by Greg Freeman

A community group has had a dream for more than a decade of establishing a permanent live music and community arts centre in Woking … and now they are so close they can almost touch it.

Woking council has said that the Phoenix Cultural Centre can have a former club and bar at Albion House, just outside Woking rail station, as the permanent venue for its Fiery Bird live music centre, subject to lease negotiations. That’s good news … but, amid the uncertainties of the continuing pandemic, there are still a number of issues to be sorted. 

Phoenix Cultural Centre will need to win further grants to refit the new building’s shell with toilets, disabled lifts, and many other things to make it accessible to the public. The vision is exciting – an arts/acoustic/spoken word cafe on the upper floor, open all day for people of all ages to meet, create, relax and share ideas, and stage the smaller gigs that used to take place in the Phoenix’s first premises in Goldsworth Road. And on the lower floor a 300-capacity live music venue for all genres and all ages, bringing in touring ‘about to break’ bands with local emerging artists. Such a space could also be used  for dance, record fairs, or daytime recitals.

The Phoenix Cultural Centre have applied to Your Fund – the Surrey county council community fund where proposals are made and the community vote if they want them to happen. It hopes to secure a share of the £100 million county council fund for community capital projects. Meanwhile the Fiery Bird has to move out of its current temporary venue in the former, nearby Quake night club because it is due to be demolished.

The group wants to work with other social businesses/charities and community groups to help strengthen their work for good, and says it is a non-affiliated, equalities-based organisation that is committed to social progress, owned and operated by the people of Woking for the community of Woking and beyond, and aimed at giving everyone equal access to the arts and self-expression.

As a local poet and writer, I have been interested in the progress of the Phoenix Cultural Centre from the outset. Back in 2013 I went down to their Goldsworth Road premises with Woking Writers Circle chairman Peter Morley to talk to Elaine McGinty and her partner Joe Buckley, the two leading lights behind the project. Thanks to their encouragement, soon some of us were turning up at the open mic nights to add some poetry to the music mix. Woking Stanza poetry group began holding regular poetry workshop meetings at Goldsworth Road. I’ve also looked in on the open mics when they moved to the Quake. Elaine even tipped Woking Writers Circle the wink about the possibility of doing regular reviews of Woking’s New Victoria Theatre productions – and had a word on our behalf with the theatre, too.

Of course, it’s not just about Elaine and Joe. Scores of volunteers have been part of the Phoenix Cultural Centre project from the outset, including the major effort to adapt and make the former Quake nightclub useable as the Fiery’s Bird’s ‘temporary’ live music venue.

However, Elaine and Joe have been influential and extremely hard-working figures on the Woking music scene for many years. They started working together in music in 2010 and in early 2011 set up Phoenix Cultural Centre as a community group. Elaine had been putting on gigs around the area for Oxjam from 2008 onwards and she and Joe were both in a band.  In 2008 Elaine put the idea to the council of an annual town gathering in the park celebrating everything that brought people in Woking together. The idea was adopted as the flagship event for celebrate Woking 2012 – Party in the Park.

Elaine said: “We ran the main stage and our band played alongside other mainly local original bands, This became an annual fixture run by the council and we went on to run a smaller event in the park called Phoenix Rising that focused on emerging local original music, poetry and smallholders. We continue to be involved with Party in the Park and place buskers there now and at the last one programmed a stage in the early evening. We also held the Bandstand marathon that year in the Town Centre celebrating the Paralympics. We also put music in the Town at the weekends in partnership with WBC and Woking Shopping in a project called Streetlive to give musicians a chance to share their own music as well as busker standards.”

Elaine admits that it has taken them longer than they had expected to achieve their goal of a permanent venue, but that they have learned many important and useful things along the way. She has always believed strongly that Woking needs a community, grassroots music and arts venue – is crying out for it, in fact. She said: “When we started the town was being rebuilt. It seemed to be incorporating chains and corporate life. We wanted to have something that reflected Woking’s identity, its mixture of people. People were seeking grassroots culture, especially music.

“I still believe we can do more. People run to the dance floor when they hear Town Called Malice and proudly claim it as Woking’s song, ‘’this is about my town’ and it ends with the line ‘I’d sooner put some joy back in this town …’ I think that is what we are trying to do. Community activism (so many hate that word but all it means is to act, anyway) is not a benevolent patronage to willing victims. It requires the community to be active in how things grow and are made positive. The project will reflect the community it is in, it can only operate with consent and support. We prefer to think of it as a catalyst of action, ideas and optimism. There is a hope that the regrowth from Covid can bring with it is the realisation that high streets need more than shops and restaurants. Locally-based, community arts and wellbeing can be the anchor to recovery of our social confidence and connected communities.”

In the middle of all this intense work to make things happen in Woking, you wouldn’t think that Elaine McGinty had any time left for her own creative work. But you’d be wrong. For many years she headed as vocalist the band Phoenix Chroi – “post-punk with a Celtic heart” – with Joe on bass guitar. “Joe and I founded that band together after our previous band, the IPO mob, had finished. He has been in music for over 40 years and had a great deal of experience of working at all levels whilst for me it is something I restarted later on in life. I have always written poetry all my life though and we’d incorporate them into songs. Then the venue got so busy and with four of you it is harder to pin down gigs and rehearsals.

“I had so many poems, I collated some of them under the working title Humanity Lands, it was the final poem that was made into a Phoenix Chroi song and title of our last album together. Humanity Lands was/is designed to be an art collective, based on two volumes of work. The first focus is on someone surviving an abusive relationship and alienation whilst trying to make sense of a tyrannical world. The second volume covers the poems of social justice from that world. We wanted to go out with the poetry and music and work with other artists to widen it, do workshops so others could write poetry, or art, or music around their experiences and perhaps perform. We initially worked with an illustrator Vera Howard who illustrated the two volumes and Graeme Reeves who had been in Phoenix Chroi, who produced the song versions, or put soundscapes over the words.

“Now, there are so many more poems that whilst Humanity Lands still exists as a project and post-pandemic we want to pick it up again, the new stuff is just going out from both of us as our own names and for the first time that will be at Weyfest this year.  I have no other name to hide behind, which is a bit scary.” She added: “I also write poetry for She Leads Change’s Lead More programme. Each month they hold masterclasses globally for (mainly) women on topics like ‘Resilience’ ‘Communication’ etc with expert speakers. I write a poem for each and choose a playlist of music, to encourage, and support and hopefully bring people joy as they study for the masterclass. Last year I was asked to write four poems for a young couple describing their journey of love.  One was trying to communicate with the other, they’d become estranged through miscommunication. A few months later they sent me their wedding photos. That was a big highlight of poetry for me. Those poems will never be published and that is even better for it.”

Returning to the current live music venue and community arts project, Ellaine once more emphasised the importance of the Fiery Bird’s prized band of volunteers, and added:  “Although we stopped the band one of the things we felt important is that the place is always run by gigging musicians/arts practitioners who know what a good, supportive performance space feels like and make sure that we offer that. It keeps us on our toes!”

If you’d like to support the Phoenix Cultural Centre’s bid for a share of Surrey County Council’s community funding, put a ‘like’ and agree with their project as it is pinned on the county map – here’s the link – next to Costa and opposite the station.