A talk for a panel discussion at Talking Bird’s Nestival of Ideas.
A podcast of the full event is available as a podcast here.
Anything For The Money is a great attention grabbing question but I suspect if it were just ‘for the money’ none of us would be here. I would be an engineer, or a coder, or something and you, you’d all be doing something else as well. We’re not doing ‘anything for the money’, we’re doing it for the art. Unfortunately the money is all entangled in the art, hence our discussion today.
I thought it might help this discussion if I shared a whistle stop tour of things Stan’s Cafe have and have refused to do ‘for the money’ over the years.
Weirdly in 1993 we persuaded ‘K’ Cider to sponsor our third ever show Canute The King. Which, even back then, when the ‘K’ brand was edgy and enigmatic rather park bench daytime drinker, was quit miraculous.
In 1996 we accepted a Barclays New Stages Award which paid for our show Ocean Of Storms. This was a decade after the bank bowed to anti-apartheid pressure, so there weren’t pickets at the box-office.
In 1997 we accepted the proceeds of gambling to buy some digital video equipment that at the time was mind blowing but which now your phone would shrug at. We still accept National Lottery funding because it’s all mixed up in our Arts Council money.
It is a little know fact that in 2007 we did an anonymous corporate job for Cadburys which paid us enough to buy the lighting equipment we needed to make our show The Cleansing Of Constance Brown. Years later a lucrative international touring opportunity for this show fell down partly due to concerns over censorship.
In 2025, which is this year, the Birmingham Plastics Network commissioned us to adapt their policy commission recommendations to government for the stage. The Many Lives Of PET #1 proved just as successful as our show explaining how local authority funding works. So we are now discussing if these are the first two episodes of a series and, if they are, what might future episodes be about, who might commission them and would that be okay?
Now we come to the performance installation Of All The People In All The World, which we have been touring since 2003. Often new versions are commissioned to address themes dictated by the host venue or festival. So far this has been fine because we’ve never had a moral problem with the themes.
A property developer paid for a version to be made for the grand opening of an office block in Birmingham before the public were invited in to see it. Incidentally a few years later a different property developer paid for our old show It’s Your Film to be revived for the opening of an high end apartment block and for the public to see it after that.
30 years after ‘K’ we secured our second corporate sponsor ‘Tilda’ have given us a couple of tons of rice. This move from high APV cider to sensible carbohydrates encapsulates our tragic decline into middle (possibly even late middle) age.
A few years ago we declined a lucrative opportunity to tour this show to a country we didn’t feel comfortable associating ourselves with.
in contrast are currently in negotiations with a globally signifiant charitable foundation to make and license a version of this show to promotes one of their forthcoming campaigns. Which is a big move for us after years of trying to ensure the show is not a propaganda tool.
In the interests of full disclosure, a few years ago the accountancy firm KPMG paid for us to devise a maths challenge for its staff to deliver across Holy Family primary school. And I think that’s about it.
We’re always looking at money offered by trusts, foundations and local authorities but we very rarely apply for any and when we do, we are very rarely successful. This is because what we want to do very rarely overlaps sufficiently with what they want done. Currently we are lucky that enough of what we want to do overlaps with what Arts Council England wants done. Long may this continue, if it doesn’t ,we’ll have to wave good by to our funding.
Finally, looking ahead, we are trying to make a very large, very long and therefore very expensive show about a heart transplant. If a big pharmaceutical corporation wished to help us make this happen I would be very interested in talking with them and hope that the conversation we are about to have, will help inform how I might approach that conversation, should it ever take place.
James Yarker 16 May 2025
