Medway River Lit returns
Plus requiem for a hoodie, new Singing Loins album, give art a second chance, our weekly events guide, and more
This weekend sees the return of Medway's biggest and best literature festival, Medway River Lit. Now in its third year, the lineup features a number of big names alongside more local talent. We’ve been talking to the organisers to find out more. Further down, we look at the memorial exhibition for a local artist’s hoodie, our music correspondent Stephen Morris reviews the new Singing Loins album, our weekly events guide, and lots more.
Medway River Lit returns
Medway River Lit is a literature festival that is now in its third year. We caught up with organisers Barry Fentiman-Hall and Sam Hall to learn about this year’s festival…
“It’s a literature festival by Medway, for Medway,” says Barry. “We will bring in the very best names that we can get hold of, but they will also be mixed in with the best names that Medway can produce,” says Sam, “which is pretty damn good”, adds Barry. They work to produce mixed bills that they hope will produce something for a mixed cohort of people.
A focus for them is providing entertainment for people who wouldn’t have had this opportunity before. “I’m not saying that there wasn’t entertainment that came to Medway,” says Barry, “but there seems to have been some point in the 90s where essentially anything that wasn’t a tribute band stopped coming here.” They are working to make Medway River Lit a corrective to that.
Sam and Barry are otherwise known as Wordsmithery. “We’ve been working in Medway for ten plus years on various literary projects,” says Sam. They built a working relationship with the council and “we were the people that they thought to ask about a literature festival” says Barry, “and we were up for running that.”
Having run to previous Medway River Lits, there has been things they have learnt from the experience. Firstly, “don’t try and do too much,” says Sam. The first festival was in the summer, and it ran over ten days, with at least one event happening almost every day. “We did about 60 events the first year,” says Barry, “which actually was crazy.”
The second festival had a large number of events, “and that dragged on for a month,” says Sam. This year’s festival is over a month, but they have worked to make it a more manageable 25 events. “We’re doing about 15 less than last year,” says Barry, “because it wears us out. It wears the audience out.” They have worked to keep the festival events special, and to make sure that there’s an event every five days, “and then it’s bright and fresh,” says Sam.
The festival launches tomorrow (Sat 1 Nov) at Chatham Library at 1pm, which will involve the former London Young Person’s Laureate, Theresa Lola, who will perform and present the Medway Youth Laureates their prizes. They will also be performing their poems, “if they want to,” adds Barry, “because it’s kind of a big deal standing a 13-year-old up in front of adults in a library. They’ve probably never ever done it.”
Local historian and anthropologist Chris de Coulon Berthoud will also be there to talk about the Kalomera project, which we will come back to next week. There is also a festival warm-up event tonight (Fri 31 Oct), which, because it is Halloween, features spooky short stories by candlelight from the various local talents, including Zahra Barri, Neil Thorne, and Sam herself. That will be at the Huguenot Museum, which is part of a strand of events called ‘Nights at the Museum.’ “We’ve got a lot of events there,” says Barry. “It’s the backbone of the festival this year, the Huguenot Museum. They’ve been really good”.
Big names at the festival this year include ‘cardigan polymath’ Robin Ince of Infinite Monkey Cage fame. Robin has been a stand-up comedian for over 20 years. This year Robin has released a memoir, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, which is about his “adventures in neurodivergence.” “For an awful lot of artists,” says Barry, “particularly us, who work in and partake of literature that have got traits like that.” It is an interesting book that we at Local Authority Towers recommend. “The one thing with Robin Ince,” says Sam, “is that he’s good and he’ll be on for an hour and it’ll fly by.”
There is Budgie, who was the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees, who has written a memoir called The Absence, which traces back to when he lost his mother, when he was quite young in St. Helens, when he was Peter Clarke. “He got called Budgie quite young actually, according to that book,” says Barry. “It’s because he started keeping budgies,” adds Sam. So don’t attend if you were attempting to solve that mystery.
Dave McKean and Simone Lia, two amazing graphic artists, will be heading an event about working in comic books. Dave McKean “is the towering name of comic art of the last 40 years, with credits including Sandman, Arkham Asylum and this writers favourite graphic novel, Cages and “he will be talking about his career and probably having a bit of a pop at AI,” says Barry. Simone Lia, cartoonist for The Observer, will be bringing her latest book, and the return of Fluffy Pulcino, “which may or may not be a bunny,” says Sam.
Caroline Bird is back, who is one of the festival patrons, and “one of the very best poets in the English language,” says Barry, “in my opinion.” She will be supported during a poetry evening by Charlotte Ansell and Barry himself. The end of the festival will be Kent’s best (citation needed) dominatrix, Melissa Todd. “That has to be in the evening,” says Barry. “We can’t let kids see that one.”
The festival is taking part in Carbon Literacy Action Day on November 13, a worldwide initiative where “they’re going to try and do a massive training event for the most people in the history of the world ever,” says Sam. The festival is doing a preview event for that, “because we’re planning on completing some training afterwards.” Working with Spotlites Theatre, their young people, who have created artworks that will be displayed throughout the day. For the evening, the young people have devised short plays about their concerns about climate change. They’ll be performing them and then there will be a Q&A for the audience afterwards.
Medway River Lit operates a pay nothing option, but “please do get tickets,” says Barry, “because some events will sell out.” “We will try and accommodate anyone that turns up on the evening,” adds Sam, “but the size of the Huguenot is quite finite.”
Check out the Medway River Lit website for all those events and to find out when and where they are happening.
Requiem for a hoodie
Local artist Jonathan Ash is hosting an exhibition at the Halpen Pop in Rochester: A memorial to his hoodie. We spoke to him to find out more.
Jonathan is an autistic colour-blind artist who paints in layers of colour. He struggles to blend colours and identify some shades. He paints in stark layers of colour, which people have equated with pop art, though Jonathan admits he has no idea whether he agrees with that. He has claimed colour blindness as his superpower for his art. Jonathan paints a wide variety of people and objects, but has a very popular rendition of Thomas Waghorn. He is currently working on a German Shepherd and a Brian Blessed. To be clear, these are two separate paintings.
Jonathan has become known for his red hoodie, a 20-year-old garment that he has worn when painting for the last nine years. It has come to a sad end because Jonathan promised his partner that when the cuff fell off (not a metaphor), he would throw it away. The arm of the hoodie, which was being held together by acrylic paint, finally gave up six months ago, and Jonathan is finally ready to let his favourite top go.
An opportunity presented itself to host an exhibition at the Halpern Pop. For Jonathan, it was fate, an opportunity to celebrate the life of the Hoodie and the work he produced whilst wearing it. He has been lent a mannequin, and the hoodie will have pride of place in the middle of the gallery. There will also be an exhibition of Jonathan’s paintings. He has chosen five large paintings, which he doesn’t normally get an opportunity to showcase. There will also be a range of framed prints, prints and cards.
For Jonathan, who has hosted a stall on Rochester’s former artisan market and has work available as part of Get Ready Artists, all the work exhibited at the Pop will be available for sale. Except, of course, for the Hoodie.
Hoodie is at the Halpern Pop gallery inside Cafe Nucleus in Rochester until 11 November. Jonathan will be present at the exhibition on 10-11 November. Jonathan’s work can also be found on his website.
Singing Loins release new short album
by Stephen Morris
A year after the release of Twelve, a collection of reimagined songs from their back catalogue, The Singing Loins have now returned with a shorter album – half the length to be precise – featuring five more new interpretations of old songs, plus one new song.
Camber ’87 is delivered with all the raucous, warts-and-all vigour that made the Loins so lovable in the first place. Richard Moore’s furious fiddling – fit only for the most frantic of hoe downs – is a fine, perfectly placed addition. Allen assumes the role of rough and ready lead singer; when he celebrates young women from a Medway town, they are very much “Cha’am Girls” with not a “T” in sight. Which is, entirely, as it should be.
While that song, together with ‘Cheer Up,’ profiles the riotous, Rochester-High-Street-of-a-Saturday-night side of The Singing Loins, the band’s twinned trademarked tenderness is amply represented with a heartbreaking song about an ill man’s desire to be put out of his misery (‘Drunk and Fed’) and an account of love and self-loathing set amongst the post-industrial decline of a north Kent landscape (‘Medway Delta Love Song’).
The highlight, though, comes with the first track on the album, a brand-new song called ‘Teeth and Eyes’ whose lyrics feature the album’s title. It is a faultlessly Loins-y song, full of misty-eyed memories of a perfectly imperfect past and a heavy yearning for some better tomorrow, tantalisingly out of reach, and comes complete with the same Bowie reference to star men that their old bandmate used on his Pod album.
Camber ’87 is a beautiful album that sees The Singing Loins looking both behind and ahead in equal measure. It is – as everyone who loves them has come to expect – a glorious blend of rough and smooth, of riotous jubilation and desolate sorrow, of unfulfilled pasts and uncertain futures.
It is, in short, a beautiful snapshot of Medway life.
Camber ’87 is released on 31 October 2025 on Spinout Nuggets.
In other music news, if you need a fix of live music, make sure you head to Rochester Social Club on Corporation Street on Saturday 8 November to see Allan Crockford and Ian Button’s excellent band Penrose Web (read the album review here) with support from the marvellous South Shore, who are promoting their single ‘The Ballad of Rats Bay’.
Help give art a Second Chance
Second Chance Medway is a charity in Medway helping residents facing food insecurity and insecure housing. Based in a community centre in Brompton, the charity provides a community supermarket and support workers. Steven is Chair of the charity1 and is organising an art auction to raise funds in November at Sun Pier House.
Last year, Second Chance Medway hosted a charity art auction at Sun Pier House, which raised over £2,000. This was used as a fund to provide Medway residents with food support at Christmas. This year, they are hosting another art auction to again raise funding to provide food support at Christmas, and there are two ways you can help.
Firstly, do you or somebody you know own art that you could donate to the auction? Can you drop the art off at Sun Pier House or at Second Chance Medway the week of 10 November? Then please let us know here and call in advance, ideally, to arrange a delivery time on 01634 401549.
The exhibition of artworks will be open to view at Sun Pier House from Thursday 13 November, 4pm until 8pm in partnership with Sun Pier House’s Gallery Lates. After that, Friday 14 November, 11am to 6pm, and Saturday 15 November, 11am to 4pm, with the cafe open for drinks and cakes.
We will be offering a silent auction so if you attend the exhibition, there will be forms available for you to leave your details and your bid on individual items. We’ll also be offering something that unofficially happened last year: Blind bidding, where some lovely people donated £50 and won a surprise piece of art. We’d much like to hear from you if you would like to do that.
You can learn more about the Second Chance Medway Art Auction via their dedicated website for the event.
Events this week
🎤 Sat 1 Nov - Robin Ince: Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal // Comedian, actor, and writer talks about his adventures with neurodiversity. Part of Medway River Lit. Hugenot Museum, Rochester. Pay what you can.
🗣️ Wed 5 Nov - Life Under Occupation: Stories from Israel and Palestine // Director of East Jerusalem YMCA talks on work being done to help young people recover from trauma of military detention. Rochester Cathedral. Free, booking essential.
🎸 Fri 7 Nov - B A Johnston + Schande // Unique musical stylings of the Canadian comic musician. Oast Community Centre, Rainham. Tickets £8.
Footnotes
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For full disclosure, Ed also sits on the board of trustees.