Sideshow Stories: a Review

In this modern era of 24 hour, face-pressed-up-against-a-screen living, it is as inevitable as it is hypocritical that we often find ourselves yearning for integrity, wholesomeness, and "down-to-earth" values. And as the approach of popular media becomes ever more patronizing and simple-minded, those precious nuggets of originality and intelligence seem harder to sift out.
It is therefore with great admiration and appreciation that I write this review of Sideshow Stories, a new exhibition at The Social on Little Portland Street.

Combining the art of painter Jason Butler, and the words of poet Will Burns, Sideshow Stories is an appraisal of a time largely before modern "political correctness", when Britain's show-business industry was capitalising on a popular curiosity for the alien and the exotic, the freaks and weirdos of society. As odd and unique as the characters it details, this exhibition is a sight for bored eyes.


Jason Butler is a painter who lives and works in Jersey, and was shortlisted for last year's British Portrait Award at the National Gallery for his work The Rubbish Bin Men. His work varies from personal portraits verging on the hyper-real, to more illustrative and textured pieces. The series of paintings produced for Sideshow Stories fit largely into the latter category. They are intimate, lonely and weirdly uncomfortable portraits of men and women and men/women, the ilk of whom would have made up the acts of the travelling show.

If Butler's portraits are the face of the show, Will Burns, a singer/songwriter and poet from Buckinghamshire, writes us the backstage pass for it. His poems, coupling a sensitivity for detail with a cut and thrust instinct for storytelling, are wonderfully inventive and evocative. They bring the framed characters to life, and open the curtains on a part of our history that refuses to be marginalised, feared or forgotten.

 Sideshow stories will run at The Social bar until the 26th March when it will then go on tour, stopping at art and literature festivals around the country. For more information, click here to visit the Sideshow Stories blog.



A Change In Position

Around they walk, patrolling

the half-light of the room –

the continual dance of approach

and reproach until somebody


says yes. Finally
succumbs to the eyeful and is taken,

hand in hand, or arm slipped

effortlessly around flabby waist,


down the long stretch of bar

to the little booths situated

opposite the toilets to have his dance.

A girl takes to the stage.


All control and curve

of bare back; arching, stretching.

She is naked, deliberate motion:

a calm and cold approximation.


I too have sat in that chair,

as still as death, watching 

the whole world wheel and grind;

shake and then sashay away.


I’ve put my pounds in the pint glass to watch. 

To merely stand inert. To never move at all.