A big family of my friends are used to all connecting and hanging out over the summer schedule of festivals. When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, I was working with fellow Amateurism collective members Leo Walton, Rob Leggatt and Aymen Bensaad on a collaborative mix that we could release around the time Amateurism should have been DJing at The Beat Hotel festival in Morocco.
With all the year’s live music events cancelled, we wondered if we could do something with our mix beyond simply loading it up to a website for it to be streamed. Could we create a shared musical experience? I floated the idea of broadcasting it at a certain time via an online radio stream. Precisely one day after first discussing that idea, we launched Amateurism Radio – not just to air our collaborative 3-hour mix on a Friday night to be heard simultaneously in the kitchens of all our friends and family – but as a way to bring our musical taste and style of programming to our friends and family via our very own radio station.
I promptly designed an icon recasting the capital ‘A’ of Amateurism as a kind of radio tower complete with lightning bolts symbolising the radio signal. And from 30th March 2020, Amateurism Rado began broadcasting 24/7 – airing shows and mixes by the likes of Amy Douglass, Bill Brewster, Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip, David Holmes, Sophie Lloyd, Jonny Trunk, Pete Wiggs (Saint Etienne), Keith Tenniswood and more.
Our thinking was that if we could spread joy and positivity to even a small number of people as we all hunkered in our respective bunkers – then running Amateurism Radio was totally worth it.
We’ve since wound down our radio stream due to all of us getting back to our jobs post-pandemic. However, there is an archive of well over 1,000 radio shows and DJ mixes to peruse on the Am-Rad Mixcloud feed, and we’re still sharing music with our listeners: currently, we are ‘releasing’ two-hour Spotify playlists every few weeks, compiled by our regular musical collaborators and contributors – and the occasional special guest!
Another Burgerac + Rob Flowers project that I conceived and produced. We took three of Rob’s illustrated Burgershack characters and turned them into high quality, limited edition enamel pin badges. This involved lovingly art-working the illustrations specially for the format and then working with a specialist manufacturer to produce the pins. I also sourced and worked with other suppliers to create the packaging solutions – for the individual badges and also a rather splendid boxed set of all three.
All the pins were made available through my Burgerac website. The burger pin sold out on National Burger Day 2017!
Shortly after meeting illustrator Rob Flowers, we worked together to produce a limited edition made-in-the-UK melamine tray featuring the maccy dees inspired artwork that Rob originally created for my Burgermat Show project. The trays were available to buy for a limited period.
Working in cahoots with illustrator Rob Flowers, I art directed and produced this show of illustrations commissioned for my Burgerac’s Burgershack brand.
The show ran at legendary central London music venue and bar, The Social through September and October 2016 and all the artworks were printed as foamex-mounted cut outs that appeared to hover an inch away from the wall.
As well as art on the walls, Rob and I worked together to produce a series of limited edition, high quality products to launch during the show – namely three different enamel pin badge designs and a two-colour screenprinted T-shirt. These were available to buy at a launch event.
