AKA Man About Country! Our first walking podcast along the banks of the River Chelmer through Chelmsford City Centre to Essex Records Office. James aka Man About Country. Born in Chelmsford, raised in Kelvedon. He loves telling stories about Britain, the land, the people, the folklore - pushing it beyond a grey boring concrete place you wouldn’t want to explore. Getting out is great for physical and mental health. Growing up in Essex gave James an appreciation of the countryside. During COVID he was living in Cornwall, and he started to venture out and feel the benefits of outdoor space. It gave James space for self-discovery. Exploring your local area can unlock discoveries and wonder. We find a new bit of street art by Candy Joyce and Scott Brave on a pumping station wall - Knobby the troll. Street art trails like Chelmsford’s Concrete Canvas are so good for exploring within cities. He started making walks with points of interest for his friends, his friends were encouraging and it expanded organically. Finding a job you are passionate about makes you excited to get going on a Monday morning. 2025 was all about focusing on exploring Essex. James will now expand to the whole country. James trained on Dartmoor about outdoor education and nature connection so he could communicate better and with more knowledge. Energy and enthusiasm for a subject is infectious. Discovering Mesopotamia Island in Chelmsford and hearing about the 19th century mock elections and river dunkings. Culture Essex sponsored James to create the Essex Ways project as part of a round of arts funding. Gathering stories from all over Essex travelling 400km by foot. Reclaiming the image of Essex women from the reductive portrayal in TOWIE. His history degree helps with research, his acting experience helps with storytelling. Stories are alive, they adapt and grow with every telling, and over thousands of years parts of these tales can become more important for relevant thought and times. Learning from old stories can serve as cautionary tales today - look at the spreading of disinformation about witches in the Essex witch trials. Essex arguably has the longest coastline of any county in England. Clacton has the best banter and stories in Essex. James has worn his stick down from shoulder height to a short cane. James has recorded a special mini podcast story trail for Chelmsford as part of Essex Podcast Festival. People can explore the town and activate his stories in the place that they were recorded. Like the story of Caesaromagus - which was in Chelmsford in Roman times - basically a market stop off on the way between London and Chelmsford - like a Roman Greggs!

Man About Country website

Man About Country Instagram

Man About Country TikTok

Essex Podcast Festival

Are You Creative? video recorded by Adam from Lawker Media, out and about in Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by Alpaca Antenna

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Sound artist from Colchester. Studied Music Tech in Huddersfield, and could straddle music and engineering departments and experiment for four years. Learning the recording process as well as making music - a great place for a curious mind. Frazer’s first professional music work was performing cover versions for streaming platforms. It was a great learning experience creating different genres and recording them from home. He had an original band called Feeds when he lived in Leeds… sounds like the start of a limerick. He moved to Colchester in 2015 when his parents moved there. He joined Young Art Collective at FirstSite - they had a programme called Circuit funded by The Tate, so young people could put on events in the gallery. And University of Essex had a Games Hub programme, and Frazer started making music for computer games in a company called Teaboy Games. His first sound art used a Makey Makey circuit board, which is a physical interface for a computer - you might have seen banana pianos on YouTube. He started building ‘room scale’ instruments, rigging up whole rooms to play as an instrument. People emotionally love music, but fear getting it wrong, so making new instruments helps them feel the magic. CLIP was a jam night group for non-musicians to play together with gadgets at FirstSite Gallery - Nintendo DS and Hexabugs played alongside traditional instruments. They devise improvisation games and challenges to encourage empathic listening and lead into improvised music. Work with people better than you and use it is as learning experience - If I’m the stupidest person in the room then I’m probably in the right room. Frazer and a group pf musicians played a performance in C in the sea at Great Yarmouth - watched by a real seal! Big up Sue Hogan and Beth Hull at First Site for giving young artists opportunities to experiment and develop. What is foley? Making sound effects for films. You can levitate items between sound waves using acoustic levitation - it is sound science magic. Frazer’s experiment went viral on TikTok. Creating cymatic patterns on Chaladni plates. Frazer invented a device called Photon Smasher which lets you listen to light! Born out of solar panels being used as microphones. Frazer took it to Japan and scanned all of the neon lights, vending machines, and Pachinko machines. The light sounds of Southend’s sea front lights are melodic and beautiful. Why do fairgrounds have pumping music? The answer will surprise you! What is Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM)? Try your electronic music in front of other creators. Frazer collected plastics from the River Colne and turned them into filament for his 3D printer, and used them to 3D print bird whistles. Circuit bending is taking apart a toy (SAFELY! Don’t do it with anything mains powered!) and poking the electronics to see what happens.

Frazer Merrick website

Frazer on Instagram

Are You Creative? recorded by Adam at Lawker Media, Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by Alpaca Antenna

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Ben and his friends run the Secret Island festival on Mersea Island in Essex. An independent music festival - previous headliners have been Mike Skinner from The Streets, Orbital, and Faithless. Ben’s Dad was an oysterman, his brother is an oysterman, he’s about as Mersea Island as you can get! Seagull chat. Ben looks about 95% the same as Nick, it’s like looking in a mirror - WEIRD! Big up Ray Keith and all the drum and bass legends. Ben grew up listening to tapes of raves, jungle and then drum and bass, before putting on his own raves. Breaking news: turns out Nick was at Ben’s very first rave in a barn near Tiptree. Then Ben’s crew moved their all-nighter parties to the Youth Camp in East Mersea - all thanks to supportive adult youth club leaders - big up the Powells! Ultrafunkula (their promotions) spread out to Colchester and London. Teaching the next generation how to run events and specific roles - from lighting, infrastructure, management, set-up, sound, logistics, planning. Secret Island started when Ben and his partners started putting on events again after a long break of nothing, and they started selling out and getting bigger from 250 to over 2000 people now. A local farmer had financial ambitions to run an event on their land, so they took on the location. The site is beautiful, overlooking The Strood and the water, the rolling fields, and amazing sunsets. The first event happened 2 weeks after COVID lockdown and the crowd were up for music and partying - the bar was drunk dry by 4pm! Big up Honkus Rompus - best name ever. AJ from Three Wise Monkeys is helping the festival expand and program their live music stage. Big up Frank Turner, big up The Meffs, big up Bridget., big up Monster Florence - so much amazing local talent. The importance of local promoters and their curational tastes. Would the bass from the Valve Soundsystem make oysters more muscular? Bass so big that you can’t roll a rolly. Cocaine shrimp! Running festivals is TOUGH, so many festivals drop off the radar. How do you manage it financially? Making it work on a budget and cutting elements you don’t need. DJ prices! Islands of Essex. How did it feel to warm up the crowd before Mike Skinner? How to get involved with the festival - give Ben a shout or send him a mixtape.

Ben Wass DJ

Secret Island Festival

Are You Creative? recorded by Adam at Lawker Media, Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by Alpaca Antenna

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Algorithmic artist from Chelmsford, Essex. Specilaising in using technology to create art. Previously a radio technology news and features journalist, London news, and politics, Nik knows his way around a microphone. He’s also written a load of books. But he’s talking to us about his art he creates with spreadsheets. I know! Stick with us… All of his art begins with life modelling sessions and photography. Nik’s code script will break this down into squares, measure the brightness, and put the values into a spreadsheet. Nik draws spirals and shapes by hand, and inputs them into the spreadsheet. Stick with us… Then the spreadsheet controls a plotter which will draw the image with a biro as a single line. Trust us, it looks incredible. Biros are unpredictable, and can run out of ink 60 hours into the process … so Nik has to start again! Biros can last for different distances depending on the ball size and the viscosity of the ink. This project came out of lockdown when life drawing moved online, but it came with difficulty of lack of depth and connection with the model, and flat lighting. So Nik started to arrange private sessions to collect reference shots to make art with typewriters, using diffrent keys and different layers for differences in darkness. Each image took 3 months, gave Nik a frozen shoulder and led to 6 months of physio, so he developed a new technique. So he started a new artistic project, experimenting with cyanotype on maps, and eventually tea bags… which because ‘bum bags’ with pictures of bottoms. Nik had one of his artworks at the Voyager 2000 exhibition at FirstSite. He created a self-censoring image format where the image is sliced into squares with the same script he uses for the spreadsheet plotter images. He uses a reductive process of removing squares to reveal more detail. Should artists post-rationalise the meaning of their art? Nik has stopped using the more popular video conferencing softwares, and started using Shutter which gives him remote shutter-release control over the model’s phone, and delivers an uncompressed image straight from the sensor to the remote photographer. Nik likes to build a connection with his models, rather than use sent photos. And sessions can end up with hundreds of images captured. There is a lot of trust between models and artists when you are dealing with nude photography, usage and permissions. Nik uses a Rasberry Pi computer to control his plotter. What is anti-alias? What is a vector? What is a bezier curve? Nik runs his vector file through Inkscape which is graphics editing software. How unique is Nik’s art? Even though the plotter draws the spirals and shapes they are all originally hand drawn by him. Nik loves the subversion of using software intended for business and corporate work to create his NSFW (Not safe for work) imagery. Writing a location jitter into the code to create opportunities to change biros. His process is extremely technical, but it has been a five year iterative process to develop it step by step through different projects. “Art is anything that is done with an artistic intention” Nik Rawlinson, 2025. Learning to love imperfections in your art.

Nik's website

Are You Creative? recorded by Adam at Lawker Media, Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by

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Wildlife photographer Meng was born in Macau, grew up in Hong Kong, now in Romford from 2006 working as a graphic designer. Hong Kong cinema, Jackie Chan, Drunken Master and dubbing voices in different countries. Jaiden is back in the house, bringing vibes and RAGGA JABA PUNCH to the studio. Meng’s incredible photo of green rose-ringed parakeets flying through a rainbow caught Nick’s eye at the Essex Photography Prize - taken in the tropical paradise of Romford. Meng ran to the park with three cameras, three tripods, and took over 200 photos to catch the exact magical moment. It was taken on a long lens which makes the image much closer to the birds in the distance, and makes the slice of the rainbow fill the image. Meng takes photos in the park while his kids play in the playground - and now he knows where the woodpeckers are, the rabbits, the parakeets - the whole ecosystem of Romford wildlife. Nick gets dreamy talking about baby bunnies. The best time for capturing wildlife is sunrise. Meng has run guided photography around his park to show other people how to appreciate and capture the wildlife. Macro lenses are used for super close up details, like Meng’s photo of a spider’s face. Parakeets are raver birds with their bright green feathers and loud calls! Shooting the super moon behind The Shard and St.Paul’s cathedral from Parliament Hill, London. You can use an app to find out the position of the moon, and then pick the perfect photo angle. How did Meng manage to capture the International Space Station crossing over the moon? You need a 600mm lens, a very sturdy tripod to stop movement from the wind, and find out the ISS locations from the internet. There is a lot of luck in taking a good photo. Meng started his photography journey in 2015 taking photos of his new baby son with a fix lens camera. After five years he upgraded to a DSLR camera. With a manual focus long lens, balancing composition and focus together is very hard. Learning all about cameras and photography from YouTube. Meng realised he had a talent for photography when National Geographic shortlisted one of his shots, and now he has won a lot of photography awards including Essex Wildlife Trust Photographer of the Year. Wildlife photography competitions often need to review raw photos now to check images aren’t AI. There was an exhibition in the park where Meng takes most of his photos and an accompanying book called ‘Out There’. The UK felt like slow motion after living in the hectic fast city of Hong Kong. If you want to start out in wildlife photography, experiment and try to copy good photos to learn technique, and then develop your own style.

Meng on Instagram

HUK Shooter website

HUK Shooter on Instragram

HUK Shooter on Facebook

Are You Creative? recorded by Adam at Lawker Media, Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by Alpaca Antenna

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Thanks to NGDA for their support

A special episode about Nick’s epic Costa To Costa walk to raise £5000 for Chelmsford Foodbank. Disclaimer: Nick doesn’t know about coffee or bleaching beans or anything - Costa Coffee DO NOT bleach their beans, but it sounds funny. Nick visited 33 Costa Coffees in Chelmsford on foot! Nick walked 27.01 miles, which took 12 hours. Now some Costa To Costa artefacts are in The Museum of Chelmsford. Stuff from now is the old shit of the future. The beautiful handmade posters that supporters (Candy Joyce, Elaine Tribley, Jen Flint) made are in the museum. Community support, and people involved in it are legends. Should The Museum of Chelmsford have a mannequin of Costa Man? YES! Suzi Quattro’s bass in the museum. Peak Costafication. Chelmsford is the Costa Capital of the WORLD! Chelmsford now has 37 Costa Coffee outlets, 2 new ones since Nick visited 33 on 10/12/2025. Nick has a 2:2 Geography degree which helped with map planning. The dangers of drinking too much coffee early in the morning in a ski suit onesie. Costa Man was entirely powered by Costa drinks and food - bacon rolls, millionaire shortbread and choc chip cookies. Nick does not like coffee at all. What would an athlete do? Probably drink one water at least. How do Costa heat water up hotter than boiling to lava temperatures? Scolding hands with hot liquid. More blister than foot. Getting a square blister. Why donating money to foodbanks is very useful for them. Costa Coffee’s donation of 10 x £5 vouchers. Costa To Costa was the greatest adventure to ever happen in Chelmsford! But also it was a performance art critique on capitalism and the homogenisation of the high street. Nick doesn’t know coffee names or coffee culture. Costa should serve the finest Civet Cat coffee from civet cat poo. Costa staff were awesome all day! Sledging through the Costa drive thru on Eagle Way. How do you have these crazy ideas? NICK? The helpers’ high, and how doing good makes you feel good. How to donate to Foodbanks. Random encounters on the street. The Costa to Costa legacy: 1, make people think about the foodbank and why people use it. What do foodbanks need. Food poverty awareness. 2, make people think about consumerism and capitalism, and support independent shops.

Donate to Costa To Costa

Are You Creative? recorded by Adam at Lawker Media, Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by Alpaca Antenna

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Thanks to NGDA for their support

Podcasts, audio drama, recording, editing, mixing, Helen does it all! And is in the studio judging us! Helen’s voice is YouTube famous because she narrates a school sex education film - in the style Julie Andrews reads 50 Shades of Grey! Helen does amazing on-hold message voices and you have probably been told by her that your call is important to the company. Also the English voice of petrol pumps in Spain. Having a signature voice. What are VO (Voice Over) Sessions like? Is Artificial Intelligence for voice overs affecting the industry? Stock phrases and concatenation. Tom Baker, Toast of London and Irish sat nav voices. Helen’s professional voice journey started with Hospital Radio, Restricted License Radio Stations and then on local radio with live traffic reports (A LOSE MONKEY ON THE M4! SWANS ON THE M25!) - then onto continuity at Paramount Comedy Channel. Continuity is a live person to tell you what is happening, what’s next, and to be on standby if anything goes wrong. Helen got into production, setting up mics, writing scripts and recording audio. Helen started podcasting with Robin Ince in 2006 (OG!) establishing the ‘...Shambles’ brand. Setting up a home studio - starting with the downstairs toilet! Sound effects on The Archers - and complaints about cold water pouring for tea. Home recording with celebs during COVID. The origins of the aubergine emoji. AI can’t replicate niche Northern voices yet! The art of directing voice talent in a studio without bruising egos. The voice work market is currently very saturated with a lot of people going for the same work, and some of the work going to AI. But you can still get started by recording a demo reel at home. Voice acting for computer games. Working (and laughing) with Greg Davies on continuity for Paramount. Helen finds out she is a Webby Nominee. Mixing and editing dialogue. Monkey hangers! Making Rylan Clark cats-eyes for Chelmsford. Producing ‘The Menopause Monologues’ podcast. When is the best time of day to record a VO? 11am. Dolphin noises!

HQ Voice Website

HQ Voice on Instagram

Are You Creative? recorded by Adam at Lawker Media, Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by Alpaca Antenna

Don't forget to like, subscribe, share and all the good stuff.

Follow our Instagram for latest news and behind the scenes photos

Send comments, questions, or suggestions for fascinating creative people in Essex give us a shout on our Instagram

Thanks to NGDA for their support

Colombian visual artist and illustrator living in Essex, via Mexico and Suffolk, it’s a complicated story! She paints murals, creates digital illustrations, picture books and everything in between. Fine art and snobbery in art. Catalina blames her ADHD for ending up in Essex, she met an English man in Mexico who shared the same music taste (Josef K), and she decided to go on an adventure to Ipswich. Her experience in Ipswich ended up inspiring her artwork. It is hard to make a living from art in Colombia. In Mexico, Catalina funded her art and illustration studies by working in an advertising agency and also reviewing gigs. Catalina started getting freelance illustration commissions. And then onto bigger picture book commissions where she could be more experimental with styles. The difference between commercial and community mural projects. Window art - Big up Juliet Townsend and her amazing work! Catalina has two super powers - 1, being able to mix colours precisely. 2, being able to estimate measurements precisely like a Human Ruler. Is she a robot? Moving location, county, country means you have to start building a new network, and it can be tough. Finding your tribe. Looking for creative spaces locally. How is AI going to impact mural makers? Winter is brilliant for creative hibernation and getting loads of stuff done. Public art like murals and window art gives a sense of place against the commercial homogenisation of the high street. Catalina does a lot of visual work for the fun Essex band Dingus Khan. She’s also been getting crowds going wild on the dancefloor by DJing Colombian music in Colchester. ADHD, hyperfocus and being prolific as an artist. Pro tip: Don’t wear dungarees on a tour with a band, the dive bar toilets are not suitable! Being inspired by emotions and nature. Mind blowing - Essex wildlife is very exotic to a Colombian - big up the foxes!

Catalina's website

Catalina on Instagram

Are You Creative? recorded by Adam at Lawker Media, Chelmsford, ESSEX
Edited by Nick Hearne
Artwork by Alpaca Antenna

Don't forget to like, subscribe, share and all the good stuff.

Follow our Instagram for latest news and behind the scenes photos

Send comments, questions, or suggestions for fascinating creative people in Essex give us a shout on our Instagram

Thanks to NGDA for their support