Live review #7: Reimagining Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'

World premiere of immersive electro show

Reimagining Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, ReNude19, Old Market, Hove, UK, September 6th, 2025

By CJ Thorpe-Tracey

A STAGE IS SET up in the middle of the room, in the round, with each musician facing outwards in a different direction, while the audience wanders or dances about informally. The night unfolds in a gig format, by which I mean there’s a couple of hours of DJs and it’ll be 9:30pm before the performance begins. We go for a chippie tea.

The Old Market in Hove is south-east England’s perfect home for this kind of premiere: a rare level of technological support for an ambitious, unusual performance, yet still intimate enough to keep everything viscerally close and direct.

Even before they start, ReNude19 have successfully generated the atmosphere of a club night, or a happening, rather than something more conventionally theatre-bound. In this layout, the venue can hold perhaps 250 people, though sadly there are maybe 100 in. These are tough days right across the live arts.

ReNude19 are a Brighton-based electro pop duo, comprising producer and club promoter Ash Huntingdon – a Yorkshireman who long ago made his home in Brighton – and vocalist Christabel Cossins, known around here as a radio DJ, singing teacher and coach. Their re-envisioning of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark masterpiece ‘Howl’ began as a recording project to turn the poem into an album-length piece, whereby audio of the poet’s own readings were sampled from archive performances, cut up and interspersed with new music.

Later, as the work developed, the duo switched approach and brought on board Ashley Slater, frontman of Norman Cook’s chart-topping Big Beat era dance act Freak Power and one-time Loose Tubes stalwart, to replace Ginsberg’s voice with his own rendition of the poem. Currently available is an EP, Waking Nightmare (via Out Yer Box Records), which collects three pop song-length sections from the work. They break the poem into these song-length chunks for the show, too.

Tonight, ReNude19 are a four-piece live outfit, with Cossins, Slater and Huntingdon joined by Aaron Emerson on keys. Slater sits on a high stool and, with a remarkably understated beginning, speaks ‘Howl’ with the words in front of him on an iPad, while Christabel – who prefers to go mononymous – sings at in-between points, where fragments from the poem are looped.

She repeats them over and over, in a classic rave belter style, weaving phrases nominally into hooks that come off mantra-like, in lieu of more conventional pop choruses. Slater’s delivery is more diffident and at times he seems to lean into a transatlantic drawl, as if he’s matching Ginsberg’s original flow. At other times it feels more of a straightforward reading.

Pictured above: Spoken word narrator Ashley Slater

The neat audio-visual production throws live video footage of the band across the walls, so that wherever you are in the room, you can see them from a couple of angles at once. Noticeably, there’s no imagery to connect us to the poem’s content or meaning. However, blended with lighting, it’s still an impressive production and could suit a larger room.

The audience begins to lose itself in these rhythms, until a fair few people are grooving along. Musically, ReNude19’s ‘Howl’ is prosaic and secular, bowling along on a compelling scaffolding of nostalgic beats, rave-style piano chord stabs, squelchy synth.

This is unabashedly old fashioned 1990s electronic club music, mostly sequenced, mildly psychedelic, with the live musicians augmenting over the top, the singer using her (terrific) voice as an instrument more than prioritising words, while Slater’s spoken vocal is by turns nebulous and indistinct.

In truth, the balance of voice and instruments isn’t quite right, I don’t think: it doesn't allow the listener to follow the versifying without hard concentration. I’m very familiar with ‘Howl’, with long passages from it lodged in my memory, and, for me, as the show goes on, sections that I remember seem to emerge out of the fog of the whole, rather than as part of a coherent experience of consistent clarity. Quite often, I don’t know where I am. I suspect, if you come to this fresh, without prior knowledge of the poem, you’ll lose the thread quickly and often, or never grasp the thread at all.

I briefly think about Sleaford Mods and how their vicious, biting, declaimed lyrics always cut through the minimalist beat-driven underpinnings. Tonight’s blend of beat-making (fatter, less glitchy, less taut) and laconic delivery is closer to the sound of drawling, smokey American late-twentieth century bands like Soul Coughing or Morphine, perhaps if they were being live remixed by Orbital.

Pictured above: Singer Christabel, with her ‘terrific’ voice, in action

I realise nonetheless I’m enjoying the music quite a lot – I’m basically into this gig – while at the same time badly missing the core content, because comprehending the text is far from easy: I’m engaged with their howl, but not their ‘Howl’.

One highlight is the ‘East River’ sequence, where Emerson’s keyboard work becomes much jazzier, feeling immediately more human and vital. Both Huntingdon and Emerson are solid players and, for the first time in the show, the music actively vamps with the rhythms and cadences of the lyric, reacting directly, offering answer lines, finally throwing focus in the direction of the words. It’s a step up, though still it devolves frustratingly by the end of the section. Towards the end of the set, the musical accompaniment does get stronger, more diverse, and the performance more relaxed.

A key issue for me with both performance and arrangement is an over-riding sense of normie heterosexuality. A whiff of sexism, or at least what you might call more politely ‘generational conventionalism’ in the band’s presentation, alongside this plangent sense of a groovy club show, distances and undermines the sheer, pummelling radicalism of the extraordinary content within ‘Howl’. In some ways this set matches the Beat sphere’s masculine-skewed conventions, yet, of all Beat writers, Ginsberg was not that.

ReNude19 can’t help who they are and how they arrived at this project – and of course they have every right to their interpretation of what ‘Howl’ ought to be, ought to mean, from their perspective. That said, I do come away with a sense that ReNude19 aren’t actively engaged with the inner workings of the poem at all, beyond it being a cool thing to put over their music. Thus, witnessing it, people like me who care for the poem really need to decide for ourselves what we actually want from ‘Howl’ and its sibling Beat works. The nub of the challenge here is, how old fashioned it all feels, and how comfortable.

The night leaves me struggling with how we are to remember and celebrate a poem as uncompromising and disruptive and important as ‘Howl’, as we rapidly approach the 70th anniversary of its legendary live premiere in San Francisco.

ReNude19’s performance opens up this crucial conversation but cannot resolve it: how do we engage with this work today, in our own era of upheaval? Is it a museum exhibit, some anachronistic trinket, a virtue-signalling badge or a vital template for current and future radical self-expression? I enjoyed this show but its sheer indistinct blobbiness convinces me it’s now pretty urgent to find an answer to those questions.

Editor’s note: CJ Thorpe-Tracey is a musician and songwriter, broadcaster and arts critic, based in Brighton. Images by the author. You can visit his Substack The Border Crossing here.