Shaking the foundations: Nate Coltrane on the next stages of creative project Our Yard

One wintry day in Sneinton Market my eyes were drawn to a poster on a lamppost. Emblazoned in the bright green and gold of the Jamaican flag, it displayed a printed slogan – ‘WHAT HAS IMMIGRATION DONE FOR THE UK’ – and above, a social media tag  – ‘our yard’. Almost immediately, I was opening Instagram to find out what that meant. 

It was 2023, when the news cycle was seemingly taking for granted that the majority of the British public were hostile towards immigration. In July of that year, Rishi Sunak’s government passed the Illegal Migration Act – mandating the removal of people unauthorisedly entering the UK, mostly via the wilfully cruel ‘Rwanda Plan’. 

Many legislative bodies, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, were repeatedly criticising that idea, but the UK government apparently didn’t want to hear it. As such, the slogan on that poster seemed really quite bold – striking at the heart of an issue lots of people felt strongly about.

The man behind Our Yard – Nate Coltrane, has always been a bit of a cultural force of nature in Notts. For fifteen years he’s led Mimm (music is my motive), a street clothing retailer doubling as a music, fashion and art studio, while balancing that with a career as one of Nottingham’s most prolific dance music promoters and the mind behind Notts Street Food  – a pop up at Trent Bridge Cricket Ground. 

So naturally, when Nate decided to start a ‘heritage project’ on immigration, and its positive impact, he knew it would be through the cultural lens of music. 

“My goal with Our Yard is to look at how we change people’s view on what immigration has done for our country – especially with sound system culture and Caribbean culture,” says Nate. “It’s so important to look at the genres throughout underground music – genres that use bass music. You look at all of them –  they’re all influenced by the immigration of the Windrush Generation. The reason why we have big speakers in a field is because we had migrants bring their culture to this country.”

When I meet Nate he’s preparing to launch Our Yard: Foundations in Hyson Green’s New Art Exchange gallery. This new exhibition bookends what he describes as Our Yard’s first “chapter”, primarily exploring the Windrush Generation – post World War Two emigrants from the Caribbean and other countries, to the UK – and how they musically and culturally impacted the nation. 

So far, Our Yard has featured clothing drops, radio shows, film screenings, a mural painted near the New Art Exchange, and interviews with artists and promoters, from Notts and beyond, who shaped UK sound system culture.

“One interview I really enjoyed was Lloyd Coxsone, which was the first one,” says Nate. “He was probably the oldest person that we’ve interviewed and he came over from Jamaica in 1962. He talked about the resilience that the Black community had to have to put on these parties and have a space for themselves. It was a great way to start the project off.”

Lots of the interviews that Nate has co-ordinated as part of Our Yard, including film director and DJ Don Letts, musician Dennis Bovell, and local  promoter Valerie ‘Lady V’ Robinson, plus archive film and photography he’s sourced, all emerged from an unexpected connection he has with 48-year-old reggae imprint Greensleeves Records. Nate met their marketing manager, Adam Prescott, when they were both teenagers DJing on the Notts circuit.  

As such, the cultural cornucopia of Greensleeves Records has given Nate and his Our Yard collaborators a profound understanding of soundsystem culture’s early days. In the 1950s, inner-city soundsystem ‘blues parties’ provided refuge for the UK’s Caribbean diaspora – barred from ‘whites only’ parties. 

Eventually, these events helped facilitate racial integration, as the ska, reggae, and rocksteady sound became popular with people who were part of sixties subcultures like the Mods. Despite that, the people putting on these parties faced continual racist violence and persecution.

“I was always aware that people were subjected to this kind of racism but to hear other people’s perspectives of what they had to go through, say Lloyd Coxsone – whenever he wanted to put on a blues party he had police coming to the door, stopping him from loading into the house with his sound system, and trying to pin stuff on him when he didn’t do anything wrong,” says Nate. “That kind of police brutality was very insightful – to understand the gravity of what Black people faced in the sixties, seventies, eighties…” 

Trace the history of UK dance music and you’ll always arrive at descendants of the Windrush Generation. Whether we’re talking about alternative hip hop and dance music in the nineties, acid house and rave – which was indebted to soundsystems and Black British DJs putting their own spin on house music coming out of the US – or the emergence of UK garage and dubstep in 2000’s London clubs, pretty much all UK music made for cutting loose and moving your body is indebted to immigration. In subsequent chapters of Our Yard, Nate wants to explore this. 

“My starting point, potentially, would be trip hop, and the Bristol scene. I’d really like to interview Daddy G, who was one of the founding members of Massive Attack,” Nate says, adding, “and like I said: trip hop never would have happened if we didn’t have sound systems. Massive Attack had their Wild Bunch sound system back in the late eighties, and off the back of the fact that they were playing hip hop, reggae, and dub, they were doing something a little different from their upbringing. What was born out of that was trip hop – bass heavy, but hip hop, and they were spitting over it in Bristolian accents. And that never would have happened if we hadn’t had immigration in post-war Britain.”

If all of this sounds interesting, a great starting point for engaging with what Nate is up to is visiting the new exhibition at New Art Exchange. 

Towards the end of our conversation, he shows me around the exhibition space, which is still being put together and set to be packed full of all of the art and culture you could want. From archive photography, film and radio shows, to original visual displays from his collaborators and a documentary made about Nottingham’s historic A.C.N.A centre – it’s going to be a pretty spectacular experience. 

“I always wanted this to be a nod to Nottingham. The relationship with V Rocket had been there from when I started Our Yard – I wanted to tip my hat to what V Rocket have done as an institution. So from lots of scouring archives and internet forums I managed to source live recordings from the Marcus Garvey Centre and V Rocket. Then, finding probably about sixteen hours worth of radio shows from Heat Wave Radio, which was the first, Black, pirate radio station in Nottingham – it’s been really nice to delve into that and see what I can find.”

Aside from the exhibition, the New Art Exchange is set to host various other Our Yard events in the approaching months, including film screenings, networking events for music producers, and live interviews. 

There’s also stuff going on in other venues, which include Brickworks, Mimm, and the Nottingham Playhouse. Our Yard continues to be a resolutely ‘Notts-based’ project – if you support it, you’ll definitely be supporting some of our city’s most hard working creative people. 

“I love working in that ‘community way’,” Nate says with a grin, “I love curating, I love being able to curate a program of events. It’s just what I’ve done for fifteen years innit, so it’s great to do something which really taps into my heritage.” A worthy cause.

Our Yard: Foundations features at the New Art Exchange, Hyson Green, until 2 May 2026. Head to their website below for more.

ouryard.uk