About the Red Megaphone

In the early 1990s I developed as a campaigning tool the idea of using recorded loops to broadcast candidates' voices from loudspeakers, accompanied by the Labour Party's theme tune - a little ditty composed by Brahms. I called this initiative the Red Megaphone. The phrase was inspired from the title of a conference celebrating the life and work of the radical folk singer, Ewan MacColl held in Birmingham in1990.

That in turn was taken from the name that Ewan gave to an agit-prop street-performing group he founded in 1930 when he found that the founded in 1930 when he left the Workers' Theatre after finding it too pedestrian for his revolutionary consciousness. This went through several other changes until itn finally evolved into the Theatre Workshop of "Oh What A Lovely War!" fame. Joan Littlewood was one of his 3 wives.
Check out Ewan's Wikipedia biography

Another inspiration was the classic Alexander Rodchenko image seen below. It is an advertising poster for the publishing house Gosizdat, created in 1924 and featuring a portrait of the actress Lilya Brik shouting out the word "books". Although not actually using one, the Russian Cyrillic is contained with the shape of a megaphone.