Music

Time Out has come to the New Cross Inn for the launch party of the Deptford X Festival, an independent film festival in deepest south-east London, and it’s great. As well as film projections, there are bands playing and art upon the walls, and people are drinking and having a good time. Like when you go to any party on your own, at first it’s a little daunting, as everyone seems to know each other. But after a few minutes of watching the crowd circling, swapping fliers, fanzines and email addresses, you realise that, despite appearances, most of them have never even met. A couple of hours later, with your pockets stuffed full of invitations and other potentially exciting scraps of paper, you know everyone in the room yourself. Feature continues

This is the hub of the new New Cross underground, a melting pot of ideas that takes in music, film, theatre, comedy, visual art, performance art and art for art’s sake. The loose adopted term for this movement, centred on New Cross and the surrounding boroughs of Brockley, Lewisham and Deptford, is Rocklands. Rocklands was recently hailed by Vogue Italia, which likened the area to the more ostentatiously fabulous Montmartre district of Paris (though British Vogue has been conspicuously slow to pick up on the story). Of course, comparing New Cross to the home of the Sacre Coeur is just a facetious journalistic exercise, not to mention totally inaccurate. No, New Cross these days is much more like Haight-Ashbury, circa 1966.

Bands and fans - sorry, co-participators - crowd the New Cross Inn for the Deptford X Festival launch

Now, this being London, you’re probably used to hearing about exciting new things happening, and scoffing at them over your Pret A Manger. However, the Deptford Renaissance is more than just another hyped-up musical movement. It’s a genuine artistic community, made up of bands, artists, filmmakers, comedians, performance artists, writers and anyone else who’s got an idea. In the last couple of years, an enclave of arty types has set up a self-sustaining network of parties, venues, spaces and events that isn’t dependent on record-company money or media attention. The Rocklands scene doesn’t have a signature sound, a central venue or a nominated leader, and it’s all the better for that.

Your diary and agenda are assembled almost at random – locals might head to record/clothing boutique Rubbish & Nasty to score the new sounds, but there they’ll pick up a flier that directs them to, say, the Fox and Firkin in Lewisham for a film night, where they’ll be given a fanzine by someone who’s in a band… and so it goes. Terry Butchery, from local band Sharing Sheaths, explains the appeal: ‘I think this area attracts people who are culturally enthusiastic, and that’s the main thing. A lot of people come to London because they hear the streets are paved with gold or they come here because there’s a lot of culture – they come here for a reason. But that’s great, because people are here to try and find something they relate to, that maybe says something about them, or they’re trying to find something out about themselves.’

Butchery is also one of the founders of the Artful festival, an annual celebration of Rocklands life that has been running for the past three years, commandeering an archipelago of venues around the region and filling them with bands, projections, performances and punters. Artful is still the highest-profile event in the SE8 calendar (and is what attracted BBC4 to the area in the first place), but it has now been joined by the Deptford X Festival, which is pretty much the same sort of thing but with the emphasis on film rather than music. However, there is something like this (albeit on a smaller scale) going on in Rocklands most days of the week. The Fox and Firkin, previously a bog-standard boozer on Lewisham High Street, now plays host to a number of intriguing events, including the Film Night at The Fox (held on the first Monday of every month), set up by local promoters The Blue Light District. There’s also Toy Pirate, which is the brainchild of promoters, DJs and multi-fanzine producers Greenwich Pirate. Rocklands even has its own semi-official podcasting radio station, Earwax, which performs all the rabble-rousing, word-spreading, tune-disseminating duties you’d have wanted from pirate radio once upon a time.