About Us

Music has been a key part of The Warren’s activities for well over 20 years. We have focused on providing the best resources we can, free of charge, to young people in Hull. These include an industry standard equipped recording studio; a midi room and a rehearsal room. Often we have live music on the stage in our cafe.

This year we have again seen well over 1000 young people using the music facilities. Can Do and our music team put on courses ranging from learning to play the guitar to accredited courses in sound engineering- these are free. Young People are encouraged to become volunteers and from time to time we have placements from other organisations.

Is part of our music project. We had the fortune of hard work and good luck coinciding – we had worked really hard whereby the music project was not only beginning to be the ‘hub’ of local new music by adeveloping or lining up with a whole range of talented young musicians allied to very good links with Hull’s independent venues and promoters. Also importantly the city council and its partners had launched firstly the Wilberforce Celebrations, which flowed into becoming the incredibly successful FREEDOM Festivals. Presumably because we had established a reputation for putting on live gigs that raised social issues such as pioneering the first Refugee Week gigs in the city we were honoured to be asked by the city council to organize our own gigs within the overall festivals. This meant we could link up with the national Love Music Hate Racism campaign, which meant in turn that they would bring to Hull really excellent bands and artists who because of their support for LMHR would not be expensive at all to book. And then the real piece of luck we get conned by Channel 4, have this bloke from London who we’re told is some kind of education expert who then turns out to Martin Stamp, an IT millionaire. Yes, hook, line and sinker we are captured on the screen as dupes of the Secret Millionaire programme. He gave us £20,000 for our music projects and after considerable, detailed debate lasting all of 2 minutes the consensus was we launch our own record label. You’re now supposed to add, ‘ and the rest is history’ but we’re to busy making this history to go in for any early nostalgia.

Warren Records was going to enter and engage the music industry but at the same time maintain its empowerment philosophy. We were going to treat people well and with respect, be honest and do our best to provide a platform for Hull musicians to show their true potential.

We were determined to produce quality products, the music would sound good and the CDs would look by having good design. This commitment to good production values. Has proved possible. We hope you can see, the same high levels of quality in our Warren Records website and in our promotional materials.

This is a risky project in that it has to be self-financing. We can only produce a new CD if we have sold enough copies of previous releases. So we have taken the plunge, and now have 6 CDs on current release – the latest being a partnership deal with The Talks who have their own label.

We retain a certain amount of caution about the economics of this project, it is rare after all for a youth work project to launch a record label, but creatively every CD released has proven to be of the highest quality and is a true reflection of the talents that have been recorded and released. We’ve recently established sales facilities on the Internet and Warren Records has broadened out to work with a whole range of partners in the city and from elsewhere to maximize the opportunities for young musicians in Hull. We have had fantastic support from a wide range of people and organisations and we are grateful to them all in helping us with this venture. We still intend to use music and the arts generally to raise issues amongst young people and the wider public. No selling out just because we’re in the music industry!