INTERVIEW: Public Record

Public Record by Mark Savage

Heading to the Fire Station for four unmissable shows between Friday 25th and Sunday 27th April is Public Record, a new showstopper of a collaboration between the National Theatre, Sunderland Empire and Sunderland Culture. Whether you love culture, music, dance or even just Sunderland in general, this is a gem of an all-rounder to catch at the city’s iconic Fire Station.

With such huge organisations coming together to form Public Record, it almost feels like a miracle that’s come out of nowhere, but Ross Millard explains how the idea for the play was actually initiated. “Public Acts is the National Theatre’s external programme where every year they’ll go to a different part of the country and work on a show with a large number of community participants. But Sunderland is the first time we’re creating the show ourselves from scratch, without any kind of adaptation.”

“Emily Lim (director) and Dan Canham (co-director and choreographer) first came up to Sunderland over a year ago now,” Ross shares. “It was then that they decided they wanted to make a music-based show about the past, present and future of the city.” Since their visit, Sunderland has deservedly been named an official member of the Music Cities Network, proving Lim and Canham’s vision right.

“The idea is that we are making an album about the city. The audience will come in and it willfeel – in a slightly deconstructed way – like they are walking into a recording studio. Everyone in the room on that particular night is there to make an album about Sunderland.” So if you’ve ever dreamt of making the perfect album, make sure you grab yourself a ticket for guaranteed success with what Ross describes as “a live session meets a piece of musical theatre”.

When shows say they have ‘something for everyone’, this one really means it. Audience members certainly won’t be lacking in terms of special guests and thrilling cameos either; Ross lists an array of stars including himself, Sarah Hayes and Field Music superstars David and Peter Brewis as the house band, a handful of We Make Culture’s Young Musician’s Project attendees, local youth dance troupe Dance Jam, his very own Futureheads bandmate Barry Hyde, Sophie Lisa Beresford, DJ Infinite and many more. With over 100 community participants, there are too many to name – all the more reason for you to go and watch the show.

Alongside Stuart Pringle’s writing of the play itself, Ross is writing the songs and the music for Public Record – no small feat indeed. But it shines through in conversation how passionate Ross is about the city and its cultural communities. “Because [with The Futureheads] we’ve been making music for a really long time, there were a lot of opportunities along the way to get out of the North East, but being from Sunderland is a massive part of our identity and who we are,” Ross expresses. “When it got to the point where we could actually do things in the city to help support other stuff and platform other people, we really started to prioritise that.”

To leave you on a tempted-to-buy-tickets note, Ross (after lots of pondering) shares his best bit about Public Record: “The thing that I like about it the most is that it’s all these different moving parts, tiny little cogs whirring in tandem to make this thing run like it should. What’s going to make it work is that we have lots of different people telling snippets of different stories, their own stories.”