Our Culture Series Editor Alan McGuire talks to writer and musician Lydia Phillips about her role on the World Transformed Organising Committee 2025, where she was responsible for organising the Arts program for its most recent festival in Hulme. Founded in 2016 alongside Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign, the socialist festival has grown from a Labour conference fringe into an independent space for politics, art, music and activism.
Today, The World Transformed sees culture as part of political struggle, not just entertainment. However, in the early days of Corbynism it seemed like an ‘add on’ or after thought. How has that changed and why?
The World Transformed is one of the institutions of Corbynism where culture has always been somewhat central. Each year a different arts programmer has interpreted the brief in their own way. This year my focus was on different forms of live music that are embedded in Manchester. If the cultural programme seemed distinct, it was more to do with our dramatic change in political circumstance.
I will use music as an art form to try and explain this. When a political movement’s focus is on electoral success it can find itself focussing on Popular music ‘capital P’, in a somewhat instrumental way: Popular artists backing the Left matter because they will help us win votes.
Planning this year’s programme, I thought a lot about a different kind of “Popular” music: music of the people. Grime4Corbyn leaned towards the instrumental. Stormzy, JME and so on backing Corbyn in 2017 was what mattered, while the ruling class media ogled with confusion at millions of ordinary young peoples’ desire for a better life.
What mattered for me was the reception of Stormzy’s ‘Heavy is the Head’ dropping the day after that 2019 general election, amongst the activists whose hope had been lost amongst that winters’ endless rain and betrayal. When I need to remember the pain & righteous anger of that time I listen to that album.
When you think about Popular music as music of the people, you start thinking about the conditions which allowed Grime to come into being and become popular. You think about gentrification and the assault on our access to public space and the effects on artistic experimentation. Just as the times we find ourselves in demand the creation of organisations to fight, they demand the conditions to create the art and culture which will nurture and examine that fight.
The politics of the festival this year had little time nor need for instrumentalising big names in service of an electoral project. Western powers’ support for the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people has moved a generation in Britain to a place of no return, and the artistic programme demanded something more complex than mere joy and a celebration of our coming together.
While previous TWTs have covered difficult and painful subjects in visual arts & theatre, this year tried to include different forms of Art Music in the programme to give space to music’s unique abstracted ability to present the contradictions of our moment.
In the Jazz Loft, Bint Mbareh used audio of an interview with the Palestinian martyr Walid Daqqa as part of her improvised electronic set. Later, Maggie Nicols performed with her band Siapiau a new poem by Vicky Scrivener, ‘Sumud’.
Siapiau with Maggie Nicols in the Jazz Loft in the Garden Centre. Photo by Jack Witek.
On Sunday, Ben Lunn’s ‘the whispered yakka’ moved trade union delegates to tears, as Ann Wilkes, the soprano, recited pits names, now shut. Alan Bush’s ‘Dialectic’ astounded the audience, perhaps the most abstract piece of political music they would have heard over the weekend. Many in the audience told us this was their first time hearing a string quartet.
‘Ordinary people’ do not need to have political art forced on them. They do not need to be patronised and have things over-explained. Their imaginations, experience and ability to think deeply and complexly knows no bounds.
How do you decide which people and groups to invite when it comes to culture? What have been some of the highlights? (Including unexpected ones)
The arts programme was done with limited resources and time. I leant on communities of politicised artists across the city, such as those around Breaking Barz, who programmed the opening ceremony. The folk bands who played were also connected to political movements. A comrade who became completely central to the logistical & political operation got involved because she came, by chance, to a gig some of us were involved with in the summer.
I say this because these networks of socialists & artists matter. All forms of public life are under assault, and it matters who your audience is, it matters who you chat to after a show – it matters if you have artistic spaces where you feel safe to chat politics in a dark corner. It matters if you see the same people protesting as you do performing. It matters how we spend our precious free time with one another.
Highlights: I don’t know where to start. Undeniably, Dele Sosimi, who headlined the whole weekend. The crowd at the Nia was totally entranced. There was a real poetry to programming Dele on that stage, because it was the same stage Fela Kuti himself played on in the 1990s; Dele played keys Kuti’s band Egypt 80 in his teens.
There were moments of beautiful political interpretation by artists responding to the themes of the festival: e.g. Brown Wimpenny’s choice to perform 1960s Stalybridge group The Three Crows’ ‘Oh Hattersley’ about the Ardwick slum clearances, responding so poignantly to the experience of residents of Hulme & Moss Side.
Another highlight was the success of the play readings. Elmi Ali, local theatre maker, Njuki Githethwa, convenor of the Kenya Left Alliance, and Nigel de Noronha, longstanding anti-racist and housing activist, facilitated a collective reading and discussion of scenes from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo’s ‘The Trial of Dedan Kimathi’.
Comrades from the Palestinian Youth Movement facilitated the reading and discussion of Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace’s stage adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘Returning to Haifa’, while local actors & activists James Varney and Lamin Touray facilitated Caryl Churchill’s ‘Light Shining in Buckinghamshire’.
I was moved also by the responses of many of the artists to the audience. Mo’min Swaitat told the dance floor at the afterparty that the atmosphere reminded him of underground parties back home in Palestine.
It was a real honour having legend of improvised music Maggie Nicols perform for us on Friday night, and even more of an honour to hear how much she loved the response from our audience. Most artists
want to play for workers & socialists.
The staff at our venues invited different acts back, kept bits of the festival, and got involved in different ways. Chanukah Lewinsky’s ‘Liberation Sukkah’ – a constantly evolving series of eclectic events directed by its attendees for the Jewish festival of Sukkot – has been kept by the Garden Centre as a permanent piece of its architecture. A Garden Centre worker donated his boots to the construction of the “Mud Man of the North”, the chilling yet hilarious centrepiece of STAT’s ‘Secular Exorcism of the North of England’.
There’s been a shift on the left from protest to imagination. How does the festival help turn frustration into collective visions for the future? And how can the left do this beyond festivals like yours?
This is an interesting question, as the festival returned two years since the 7th of October, two years marked by the intensification of street-level protest politics in Britain against the genocide.
We opened the festival with a parade – at once protest, spectacle, performance and history lesson. Artists, builders, tradies & prop makers spent the weeks prior in the Boiler House in Moss Side building lanterns to represent the different tenets of our movement. This wasn’t a protest in the conventional sense, its only aim was the affirmation of a politics & culture – the loud and beautiful welcoming of thousands of people to our city.
As we turned the corner onto the site of the old Gamecock pub, Sally Casey, longstanding Hulme tenants activist, was there waiting: she took us in her arms and said she heard the drums and saw the parade and it reminded her of an older Hulme she used to know in the 1980s. Our movements have suffered great setbacks since that time, we feel those defeats across every front. They haven’t gone away, though, not really. Our task is to be sensitive to them, learn from them, nurture them and build their new forms. Hulme’s radical history was this festival’s cocoon and long-memory.
I wonder if there’s something in that for your question. Protest itself is imagination. The most beautiful spectacles are often meticulously planned. We have a lot of work to do and we can be deliberative in how we do it: we can choose the routes we march on.
We must no longer be at the whim of time but rather grasp history in our hands – only then might we break free. The process of creating art can teach activists a lot about organisation and commitment.
The festival ended with a performance of the Internationale, performed by two specially formed scratch ensembles for the weekend, the Manchester People’s Orchestra and the TWT International Choir. They were made up of musicians who’d performed across the weekend, volunteers and delegates to the Festival, and comrades who live in the flats around where TWT took place. Rehearsals largely took place at the build in Moss Side as the puppets were being constructed.
We will return and we will sound better yet. Not because we sounded bad – the Internationale, sung with commitment by committed people, can never sound bad – but because we will have worked harder because there is so much more to do. We hadn’t rehearsed enough; we didn’t have the conditions to do so. Our task is to build the conditions so that a People’s Orchestra and Choir can more easily perform the Internationale, in many more languages. The conditions that might allow that are the same conditions that we need to build the organisations that can keep fighting for the freedom of all peoples everywhere. I really believe that.
The Left has many ambitions – rightly so. From a certain angle, to a Left unused to this kind of mass musical work, I sounded crazy when I was recruiting people who very rarely sing into this choir. But building a choir and orchestra of socialists is an easier thing to do than defeating fascism, dismantling imperialism, patriarchy & the brutish, controlling will of Capital and its henchman. We said: let’s try this first. Then let’s see what we can do…
P.S: There is one thing I would like to use this interview to mention, as it was missed off the print programme. The Garden Centre Bar was named after our friend and comrade Josh Schoolar, who passed away far, far too young in September 2020. We marked 5 years since his passing recently, and the bar is named in his memory and honour: The Schoolar Bar.
Lydia Phillips is a writer and musician and a member of The Commission for New & Old Art (@thecommission.mcr), a Music/Theatre intervention operating in Manchester and New York City.
She was elected to The World Transformed’s Festival Organising Committee in April 2025 and was responsible for the Arts programme for its most recent festival in Hulme, Manchester last October.
Read the rest of the editions from the Our Culture series:
Culture as Class Struggle: An Interview with Jenny Farrell
Our Culture: RIP British Working-Class Cinema (1935 – 2025) by Brett Gregory
Our Culture: The Uncomfortable Truth About Public Libraries
Our Culture: Breaking through the Class ceiling with bread and roses
Our Culture: Games and Class Struggle – with Scott Alsworth
Our Culture: Prize-winning Poetry Only Please! with Andy Croft
Our Culture: Democratising the BBC
Our Culture: Prison, Class, and Art – with Nick Moss
Our Culture: Can the Church Be More Democratic?
Our Culture: Putting the Class into Classical Music
Our Culture: Our Code; AI, Class, and the Fight for a Digital Commons
