Mugger Music (1996-97)
24 hour Performance commissions
Manchester/New York
Manchester version of this work was made as a member of the cooperative, Index, in collaboration
with Ian Rawlinson and the New York version in collaboration with Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson.

Mugger Music was a 24 hour performance work made up of 46 circular walks along a fixed route
(carried out by 3 guides setting off at half hour intervals). It was initially made for the River Medlock
in Manchester - a river largely occluded by the built environment in the years following the industrial
revolution. Accordingly the walks (carried out by a guide and a single member of the public who had
pre-purchased a 'ticket' for a specific time slot) passed through many parts of the burgeoning 24
hour economy en route - pool halls, 24 hour delis, hotels etc.

These sites, as well as sites along the river bank, would be used to carry out a series of discreet
transactions, which were the only real interruption to the rhythm of walking the route. The guide would
walk fractionally ahead and lead the way, whilst the walker would follow, for the most part listening to
a Walkman playing a collaged audio track of 24 hours activity along the route condensed into a 90
minute tape.

The work was the logical extension of a series of works made about the city and tried as much as
possible to sit discreetly within the existing life and patterns of the city, so that it would not be
externally visible as an anomaly in the regular urban landscape.

The New York version of Mugger Music was commissioned by LMCC and involved two more performances,
in and around the original walled city - working with 55 Broad Street, Thundergulch, Adaweb, The Millennium
Hilton Hotel, a 24 hour deli and an abandoned restaurant called the Italian Alps, as the principal physical
nodes which the walk was structured around.

L-R: A guide illustrates the route of the walk at the start point in Manchester. A recurrent device
in the walks was to repeatedly reveal the conceptual, administrative and temporal frames of the work,
so that as much as possible of the fictional potential of the piece was limited to the walkers giving up
their usual criteria for navigating the city

A walker signs their name on a piece of gilded glass whilst passing through a hotel lobby - before
exchanging it for one signed by the previous person on the walk. At certain points en route the walker
would be reminded of the presence of the previous person to have walked that way.