power" to counteract the top-down, dominant "remotely done power and glory" of impersonal government and big business. The Catalog proved very popular, selling a million copies by 1972. Larry Brilliant, a doctor and activist who also happened to be the owner of computer company Networking Technologies International, approached Brand with the idea of putting the Catalog online. It was a radical idea at a moment when most people had never even heard of the internet. But Brand saw the potential in giving readers of the Catalog a place to talk to each other. Brilliant provided the money and equipment while Brand helped onboard users and build the community's culture, and in 1985, the Well went online. The Well was a "bulletin board system" (BBS), an early text-based approach to online communication that long predated the mainstream internet. People could dial into a BBS using a computer and a phone line, where they would send messages and share files. But the Well was more advanced than other BBS's. In the 1980s, these systems typically ran off a single modem, usually in someone's home, and only one person could dial in at a time. Real-time conversation between multiple users was impossible. The Well, operating out of the Whole Earth Catalog's San Francisco office, was among the first to change that. It was professionally run on command-line PicoSpan software, and sported the hardware necessary for multi-user use and conversation – fifty people could be online chatting at the same time. This was a revolutionary experience. And the Well was very different than purely commercial conferencing services like CompuServe that were around at the time: it was founded with a countercultural ethos at heart, based in the Whole Earth Catalog's do-it-yourself message, and was meant to encourage people from different walks of life to mix and mingle with each other, provoking interesting conversations and social change. Howard Rheingold was a freelance writer working from home, looking for ways to socialise – and procrastinate. Having been a devoted reader of the Whole Earth Catalog since its first issue, he was early to the Well, signing up soon after it was launched to the public in 1985. "Writing is a lonely affair," he says. "You're alone there with your typewriter, and your words. Instead of hanging out at a bar or a coffee house, I found that I could log into the Well and have that kind of conversation in between writing things." Rheingold saw the Well as a demonstration of the promise of electronic connectivity. He coined the term "virtual community" to describe the Well in his 1992 book of the same name, Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. In the book, he observed that "[most] people who have not yet used [networked communication] remain unaware of how profoundly the social, political and scientific experiments under way today via computer networks could change all our lives in the near future". At its launch, the Well was populated by a diverse group of conversationalists. The canny owners gave free invitations to journalists, computer enthusiasts and other prominent figures in a culture centred on Silicon Valley-style experimentation and forward thinking. The Well emphasised independence and ownership: the login screen told users "You own your own words". Many see it as the first time user-generated content was recognised as the inherent value proposition of an electronic tool. "It was a bit of an eclectic mix with a heavy countercultural flavour," says Rheingold. One of the recipients of these free invitations was David Gans, a Bay Area musician, DJ and Deadhead who was interested in the idea of finding an online home for the thriving Grateful Dead community. The Well was a perfect fit. Alongside cofounders Bennett Falk and Mary Eisenhart, he spun up the Grateful Dead forum. Eisenhart, at the time the editor of a Bay Area computer magazine MicroTimes, remembers how Grateful Dead fanzines made her think about connecting members of the fandom. "[The fanzines] would get these heartrending letters from people who thought they were the only Deadheads in their state, but now at least they could connect with other Heads," she says. "I was very drawn to the ability to overcome the barriers of time and space to connect with those you had some actual affinity with." Before long, the Well's Grateful Dead space exploded in popularity. At $2 an hour to dial in (about $6 or £4.50 today) along with its $8 membership fee ($23 or £17.20 today), the Deadheads devotion to endless discussion of their favourite band helped fund the entire platform. What was there to talk about? Well, a lot, according to Gans. Not all Grateful Dead fans went "over the wall" to the rest of the Well. Plenty stayed within their bubble, chatting away. The single forum for Deadheads got so unwieldy it had to be split into multiple forums, with separate ones popping up for tours, tickets and tape recordings of live shows, says Gans. There was also the deadlit conference – "conference" being the Well's terminology for an individual, topic-based forum within the larger platform – where users could talk about the Dead's connections to literature, and dissect the poetry of the bands lyricists Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow. More like this:• The failure that started the internet• The people stuck using ancient Windows computers• The hidden world beneath the shadows of YouTube's algorithm Barlow himself was a major figure at the intersection of the Grateful Dead and the history of the internet. Raised on a ranch in Wyoming, and introduced to LSD by Timothy Leary himself during college, he ended up falling in with the Dead in the 1970s. He wrote songs for the band before heading back to take over his family ranch, where his distance from the Bay Area contributed to his interest in the burgeoning field of personal computing and online connection. Gans remembers interviewing him in 1982, a few years before the Well came into being. "He said [of the Deadheads], 'this is a community without a physical location.' And that really stuck with me." Grateful Dead fans already a nationally distributed group which came together regularly at concerts, and through the Dead's sizeable mailing list. In fact, the Well wasn't even Deadhead's first foray into digital communication. According to Gans, one of the first non-technical groups that formed on Arpanet, a precursor to the internet run by universities and the US government, was devoted to discussion of the Grateful Dead. A full embrace of cyberspace was a natural next step. Barlow wasn't immediately on board, however. Gans recalls his skepticism: "[He said] 'Well, I'm not sure I want to be part of anything where you have to make up a nickname for yourself.'" But it wasn't long before Barlow embraced the Well, and soon, he came a pioneering force in as the internet launched into the mainstream. He was the first person to apply Neuromancerauthor William Gibson's term "cyberspace" to the emerging network of computer and telecommunications systems linking people together around the globe. Barlow started referring to cyberspace as an "electronic frontier," drawing on his experiences growing up in Wyoming, in the Mountain West of America. The Well and other similar outposts, like Prodigy and The Source, were akin to the Wild West, writes Barlow, "vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous [...] hard to get around in, and up for grabs". Barlow found a home within the Well's community of hackers, free speech enthusiasts and home computing pioneers. He quickly understood the Well's potential as a harbinger for the ways the internet would change the face of human communication forever. On the Well, Barlow engaged in long discussions, often debating with anonymous hackers and "phreaks" – or telephone hackers – about the role that networked communication was to play in the future of humanity. After some run-ins with clueless law enforcement officers, Barlow recognised a growing need to defend the internet users against the overreach of institutions and governments who would want to control it. In 1990, he founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – an advocacy group that fights for free-speech and other civil rights in the digital world. "The next thing I know, he's founding the EFF and he's the Lord Mayor of cyberspace!", Gans says. The EFF quickly gained a national profile, and 35 years later, it's still one of the most influential forces in the world of technology policy. For cyberspace denizens who wanted to engage in discussion and collaborate with the people who were shaping the future of virtual communities, the Well was the place to be. Alongside the Well's many Deadheads, members included technology journalists like John Markoff and Steve Levy; entrepreneurs Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Steve Case, founder of AOL; homebrew computer enthusiasts like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak; phone phreakers and hackers; libertarians; hippies; and even the founders of Wired magazine. "Over the years, we've had people that were retired captains of submarines, we've had journalism professors. Jane Hirschfield, a very famous poet, is a regular, and John Carroll, who was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, was the host of the media conference for many years," Gans recalls of the diversity of the Well's user base. Many of these groups got into frequent disagreements. But that was part of the convivial spirit of the Well, says Rheingold. "You don't have a lot of great conversations with people who agree with each other about everything all the time," he points out. "Having some friction can help foster a lot of lively conversation." At first, geography limited the Well's early users to the area surround its servers in San Francisco. Long-distance users had to pay requisite phone fees to dial in up, until 1990 when the Well was connected with the global internet. Though there were never more than 5,000 or so users of the Well at its peak, its coverage and innovators of the day and its starring role in the creation of the EFF gave it an outsized reputation compared to more popular mainstream platforms like CompuServe and Prodigy. "Being on The Well kept me six months ahead of other people about what was actually happening on the internet," said tech executive Jim Rutt in a 2022 interview. It was a vital incubator for ideas and movements in computing, communications and social change. But as it grew, Well faced some difficulties in governance, as Rheingold recalled, thanks to its libertarian free-speech ethos. "There was no police. It was consensus, which meant that in order to be sanctioned or to even be thrown out for bad behaviour, it required people on the Well to argue about it endlessly. I mean, thousands of posts." Lessons about moderation were learned, such as – for Rheingold – the vital importance of moderators being more like hosts at a party, becoming intensely proactive about what content to allow and promote. "Moderators are filters and sensors," he said, whereas hosts "greet people at the door, introduce them to each other, break up the fights." As for the Well, it subsequently came under the ownership of a variety of different companies, including Salon magazine, which acquired it in 1999. And it's still around today, home to a slowly dwindling but loyal group of users, many of whom have been on the Well for almost 40 years, says Gans. He reveals that discussions are beginning on how best to archive and sunset the platform at some point in the future, preserving it for future generations to look back on. Looking back at the history of virtual communities and social media since the Well's heyday, Rheingold reflects on the fact that small, dedicated affinity communities are a dying breed. "Facebook really put a damper on the proliferation of smaller communities of people with a shared interest," he says, in favour of larger platforms full of audiences which could be mined for data and served with advertisements. "Once your community members are the product rather than the customer, you don't have a community," says Eisenhart. The Well represents a moment in history when, as founder Steward Brand put it in Rheingold's book, "personal computer revolutionaries were the counterculture". Long before the mainstreaming of social media and smartphones, a virtual community was a truly groundbreaking concept. -- For more technology news and insights, sign up to our Tech Decoded newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights to your inbox twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
43 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Adeel Akhtar: ‘It seemed late in the day to start noticing Asian actors … we've been here a really long time'
A decade ago, it would have been rare to have an Asian actor playing the British prime minister or leader of the opposition. But in the space of a couple of years, Adeel Akhtar has done both. He was the PM in the Netflix drama Black Doves, which took the world by storm last year, and now he's stepping into the shoes of a man vying to be leader of the opposition at London's National Theatre. For Akhtar, who has been working as an actor for more than two decades, there has been an undeniable shift in the kind of roles he's been offered in recent years. The British Asian experience is no longer a niche subject. 'I wouldn't dream of being offered these types of roles previously,' the 44-year-old tells me when we meet at the National during a Friday lunchtime. 'We're sort of redefining the idea of what an everyman can or should be. We're suddenly in a situation for it not to be a massive thing to be Asian and to be the prime minister; it's just accepted. You can be critiqued in the same way as anyone else, and it doesn't matter what your heritage is. Which really wasn't the case when I first started out. You would find yourself playing a particular type of role over and over again.' Of course that reflects changes in both British politics – we are, after all, living in the wake of 'Dishy Rishi' in No 10 – as well as evolving attitudes to casting. From Meera Syal to Riz Ahmed to Dev Patel, we're seeing more brown actors stepping into roles where their ethnicity and background are merely incidental, and not the main focus. 'I'm blessed to be able to present some really complicated ideas, and help move conversations on. Working at the National has always been a massive dream,' Akhtar says. He plays the lead in The Estate, which premieres in early July. Directed by Daniel Raggett and written by Shaan Sahota (a full-time doctor in the NHS), the play explores fictional MP Angad Singh's attempt to become leader of his party. For Akhtar, it is an opportunity to probe biases within cultures, politics and society. Singh finds out he doesn't have his party's backing, and interrogates the reasons behind that. At the same time, he learns that he has inherited his father's entire estate, while his sisters 'have been completely overlooked'. The play is based on Sahota's own experiences of growing up in a south Asian community, but Angad's personal sphere is distinct from his political sphere – it doesn't influence his running for leader, and his politics isn't affected by his heritage. Akhtar may not be a household name yet, but it feels as if he's been in everything. His recent credits are like a roll-call of every massive show on TV over the past few years: Utopia, The Night Manager, Killing Eve, Sweet Tooth, Sherwood, Fool Me Once, Showtrial. He has also starred in films including The Big Sick, The Nest and 2021's critically acclaimed Ali & Ava. I wait for Akhtar in a small meeting room within the network of nondescript tunnels of the National Theatre building. When he arrives, it's like seeing an old acquaintance. He's wearing a loose blazer from the Salvation Army, rolled-up khakis and a pair of black trainers he 'bought for £30 online'. A faded cap sits askew on his head, giving him the look of a mischievous schoolkid. Akhtar's dark, hooded eyes and turned-down mouth mean he's described as 'hangdog' in almost every interview he's given, but they're also what make him so relatable. He tells me people often stop him when he's out and about for 'pleasant chats' like they would with a pal. What do they want to talk about? 'Oh, everything,' he says. 'The themes of the shows I'm in, my performance. Particularly Sherwood, which seemed to elicit a huge reaction from people.' Akhtar's devastating portrayal of a man who hides in the forest after killing his son's wife in James Graham's crime drama has often been referred to as a show-stealing performance. Born in London to a Pakistani father (one of Britain's first Black immigration officers) and an Indo-Kenyan mother, Akhtar knew early on that he wanted to be an actor. As a child he attended speech and drama classes because his parents believed they were elocution lessons that could teach him to 'speak properly'. It was here, during a reading of Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky, that he found his love for performing. He went to boarding school in Cheltenham, where he was one of just a handful of brown kids and had stones thrown at him, then did a law degree due to pressure from his father, before retraining at the Actors Studio drama school in New York. It was in 2002, on his way to audition for the drama school, that he experienced a life-changing incident. Upon arrival at JFK, a fleet of FBI cars pulled up alongside the plane, handcuffed him and took him away. They had mistaken him for a terror suspect. 'I was detained for hours,' he says. 'This was just post 9/11, so everything you're doing is suspicious and triggering, just because of the colour of your skin.' It was a harrowing experience that sparked years of reflection. 'For ages my name was on the system, so every time I travelled to the States I'd set off an alarm and have to be questioned.' It is ironic that his first film role that same year was as a 9/11 hijacker in Let's Roll: The Story of Flight 93. But Akhtar has said his experience has actually informed some of the work he's chosen to take on, that he's drawn to stories about people who lack a safety net and put their misguided faith in systems that don't serve them. His first major role came a few years later, aged 30, in Chris Morris's 2010 cult classic Four Lions. Akhtar played a bumbling Muslim extremist who accidentally blows himself up in a field of sheep. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion He calls Four Lions a 'groundbreaking' film. '[Islamic terrorism] was a real hot topic at the time. We were in a situation where we were terrified of the Muslim community, both here and in America. And the film was so irreverent, it just took the teeth out of it. It portrayed these young men as buffoons, clowns, not something to be feared. Because it doesn't matter if it's a bunch of young Muslim lads, or young white lads or whatever, you just get lads in a room and it's going to be a shitshow.' Despite the success of the film – fans still shout its most famous line 'Rubber dinghy rapids bro!' at Akhtar – the offers failed to come in, and the actor found himself living in a van and desperately searching for work. About that time, he had his beard yanked by a stranger in the street and, on another occasion, a group of men started shouting racist slurs at him when he was with his wife, the director Alexis Burke. But if Akhtar is holding on to any residual anger, he doesn't show it. 'Even as a teenager, I refused to let anybody tell me I was just one thing, because it's false,' he says. 'If I feel upset by those experiences it means they've won. Whatever they were trying to make me feel worked. The only option is to blankly refuse that. I'm lucky now I can look back on it, with the career that I've had, and interrogate it in different ways.' In fact, he adds, he often draws on his own life in his work. 'I'm always working that way. I ask: what do I have in my experience that is close or approximate to this character?' Akhtar has the ability to make you root for his characters, no matter how shocking their actions. He won his first Bafta for his performance as the Muslim father who murders his daughter and then kills himself in the BBC Three drama Murdered By My Father, making him the first non-white man to win the lead actor gong (he was previously nominated for Utopia, and has since won a best supporting actor Bafta for Sherwood). It's an event the actor calls 'bittersweet … You can't not celebrate winning a massive award. I was happy and proud of making it happen, but there was also this overwhelming feeling of it being strange. We've been here for a really long time, so 2017 seemed pretty late in the day to start noticing British Asian actors.' He has become so sought after that his nickname in the business is Ideal Actor, a play on his name. Does he feel vindicated in his decision to stick with acting, despite those years in the van? 'There was never an option of not doing so, because the alternative was returning to a life of law.' What kind of lawyer does he think he would have been? He laughs. 'Oh, a terrible one.' Over time, the resentment Akhtar once felt towards his father for pushing him into that degree has evolved into understanding. 'I've got kids myself now, an eight- and six-year-old, and I totally get it. My dad came up against a lot of struggles, pain and discomfort. It's the job of a parent to make sure your children don't feel that. He was going to do everything in his power to mitigate against it.' We discuss that common immigrant experience, of feeling you have to make sacrifices for your parents because of the huge sacrifice they made for you. In fact, he says, he has come to believe that cultural assimilation is the greatest act of creative expression. Even if they couldn't understand his career choices, he feels he can trace his talent for creativity straight back to his parents. 'I'm writing a film at the moment which is loosely based on my mum and her experience of coming over from east Africa,' he explains. 'I was working out why I was drawn to this story. I was thinking of her leaving Nairobi as a 16-year-old. How she got on a plane and flew over. The only thing she could hold on to was this faint idea of what her life could be, and the only thing at her disposal to meet that vision was her sheer will. It's like being in front of an open canvas, or the first page of a novel. There's nothing more terrifying than looking at a horizon and it being blank, with nothing to orient you.' He dwells on this. 'Maybe that's why I stuck with the acting on some level, because I saw in my parents the tenacity and will to meet your objective,' he adds. The Estate is Akhtar's second play in two years, after starring in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at London's Donmar Warehouse last year, and he says he would love to do more. It reminds him why he wanted to act in the first place. 'It's just you and the audience. The thing that makes it terrifying is the thing that makes it so fulfilling.' Is there anything specific he hopes audiences will take away from The Estate? 'We're so multiplicitous as individuals, I just hope people have an insight into an experience they otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. In this instance, it's seeing someone who is British Asian in a way they wouldn't necessarily have seen them before. You want people to bypass the nonsense questions – like why is this person in this position? – and get to the proper questions, like am I feeling something true?' The Estate is at the National Theatre: Dorfman, London, 9 July to 23 August.
