The Gluts are an environmental girl-band comprising Hayley Newman, Gina Birch and Kaffe Matthews. We formed in 2009 to write Café Carbon; sixteen songs about food and climate change, which we took to the Copenhagen Climate summit in December 2009. Café Carbon was performed on a specially commissioned climate train and at the summit, where we offered a menu of songs from which people could choose a starter, main course, dessert and drink. Together we collectively wrote music, made pop videos and the documentary film The Gluts go to Copenhagen. We sang about global food production, growing your own food, food waste, water shortage and excess, modernity and extinct animals. Through Café Carbon we wanted to construct a dialogue of awareness around food security, food imperialism, supermarkets and oil; vibrantly illustrating the current disenchanted global image of food production, by championing the fact that food is not a luxury, but a basic requirement for human life. The project was funded by Arts Council England and AV10 festival, Newcastle. It was performed at the AV10 festival; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Cafe Oto, London; Camden Arts Centre; London and Modern Art Oxford.

For more Gluts pop-videos click here.

The Gluts: Complete Works, including our musical documentary The Gluts Go To Copenhagen, was published on DVD by LADA and is available through their online shop Unbound.

Café Carbon at Cafe Oto

In March 2009 I facilitated a night of presentations by artists, musicians and activists who had taken their creativity to the streets of Copenhagen during the Climate Summit in 2009. For this one-night-only event at Cafe Oto, The Gluts performed songs from Café Carbon interspersed with presentations by invited artists and activists; The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, The People Speak (and their Planetary Pledge Pyramid), Question Time, photographer Kristian Buus and filmmaker Emily James all shared stories of the summit. The evening was hosted by Mikey Weinkove and included a take-away live-press zine designed and printed on the spot by The Ladies of the Press*. A video of the evening can be found online at archive.org.