We are excited to announce that More Media Collective have been nominated for the Youth Music Awards 2022. The group are up for the Music Video Award (sponsored by YouTube) with their track ‘Last Chance to Dance’.

Vote for More Media Collective here.

Voting closes on Tuesday 4th October 2022. The winner will be revealed on the night of the Awards, 19^th October 2022.

Last summer More Music collaborated with North West Sound Archive on a brand-new project called Demo Tapes. Bringing together the newly-digitised sound archives with music groups around the north west region, the project created new works around the theme of protest.

The group listened to newly-digitised sound archives relating to protest and politics and created new works in response to them.

More Media Collective listened to Campbell’s memories of the landlord at the underground Rockingham Club in Manchester in the 1960s before homosexual law reform. Campbell remembers the club as a very egalitarian place, where gay people felt comfortable to socialise.

But even in this safe haven, Campbell remembers the landlord calling out at each night, ‘Stop touching! You can’t touch!’ And later, the landlord would give a signal that his clientele understood: ‘This is your last dance of the evening! This is your last chance of the evening!’ Campbell was interviewed in by Jez Dolan in 2013-2014 for the Polari project.

More Media Collectives’ music video builds on the Campbell’s memories of the restrictions faced by the LGBT+ community in the past, and how that relates to the restrictions we all faced in the pandemic. Campbell’s voice swirls over the dancefloor beat where we can all feel a longing for our past lives.

More Media Collective were inspired by sounds of the industrial North, Joy Division and The Smiths. After listening to an excerpt from the archives discussing culture in the gay clubs of Manchester, the group were drawn to the phrase ‘this is your last chance to dance’ and took this as their inspiration for the track they produced. The track explores LGBTQA+ experiences from the past in relation to restrictions on contact, movement and expressing any intimacy in public.

The purpose of the song is to expose these issues from the past, whilst highlighting their similarity to the restrictions put on the public during the pandemic too. By relating these experiences, it gives the majority a chance to reflect and relate, to some extent, to the way LGBTQA+ people have been marginalised and oppressed in the past.

Jack Williams of More Media Collective said “We are so excited that Last Chance to Dance has been nominated for a Youth Music, music video award, we are all so passionate about this project and the story and voices we chose to represent”

We’re honoured to have been nominated for this years’ awards and are proud to be in such wonderful company alongside the talented nominees.