“It’s your woman, Woman Unchained, and also you’re listening to Free Circulation – the instrumental present the place we play the beat twice so you may get your bars proper!”
It’s a wet Thursday afternoon and I’ve simply arrived on the secret London location of one of many properties of Nationwide Jail Radio (NPR) (the others being contained in the partitions of close by HMP Brixton, and inside HMP Styal in Cheshire). Woman Unchained, an award-winning poet, creator and broadcaster, is sitting in a soundproof room on the opposite facet of a glass window recording her present Free Circulation. Like all broadcasts from NPR, it is just accessible to residents of His Majesty’s prisons.
Each week, a choice of hip-hop instrumentals is performed for listeners up and down the nation to practise their poetry and rapping from their cells. Woman Unchained additionally affords recommendation and recommendations on how one can construct a crime-free future utilizing the facility of creativity, lyrics and positivity. Listeners can name up and rap into an answering machine, which she performs again and offers suggestions on. During the last six years, the present has gained hundreds of followers who’ve discovered connection and catharsis via the inventive course of.
“It’s a neighborhood of listeners who’re going via private journeys,” says Woman Unchained. Final summer season, after I delivered the Nationwide Literacy Belief’s New Chapters programme together with her at HMP Feltham Younger Offender Establishment and at Oakhill safe coaching centre, many youngsters recognised her voice from Free Circulation and had been excited to point out her their bars. “Generally folks aren’t even rapping,” she beams. “They’re simply calling in to say: ‘Huge up the man who known as in final as a result of I felt what he was saying.’ That for me is every little thing.”
In essence, Free Circulation places essentially the most musical members of the jail inhabitants of England and Wales – virtually 90,000 folks – in dialogue with one another. Throughout my studio go to, recordings sourced from HMP Wandsworth in London, HMP Wetherby in Yorkshire, HMP Liverpool and others are all performed on air. The present is an instance of how evolution in expertise and music helps to supply constant, therapeutic and rehabilitative exercise in a financially strained public service context. Clips of do-it-yourself rap freestyles filmed on jail wings proliferate on TikTok and Instagram, however Free Circulation affords a secure, moderated area the place rappers can discover a dependable, distant neighborhood viewers.
NPR is the world’s first nationwide radio station for folks in jail. It was launched in 2009 by Jail Radio Affiliation, which runs it in partnership with the Jail Service. It’s made by prisoners for prisoners and goals to advertise a tradition of optimistic change whereas acknowledging and addressing the challenges of jail. About 84% of prisoners who’re capable of hearken to NPR accomplish that. Of these, almost half hear daily. A mean listener tunes in for 9 or extra hours per week.
Seated within the sales space beside Woman Unchained is a visitor host who goes by the title of Chequez. He’s in his early 30s, properly constructed with brief black hair. I ask how they met and he recounts being incarcerated in the course of the early months of the pandemic in 2020. “Guards died, prisoners died,” he says. “I caught Covid and was coughing up blood. I used to be ringing my mum and saying: ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna make it.’” However after gaining access to a laptop computer, he began listening to Free Circulation. Woman Unchained’s bubbly voice, relatable recommendation – she spent a while in jail when she was youthful – and the choice of beats, from the melancholic to the uplifting, impressed him to start out writing.
“It makes a giant distinction to somebody’s day if they’ll hear a beat, prefer it, specific themselves on the beat after which put it to mattress. It’s like writing in a notepad: if you happen to’re pressured and you place every little thing down, you may sleep higher. It’s outlet for anyone struggling in jail,” he says. He reveals me his lyric ebook: its pages are creased and ruffled from heavy use, filled with sprawling penned reflections. “I used to be letting out plenty of ache, writing to my youngsters, serving to them to make sense of the place I’m and what I’m doing with my life. Then I believed I’d swap up the vibe.”
Free Circulation is break up into six sections, 5 of which showcase beats from completely different hip-hop types – UK and US rap, grime, drill – with the ultimate part devoted to enjoying submissions. In August 2022, Chequez heard an upbeat UK storage instrumental. Having maintained a nostalgic love for the style since attending pirate radio classes as an adolescent in London, he known as as much as document a verse. It was performed again weeks later, receiving optimistic responses from listeners. After his launch from HMP The Mount in Hertfordshire a couple of months later, whereas on the lookout for housing and a job, he turned the verse right into a single known as Ahead. Its video, that includes an look from Woman Unchained, is out now.
Chequez is much from the one individual to have been energised by Free Circulation, which was launched again in 2018 as a easy instrumental present. “At first, there was no suggestions loop,” says producer Arthur Hagues. However when Covid started to chunk in June 2020, he had the concept of getting listeners to name in and rap their bars down the telephone. It was a pressure-makes-diamonds piece of adaptation born out of cancelled training courses, 24-hour bang-ups (totally locked wings) and issues about hygiene to cease the virus spreading.
“Prisons had expanded telephone providers in cells, so we made essentially the most of that,” he continues. “Beforehand, folks needed to write to us through letter, however calls had been extra hygienic.” They had been additionally simpler and quicker. It proved a potent formulation: quickly the NPR workforce – largely prisoners and ex-prisoners who obtain coaching in radio manufacturing whereas serving sentences at Styal and Brixton – had been receiving a whole lot of calls from folks eager to say their piece on air.
“I used to be tremendous gassed,” says Woman Unchained, “as a result of if you’re doing radio, you already know you’re speaking to folks however you may’t see them. This fashion, we knew folks had been listening.” She and Hagues began setting month-to-month themes similar to love or household. This has spurred an ever-expanding universe of private expressions and back-and-forth conversations between callers, largely males, who rap and cause about drug dependancy, parental relationships and childhood traumas, in addition to vowing to higher themselves, providing encouragement to others going via equally difficult conditions. For Black Historical past Month final October, callers had been instructed to jot down to the heartfelt beat of Modifications by Tupac; their verses had been subsequently threaded right into a grasp monitor lasting 20 minutes, which Woman Unchained has aspirations of turning right into a reside spoken phrase stage present.
Hagues and Woman Unchained refuse to play again lyrics that promote violence or criminality. This line within the sand is a distinction to up to date music’s capability to grease the cogs of on-line provocation and real-life hazard within the digital age, as a substitute encouraging reflection, lyricism and peer-to-peer collaboration. “Woman Unchained engages, challenges, congratulates, steers them otherwise, expands on what they are saying,” says Hagues. “I feel it’s typically the primary time any of those guys have had that type of suggestions. A few of them have by no means opened up like that earlier than.”
Free Circulation’s sponsorship by Shannon Belief, a charity that helps folks to be taught to learn, took silver in one of the best industrial partnership class finally yr’s Audio and Radio Trade awards, and bronze for finest music leisure present in 2021. NPR has been nominated for 11 awards at this yr’s awards, which occur this week, with Free Circulation up for 3. The goal is to maintain increasing, to maintain platforming the voices of individuals in jail in addition to those that are coming to the tip of their sentences and want all the assistance they’ll get on the skin – therefore Chequez’s visitor spot as a co-host.
“Now folks like Chequez are being launched with a mission,” says Woman Unchained. “They understand how they sound on air. I get messages on a regular basis saying: ‘I’m out – thanks for enjoying my voice.’ We recognise that there’s a large neighborhood of individuals returning to society who had the present as their lifeline. My dream is that the people who find themselves popping out are capable of construct a brand new narrative for what ex-offenders seem like and sound like. It’s the significance of displaying a special type of rapping, of telling your story with out including that glorification of what you’ve performed on the roads, which might result in you being linked to an offence since you’ve rapped about it in your bars. It’s about making an attempt to alter the narrative. Saying: ‘You don’t should proceed doing highway if you get out. Now you’ve received a brand new neighborhood in Free Circulation: come spit some bars and be artistic.’”
Chequez agrees. “It’s a motion pushing ahead,” he says, echoing the title of his single. “Lots of people on the road don’t have that. Ahead is the motto. If I am going for a run, I’ll put it on. It boosts my power. It jogs my memory to maintain pushing ahead.”
