Dave Rowntree is one quarter of the British alternative rock group Blur. He’s the drummer. However, he’s also been a politician, a lawyer, an animator, a composer and quite a bit more.

Dave is appearing at Metronome in Nottingham this month doing a Q&A around a book he has released of early photos of Blur called ‘No-one you know’ all of which were shot in the very early days on his Olympus OM10 Camera.

Blur formed in 1988 and released their first album Leisure in 1991. In 1993 they played the Heineken Beer Festival on Wollaton Park. For those who weren’t around then, it was a bit like Splendour, completely free with no barriers or tickets. After this they made a couple of appearances at Rock City, most notably in 1997 in the same week that Beetlebum went to number one in the charts.

Aside from Blur, Dave has also been a radio DJ and in 2014 he was the regular Sunday night host on XFM. He’s been a podcaster and a series of ‘The Dave Rowntree Show’ went out in 2021 and can still be found on Spotify. He’s also stood as a Labour MP and was elected as a county councillor in Norwich in 2017.

Dave Rowntree is appearing at Metronome Nottingham on Friday 10 April in conversation with Dean Jackson from BBC Nottingham’s The Beat. 

This interview was conducted by LeftLion Editor in Chief Jared Wilson in March 2026.

Night Creatures is a LeftLion podcast, shining a light on the promoters of Nottingham. Your host and interviewer is Beane, co-founder of Nottingham’s beloved Soul Buggin’ night and he brings with him two decades of experience of putting on great parties in the city.

This month’s guest is Oli Gibbons from Tumble Audio, Risque Rhodes and Build Beats. He started out promoting death metal events at the Old Angel as a teenager, but moved onto attending raves like Misst, Futureproof, Rubberdub, Basslaced and Detonate.

Oli discusses playing in a Notts death metal band (Never Fail) and dancing for Gene Simmons, to putting on raves with Rubberdub and a Funktion One Sound System. He even wrote a dissertation at University on rave culture!

This interview was recorded in at Movers in February 2026. Find out more about Bohemian Events and Soul Buggin’ on the links below:

Night Creatures is a LeftLion podcast, shining a light on the promoters of Nottingham. Your host and interviewer is Beane, co-founder of Nottingham’s beloved Soul Buggin’ night and he brings with him two decades of experience of putting on great parties in the city.

The guests for this episode are Adam and Rob Perkins, two brothers from Nottingham, who founded Bohemian Events and Boho Festival. Influenced by attending parties at Venus nightclub and The Garvey in the early 90s, the duo began organising pop-up parties at Riverbank bar together in the 00s and soon spread out doing other events across the city.

Boho Festival is planning for it’s third year on 24-26 July 2026 with a line-up including The Farm, Utah Saints, Dub Pistols, Levi Roots and a comeback gig from local legends Bent. Previous guests have included Martin Kemp, Jeremy Healy, Graeme Park and Fat Digester.

This interview was recorded in at Movers in January 2026. Find out more about Bohemian Events and Soul Buggin’ on the links below:

Night Creatures is a LeftLion podcast, shining a light on the promoters of Nottingham. Your host and interviewer is Beane, co-founder of Nottingham’s beloved Soul Buggin’ night and he brings with him over twenty years of experience of putting on great parties in the city.

The guest for this episode is Nate Coltrane from Mimm (aka Music Is My Motive). Mimm started out as a clothing shop 14 years ago and moved on to become a much-loved club night as well as a cultural hub and recording studio.

On top of organising lots of parties, Nate was also the founder of Nottingham Street Food Club which ran for several years in Victoria Centre and Sneinton Avenues and now uses the Trent Bridge Cricket Ground as it’s regular home.  More recently Nate has also been working on a new project entitled Our Yard, which looks back at the history of soundsystem culture in the UK and beyond.

This interview was recorded in at Movers in November 2025. Find out more about Mimm and Soul Buggin’ on the links below:

Night Creatures is a new LeftLion podcast, shining a light on the promoters of Nottingham. Your host and interviewer is Beane, co-founder of Nottingham’s beloved Soul Buggin’ night and he brings with him over twenty years of experience of putting on great parties in the city

The guest for this episode is Killer Jim from Out To Lunch who has hosted jazz dance sessions in Nottingham for over a quarter of a century.

The Out To Lunch nights first started as an offshoot of his shop Culture Vulture on Mansfield Road and later moved on to venues like Casa, Dogma, Snug, Palais, Pandoras Box, Moog, Spanky Van Dykes, The Rose and Crown and more. 

This interview was recorded in at Movers in September 2026. Find out more about Out To Lunch and Soul Buggin’ on the links below:

Head over to the LeftLion Spotify channel to listen and subscribe to all of our podcasts.

Night Creatures is a new LeftLion podcast, shining a light on the promoters of Nottingham. Your host and interviewer is Beane, co-founder of Nottingham’s beloved Soul Buggin’ night and he brings with him over twenty years of experience of putting on great parties in the city

The guests for this episode are Laurence Ritchie and Steve Littleman from Smokescreen Soundsystem. They’re one of the longest-running soundsystems in Nottingham and have been putting on parties in the city for over thirty years.

Originally formed in Sheffield, Smokescreen launched amid the backdrop of the acid house and free party movement of the eighties and nineties. They eventually made Nottingham their base and moved over their parties out of warehouses and into nightclubs.

This interview was recorded in at Movers in August 2026. Find out more about Smokescreen and Soul Buggin’ on the links below:

Head over to the LeftLion Spotify channel to listen and subscribe to all of our podcasts.

Hetain Patel is an English visual artist specialising in performance, sculpture, video and photography. Born and brought up in Bolton, his work is influenced by identity, his family's Indian heritage and mainstream Western pop culture. 

He first came to Nottingham in 2000 as a Fine Art student and spent more than a decade living and working here before spreading his wings; exhibiting in Norway, India, Belgium and more.

Notable works from him include 2014’s American Boy where he showcased a range of influences from mainstream American movies, swirling together snippets of Bruce Lee, Batman, Gladiator, American Psycho and much more into a piece reflecting on his own identity. Then for 2015’s The Jump he dressed as Spiderman and recreated a scene from his childhood home wearing a very special handmade suit.

Hetain is back in Nottingham with his latest work Mathroo Basha, performing at Lakeside Arts on Saturday 1 November as part of Nottdance festival 2025.

This interview took place over Zoom in September 2025.

Bafta-winning documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has a long career under his belt of making surreal films exploring how people think, feel, and act in the West.

He first began his career as a conventional documentary producer for the BBC throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. However, the release of Pandora's Box in 1992 marked the introduction of Curtis's distinctive presentation that uses collage to explore aspects of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history.

Since then he’s made dozens of films and series in this style, many of which can be found on BBC iPlayer, including Bitter Lake (2015), HyperNormalisation (2016) and Can't Get You Out of My Head (2021).

His latest Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century is a five-part series of hour-long episodes, which just happens to feature archive footage from Wollaton Hall, filmed back in the 80s by the BBC. With this in mind we jumped at the opportunity to pick his brain about filmmaking, politics and more.

This interview took place over Zoom in September 2025.

Night Creatures is a new LeftLion podcast, shining a light on the promoters of Nottingham. Your host and interviewer is Beane, co-founder of Nottingham’s beloved Soul Buggin’ night and he brings with him over twenty years of experience of putting on great parties in the city.

The guest for this first episode is Felix Coulton, the director and founder of Nottingham’s Swing Dash Radio and the new Hockley venue Movers. Felix originally moved to Nottingham from Sheffield to study here, but he found our local scene so compelling that he’s still here a decade later and helping to shape our local dance music scene. He also regularly DJs in venues across the city under the name of OK Flex.

Swing Dash Radio is a Nottingham-based community radio project that operates a self-service livestreaming and recording studio for DJs, MCs, and producers to create their own radio shows and music content.

Movers is a DIY day-night venue and coffee spot at the bottom of Hockley which opened in July. It’s a three-storey multi-purpose space that hosts everything from gigs and club nights to DJ live streams, workshops and panel talks.

This interview was recorded in July 2025 at Movers in Hockley Nottingham.

James Graham grew up in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Notts and has gone on to be one of the most prolific stage and screen writers in the country. In 2020 he was awarded an OBE for his service to drama and young people in British theatre.

To date he’s written thirty five plays including Quiz (about the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire coughing scandal), Ink (about the Murdoch Empire) and Dear England (about Gareth Southgate’s tenure as England football manager).

James also has a prolific career as a screenwriter and has written dramas like Brexit: The Uncivil War (starring Rory Kinnear and Benedict Cumberbatch) and Brian and Maggie (starring Steve Coogan). However, James’ biggest TV baby is the prime-time BBC One drama Sherwood for which he is the showrunner. 

James has quite a lot going on at the moment. When we recorded this interview he was in a hotel room in New York. This was because Punch!, a play he wrote last year about a man from the Meadows, Jacob Dunne, who killed a man with one punch is heading to Broadway over there and premiering in September.

However in mid September James will be back in Notts as Dear England, is playing at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal as part of their 160th birthday celebrations. 

This interview took place over Zoom in early August 2025.