FREE RANGE - Canterbury's 'best kept secret'
Artistic director of Canterbury’s adventurous culture promoter Free Range, tells us why free is the only way to be…
““We provide a receptive audience for artists to try out new things””
For more than a decade, in its own words, ‘Canterbury’s Best Kept Secret’, Free Range (@free_range_canterbury) is now ready to be discovered - in truth, it has been for a while.
An award-winning arts charity, it is dedicated to putting on adventurous music, film and dance events that you almost certainly won’t find anywhere else.
Having presented almost 250 live shows and worked with more than a thousand performers, Free Range has stuck to its key principle: it’s always free. No easy feat when having to rent spaces and pay musicians and all the other costs that come with putting on a live event.
Free Range - Canterbury
“I’d done a PhD in music and I was fed up with writing about music - I wanted to play music and put music on,” says Sam Bailey, artistic director and founding member of Free Range. “And I was also fed up with the role that money played in the whole situation as well. So we wanted free music… and have a place where musicians could play if they wanted to play, and people could come and watch if they wanted to come and watch - that kind of idealistic premise.
“So we kept that side of the bargain. It’s always free.”
Currently laid out as a nine-week series in the spring and another nine-week series in the autumn, live events take place on Thursday evenings in Fond Coffee (Fruitworks) in Canterbury, sometimes to 50 people, sometimes to 150 people. But far from it being a pet project, Free Range fulfils a very important role in Kent.
There is an important symbiosis occurring.
“It’s not easy to make it happen. But the thing is, that’s really crucial, because we put on music that no one else puts on in this area,” says Sam. “So what it does is attract curiosity, which is a real gift for a programmer, because it means I can put on stuff and no one has a clue what it’s going to be like - sometimes I don’t have a clue what it’s gonna be like. We can experiment.”
On the flip side, Free Range is providing a space for artists.
“We provide a receptive audience for artists to try out new things,” says Sam. “So if there’s an artist who’s got like a great set, and they’ve been doing it for a year or two, or they’re touring an album or something like that, we might give preference to an artist who wants to work in a new way or with a new person, or, you know, that kind of thing.”
And finding the right sort of acts isn’t a problem.
“We work in a really small scene. Adventurous music and related arts in the UK and in Europe is pretty small. So very quickly, artists who do this kind of thing started getting in touch.”
The interest in alternative music in Kent is growing, with independent venues such as Faversham’s Hot Tin dedicating a good percentage of its programming to exposing some absolute gems to new audiences.
“People are more interested in grassroots adventurousness,” says Sam. “And that’s what we offer. There’s a venue that started around the same time as Free Range called Cafe Oto in Dalston. And that has really been one of the main places in Europe - a big flagship for adventurous music.”
Canterbury audiences have already been treated to some superstars in their own genres.
“Within the tiny little world of free improvised music, jazz or modern jazz, we do put on really big names,” says Sam. “We get a lot of interest from our SoundCloud - it gets listened to from about 40 different countries. So some people [we put on] are really big in France, or really big in Japan.”
After satisfied regulars started offering cash to keep Free Range running, it registered as an arts charity to accept official donations and set up partnerships with key institutions in the area, as well as with the Arts Council.
“We get maybe three or four grand a year from donations, which gives us traction for extra funding bids because it kind of proves that people value what we’re doing,” explains Sam. “Some artists crowdfund for the fees for their own gig. We have partnerships with the University of the Creative Arts and Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Kent, too.”
Though times are hard right now, there is certainly a good feeling returning to live events after dissemination of the industry during the pandemic. An appreciation is returning.
“In the last 10 years, obviously, the digital experience has taken over, especially post-Covid,” says Sam. “And people value community more than they did back in 2012, I think.
“We are a community of artists and audience members and people who initially felt isolated in this area. Canterbury has got all these institutions like universities where you’re gonna get lecturers who are creative and students who are creative, but the cultural life category is pretty mainstream.
“And so what that created was a place where you got audiences for modern poetry, audiences for contemporary cinema, audiences for free jazz, audiences for experimental electronica, all coming together because there’s nowhere else to go. And that made for a really interesting community and a really interesting receptivity to whatever we did. I think that hunger for community is stronger now.”
Sam is also keen to explain the free and welcoming nature of the events that are put on, with families, die-hard fans and those looking to suck-it-and-see all equally welcome.
“There is cultural snobbery and cultural hierarchy,” says Sam. “And some people might feel like they’re going to be intimidated, but we create this really informal, friendly, grassroots kind of atmosphere, kids and dogs sitting on the floor, and then suddenly it doesn’t feel like there’s anything at stake. And also, because you’ve come there for free, you can just go if you don’t like it, but we don’t have many walkouts - most of the people are kind of just curious and engage with it, even if it’s something like they’ve never heard of before.”
Free Range’s Spring Season begins on the 23rd of March 2023.
