Richard Wheater of Neon Workshops: 'I thought I’ve got the type of audience you don’t get in galleries here'

“I’m first and foremost a muso,” says the owner of Wakefield-based Neon Workshops, one of the country’s few remaining companies that specialises in the development and manufacturing of neon lighting for the creative industry. “I was in a band for 10 years, I’ve been doing art as well since I was a kid, but I suppose they go hand in hand in my life. Music has played a significant role.”

Back in 2017 Wheater discovered a Portuguese electronic outfit, Sensible Soccers, “through the magic of Spotify” and decided to bring them over to West Yorkshire. “They’re one of the most famous electronic bands in Portugal but nobody had heard of them here,” he says. “I tried getting certain venues to put them on because I really wanted to see them live, but they were like, ‘We’re not going to do that, no-one’s heard of them, no-one’s going to buy tickets’, so that’s how it started, in my bloody mindedness.

“I’d just signed a lease for this warehouse so that the company I founded, Neon Workshops, could take on larger projects. It stays empty most of the time, we just assemble pieces in there that take up the whole warehouse and then it gets flatpacked and sent out to site, so I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it, both feet in’.

“Little did I know there was even a Portuguese community in Wakefield that came out for this band, and people came up from all over, from London, from Manchester. It was then that I thought I’ve got a platform here, I’ve got a captivated audience, the type of audience you don’t get in galleries, so for an hour-and-a-half they’re going to be staring at whatever I decide to put on that wall whilst this band’s playing. So that’s where the idea came from.”

That first night he “did something quite simple, working with pure neon clear glass tubes putting them through huge amounts of power and slowly building up the brightness”. Not everything went to plan, however. “I overpowered the sockets when I was doing that and everything just went black. Fortunately the band were on a different power output and they kept playing, so everyone thought it was part of the experience and started cheering. Then finally I managed to find the fuse and put everything back on again.”

A year later, he worked on a ‘northern showcase’ for the avant garde record label Erased Tapes which featured Rival Consoles, Peter Broderick and the Japanese vocalist Hatis Noit. “It was a sad time, really,” says Wheater. “I’d had to move back into my parents’ house, my dad was dying and it was this particular song by Peter Broderick that I’d heard. He’s an American musician, and I geared the whole event around this one song. I wanted a tightrope walker to be walking over the top of him whilst he was playing because it just felt like my life as on a tightrope, and this song was all about that, but it also suggested comfort and warmth. I’m sure nobody really got that but it was the catalyst for my concept which brought in more theatricals for that particular event.

“We had Hatis Noit performing, who is a Japanese beatboxing singer, she was onstage wearing this beautiful ultramarine Issey Miyake dress and she was overlapping her voice on sampling machines so it built up and built up through this song, and we had Rival Consoles who at the time had just released this formidable album and one of the songs goes like a metronome. Like all my ideas for neon with music start, I listen to the music and then these images pop into my head, usually as I’m driving or on a train or even if I’m just coming out of sleep. I wanted to repeat this electronic metronome sound but with light and we did that – we used all these straight tubes from one end of the warehouse to the other and they were slowly collapsing on themselves; it started up vertical then each tube went on a slight incline until the last tube was horizontal.

“We worked with this guy and his light-to-sound desk. He’d been all over the world, he was from Huddersfield originally but he’d done staging and lighting in New York. Whilst I couldn’t use this very fancy light desk with all these displays and knobs and dials, I was able to be quite animated with my hands and shouting what I was wanting as the music was progressing and he was doing his best to keep up.”

Although Wheater vowed he’d never do such a venture again “because it’s quite exhausting and expensive”, five years on, he found himself so captivated by the music of Weils, a Swedish duo named after the French philosopher Simone Weils, who describe themselves as “alternative-style” blues act. “That’s severely selling themselves short, there’s nothing traditional about it, they only thing I can liken blues to is the bass guitar and this slow, plodding beat that you get in a couple of the songs. They’ve only released one EP, nobody’s heard of them in the UK, so it’s all adding to the challenge, but I just think what they’re doing is something I’ve not heard of (before).”

The show will be a “one-night exclusive” supplemented with Swedish-style food cooked Chris Hail, the celebrated chef who was a finalist in Masterchef in 2016, and a light show by Wheater and fellow artist April Key. “What people are going to see on the 30th is very large scale handmade neon choreographed to the music,” Wheater says. “It’s quite minimal in the approach, we don’t throw it all at people straight away, it’s a slow build-up, just like the music. There will be projections and some of the neon will be concealed, people won’t even realise there’s neon behind veils, it will just mysteriously switch on and glow. We just want to provide this spiritual experience, without sounding cheesy. We want to compliment this music. The music inspired the concept, which is coal and fireworks. It will start with coal glowing, getting brighter and the night will end in fireworks. There’s three chapters, so there’s three songs being played. There’s no support act. Weils step onstage 8pm sharp and it will all be over by 9.30pm. It’s something that we’ve been planning for about six months, and it’s not going to happen again. I think that for me is one of the most exciting things to be involved in, in the arts. It’s actions rather than theatre, it’s doing something where you’re not 100 per cent sure what the answers are.”

Scarborough-born Key, who studied in Edinburgh and Istabul has designed three fireworks “of a colossal size” that will be suspended from the roof down into the crowd. “She’s interested in nostalgia and the firework aspect I think that stemmed from seeing some of the photographs her grandad took in the 1950s when he lived in Hong Kong,” Wheater says. “They’re just beautiful, and it’s funny seeing stills of fireworks because you associate fireworks with this one-minute expensive frenzy of bangs and flashes in the sky. We’re trying to slow down time in a way with this show. Lightning in a bottle, that’s what we want.”

The event is all self-funded. “It’s a passion, it’s what I get out of bed to want to do and why I make other people’s artworks, to give me time – the most precious thing we have – to be able to do this once-in-a-lifetime thing to look back on. It probably will be the last time I do it – or at least the last time I do it on my dime, anyway.”

Wheater, who founded Neon Workshops in Wakefield 12 years ago and has made neons for the Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed as well as Tracey Emin and Mary McCartney, is a staunch advocate for the virtues of neon. “It’s a handmade blown glass filled with gas thing that takes a long time to make, hence it’s usually costly, which is why it’s not done so much these days,” he explains. “There’s only 20 neon shops left in the UK. It’s often regarded as a very American cultural thing, but it was invented in the UK over 100 years ago by a Scottish guy William Ramsay and an English guy, Morris Travis, a true British collaboration if you like, down at UCL. They basically learned how to harness this element out of the air that we breathe. They distilled liquified air and managed to get it, and then in their wisdom injected it inside a vacuum glass tube and charged it with electricity. So that was the first neon gas tubes and they still exist, they still light up and they’re down in London for you to see.

“My obsession with neon is 20 years plus. I studied it in the States and then I came back here and I worked in a commercial neon factory in Leeds for a couple of yearsand then decided to go back to university to teach and it was during that time where I realised I wanted to combine both. I was seeing the same old stuff in neon being shown in galleries, usually texts – think Tracey Emin – and I thought that’s because creatives or people interested in it can’t get their hands on it, so that’s how Neon Workshops was born. It was predominantly for giving people the facilities to have a go and learn about its potential as a sculptural creative material. It is just gas inside glass charged with electric and the rest is up to the person.

“I think that’s one of my best achievements to do, setting that up and introducing over 2,500 people so far through workshops and exhibitions here and mobile neon workshops as well, we’ve been all over Europe teaching it.”

Weils play at 7A Wakefield on Saturday September 30. https://www.7awakefield.com/?fbclid=IwAR3bB_cHkEx4T8Bchm_Fom71iYpFTz5qN8isGnsx8WiM0aE5PHn4TNuptPg