The Longplayer Trust

The Longplayer Trust was established at the end of 2000 to take responsibility for Longplayer’s upkeep for at least its first 1000 year cycle. This involves researching and implementing the means to keep Longplayer playing, in ensuring its sustainability, and making it available to as larger number of people as possible. The trust also looks after the listening post at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London.

The trustees are: broadcaster and entrepreneur Paul Bennun; John Burton, Project Manager for Urban Space Management; Marcus Davey, Arts producer and artistic director of The Roundhouse, London; Harry Eyres, writer, journalist and poet; film maker Sophie Fiennes; artist, musician and Longplayer composer Jem Finer; screenwriter and filmmaker Tony Grisoni (chair); Roisin Joyce; arts and entertainment producer Michael Morris; urban developer Eric Reynolds; Anne Robbins; Jenny Waldman.

Paul Bennun

Paul Bennun is co-owner and Director of Strategy of Somethin’ Else, a leading cross-platform production company in the UK and has been a game designer, entertainment producer and broadcaster. Somethin’ Else is the largest radio independent, TV entertainment indie and a major interactive content producer, in which it has been active for almost a decade.

Paul leads the Company’s interactive department and future product / business strategy. He holds internationally recognised awards in games, radio, mobile technology and interactive broadcasting such as Bafta Awards, Sony Radio Academy Awards and the GSM Association Awards.

A trustee of arts commissioner Artangel and the Longplayer Trust, he co-authored the British Government’s recent report on the future of digital music, and is an artistic collaborator with the likes of: several Artangel artists, writer John Berger, Theatre de Complicite and Rotozaza. Paul also presents science, technology and usability programmes for the BBC.

John Burton

John Burton is a chartered surveyor and Member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors who specialises in regeneration projects. As such he is responsible for various Urban Space Management projects, including Trinity Buoy Wharf.

He has wide experience working in the areas of local economic development, re-use of historic buildings, physical development and town centre strategies. He is a trustee of the Aluna Foundation and a Director of CIDA (Cultural Industries Development Agency), with whom he ran the Creative Space Agency which links owners of vacant property with arts and creative organisations needing space.

At Trinity Buoy Wharf he is part of the team regenerating this former buoy yard, which has become a centre for arts and cultural enterprises. There he is involved in creating new studios from converted shipping containers, programming public events and exhibitions and dealing with Longplayer on a day to day basis.

Marcus Davey

Marcus Davey, the Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Roundhouse, studied at Dartington College of Arts and soon after completing his degree he became the Administrator of Dartington International Summer School and then in addition, the Arts Manager for Dartington Hall Trust and Director of concerts programming for Exeter University.

In 1995 he was appointed the Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, where he created a new contemporary dance festival, a wide ranging creative education programme, an inter-festival orchestral series and commissioned over 60 works in music, dance and the visual arts and expanded the Festival in length, breadth and number of events. He was appointed Chief Executive of The Roundhouse Trust in 1999, where he over sore and managed the £30m re-development of the Roundhouse into a world class performing space and state of the art creative centre (the Roundhouse Studios) for large numbers of young people.

Amongst others voluntary positions have included Chairman of the PRSFoundation, including being Chair of Judges for the New Music Award, Chairman of the Hackney Youth Orchestras Trust, a founder Trustee of People United and an Advisory Board member of the Clore Leadership Foundation. He is currently Chairman elect of the Dartington International Summer School Foundation and Chairman of the Brook Street Band Trust.

Harry Eyres

Harry Eyres is a writer, journalist and poet. The author of The Beginner’s Guide to Plato’s The Republic (Hodder & Stoughton) and several books on wine, he has been a theatre critic (for The Times), wine writer (for The Spectator and Harpers & Queen), poetry editor (for the Daily Express) and most recently creator of the Slow Lane column in the Financial Times. He is also Editor-at-Large of Resurgence magazine.

Slow Lane, going against the grain of getting and spending, proposes a pause for recollection and enjoyment of the simple but profound, and often uncostly and uncostable, pleasures and values that make life worth living.

Harry Eyres is also a poet, author of the collection Hotel Eliseo (Hearing Eye) and contributor to poetry anthologies. He gives regular poetry readings at venues such as the Poetry Café in London.

He holds an MA in English from Trinity College, Cambridge, an MSc in Environmental Assessment and Evaluation from the LSE, and the Diploma de Estudios Hispánicos from Barcelona University and is currently writing a book on the Roman poet Horace.

Sophie Fiennes

Sophie Fiennes was born in Suffolk, England, in 1967. She attended art school briefly, worked with Peter Greenway from 1987 to 1992 and managed choreographer Michael Clark from 1993 to 1995. She began making her films in 1998.

She is widely acclaimed for her unique observational eye and strong sense of cinematic form. Previous films include her infamous The Perverts Guide to Cinema (2006), a film collaboration with radical thinker Slavoj Zizek. She made Hoover Street Revival (2002), a feature documentary about a Pentecostal church community in Los Angeles and the sermons of its resident preacher.

Her most recent film is Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010). Future projects include Grace Jones, The Musical Of My Life and The Perverts Guide To Ideology, her second collaboration with Slavoj Zizek. Fiennes was awarded a NESTA fellowship in 2000 and at Rotterdam’s 2008 Cinemart she won the ARTE FRANCE CINEMA AWARD.

Jem Finer

Uncomfortable with labels such as composer, sound artist or musician, Jem Finer sees all of his activities as emanating from the same obsessive curiosity that has led him, among other things, to make films, take photographs, form bands, draw, write, perform, compose, play music and build installations. An enduring fascination with deep time and space has been the impetus behind much of his work. Some of his other projects can be found on the following sites:

Score for a Hole in the Ground | Cosmolog | on earth as in heaven | El Rino | Zero Genie | jemfiner.net

Tony Grisoni

Tony Grisoni worked in many different areas of filmmaking before turning to screenwriting. Queen of Hearts (1989) was his award-winning first feature directed by Jon Amiel.

He has worked closely with a number of directors including Michael Winterbottom, John Boorman, Rankin, Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker and Terry Gilliam (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland). Grisoni is proud to count himself amongst the crew on board the ship of fools: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Vanished – A Video Seance (1999) was made in collaboration with performance artist and poet, Brian Catling. He and Catling have gone on to make other pieces for galleries and together host the annual celebration of the absurd, Cabaret Melancholique. Other artists he has collaborated with include Oona Grimes and Dryden Goodwin.

In 2001 Grisoni made the trek along the people smugglers’ route from the Pakistan/Afghan border, through Iran and Turkey to Europe, with the director Michael Winterbottom. The resulting film, In This World, won the 2002 Berlinale Golden Bear.

In 2005 Grisoni collaborated with Simon Channing Williams, Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe to write and co-produce Brothers of the Head, adapted from the novella by Brian W. Aldiss.

More recently Grisoni has adapted David Peace’s The Red Riding Quartet (2009) for the screen. He has also written and directed a number of short films including the BAFTA nominated Kingsland #1, The Dreamer (2008), Syncing (2009), and the award winning The Pizza Miracle (2010).

Roisin Joyce

Roisin Joyce is a development professional with experience of fundraising, events and project development across charities and higher education institutions.

She began her career working on human rights projects in Central and Eastern Europe, before returning to the UK as Development Manager for CARA (the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics) and later Deputy Director of NEAR (the Network for Education and Academic Rights), developing networks of activists in key world regions.

Since 2011, she has worked for the University of Westminster on the campaign to restore the Regent Street Cinema, raising funds from trusts and foundations, individuals and corporate sponsors, and developing a network of supporters from within the UK film industry.

Michael Morris

Since 1991 Michael Morris, along with James Lingwood, has co-directed Artangel, commissioning and producing site-based work by exceptional artists for particular places throughout the UK – both natural and architectural – in the visual, performing and media arts. Since 1992, Artangel’s landmark commissions have included Rachel Whiteread’s House, Michael Clark’s Mmm, William Forsythe’s Tight Roaring Circle, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4, Gavin Bryar’s and Juan Munoz’ A Man in a Room Gambling, Jem Finer’s Longplayer and John Berger and Simon McBurney’s The Vertical Line, amongst many others. Artangel Afterlives gives a more enduring form to some of these temporary works through a programme of publications adapting individual projects into videos, books and CDs.

Following his tenure as Director of Performing Arts at the ICA London in the 1980s, Michael Morris also established Cultural Industry in 1988 as an independent, international production company, presenting and producing new work across a complete spectrum of the performing arts. Long term relationships have been forged with Robert Lepage, Pina Bausch, La La La Human Steps, Brian Eno, Robert Wilson and Laurie Anderson, amongst others, in on-going partnerships with leading venues and festivals throughout Britain and beyond. Cultural Industry also initiates and produces projects which tour outside the UK, notably Shockheaded Peter, currently making its way across the globe and soon to be adapted as a feature film.

Eric Reynolds

Eric Reynolds has been involved in numerous urban regeneration schemes since the early 1970s, many including the practical re-use of historic buildings. In 1972 he spearheaded the restoration of a derelict building in Clerkenwell as one of the first craft workshops in the country. With two partners, he started the 1974 conversion of Camden Lock, which is now one of the top tourist attractions in London.

He has repeated this success at many other locations around the country. Those he has developed and/or runs include the Elephant And Castle shopping centre, Merton Abbey Mills, Spitalfields Old Fruit And Vegetable Market, Gabriels Wharf, Greenwich Market, Bishopsgate Goodsyard, Merton Abbey Mills, Platform 12 Kings Cross, Swindon Market Hall, Sneinton Market Square in Nottingham and Green Park Market in Bath.

A recent scheme is at Trinity Buoy Wharf, opposite the Millenium Dome, where Longplayer has been housed since its launch in 1999. This is the site of London’s only lighthouse, for which he won a development/management competition from the LDDC to develop a centre for arts and creative activity. Here he has pioneered the re-use of shipping containers to create buildings in a system called Container City.

He acts as a regeneration advisor across the country and is a director and member of several other voluntary bodies. He is a Board member of Tower Hamlets College, a Freeman of the Waterman and Lightermans Company, an Honourary Member of the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), Chairman of Leeside Regeneration and has recently been elected to the Board of Governors for the Museum of London.

Anne Robbins

Anne Robbins was brought up in the United States and Turkey, but has spent all her adult life in the UK. Her working career was spent in bookselling and publishing. She now divides her time between The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics, where she volunteers on the programme to support Iraqi scholars, and an organisation aiming to improve the effectiveness of philanthropy in positive social change.

However, it is her interests in music and early medieval history which inform her involvement in Longplayer. In particular, Anne has been fascinated by the efforts of 8th and 9th century Europeans to mold late Roman institutions to their own changed economic and social conditions, and to create new forms of government and social organisation within - and sometimes against - the widening influence of the Christian Church.

The long-term survival of Longplayer may not depend on fixed institutions such as the monastic libraries in which some Carolingian documents still remain, but it should have the benefit of an awareness of history. After all, our ability even to imagine the future is based on what we know of the past.

Jenny Waldman

Jenny Waldman is an independent arts consultant with wide experience of arts programming and management. She created the public events strategy for Somerset House and has continued to develop the programme there since it opened to the public in 2000. She has also developed programme for Tate Modern and Tate Britain and was for five years Director of Arts Centre Programmes at the Southbank Centre.

As an arts management consultant her clients have included the National Theatre, Almeida Theatre, Wigmore Hall, Arts Council of England, ENO, Barbican and Shobana Jeysingh Dance Company. She spent three years as an associate of AEA Consultants.

Jenny is also on the Board of DV8 and on the National Theatre’s Education Committee.