Adult Youth Club.

In this collaborative project, Paul Bence and I explore the loss of youth. Particularly the misconception that the loss of youth means losing touch with the things you’ve been passionate about your entire life. Or that ageing somehow necessitates you stop doing certain things. As we stick to and hone our craft, we simultaneously build positive habits that can follow us throughout our lives as long as we enjoy them. Slowly developing our skills in whichever field we’re interested in.

My proxies for this idea were hosting a session on a pirate radio station called Laylow FM, broadcasting from a secret location. DJ OneTonn, MC Brim, and Big P have been performing together on pirate radio since the early 2000s when illegally broadcasting was an expensive, technical, and dangerous endeavour. Around two decades ago, being featured on pirate radio was a respected route into the music industry for many aspiring artists. It was a game of cat and mouse with the police, putting radio masts on tower blocks and forcing your way onto the airways. Now, the advent of the internet for entertainment has changed the way pirate radio broadcasts, but it hasn’t in any way dulled its edge. OneTonn and Brim embody a spark that never went out; this spark is visible in our photographs. The name of our project, “Adult Youth Club”, is taken from how OneTonn describes his thoughts about the radio station and its community.

I distinctly recall never sparing a moment to think about “growing up” when I was young. Yet, I knew getting older happens to us all. We want to give our audience hope for the future, to show them that so long as they love what they do, they never need to stop.

All of the photos on this page are mine. Follow this link to see Paul’s work.