Photography by Sophie De-Roe

If you’re local to the Hastings area and you haven’t heard of Brook Tate yet, do you even have ears?

Whether he is painting, writing, teaching maths, singing or dancing, Brook Tate is a force to be reckoned with: an insanely talented creative and proud human being with the courage to be vulnerable in front of audiences, as well as being unapologetically himself in day-to-day life, something that very few of us manage. He is catapulting himself into the community here at such a pace, not only performing but teaching, retailing, and also winning heavy fishermen’s welly races to boot! However, reaching this milestone has been a bit of a tumultuous journey for this St Leonards-born and bred performer.

When I first encountered Brook, he was telling the story of his upbringing in St Leonards in front of a weeping audience, he then proceeded to tap dance on top of a suitcase… while painting himself to look like a zebra (which is just what you’d expect round these parts).

To delve a bit more into this all-singing, all-dancing, all-painting stripy genus equus, I met him at the Marina Fountain for a chat over a swift half and a sandwich.

Sophie De Roe contacted Get Hastings ages ago, wanting to photograph someone underwater for us but we couldn’t think of a relevant subject… until now.

I began by asking Brook how his underwater photoshoot had gone: a first for him as well as for Get Hastings magazine. 

”It was really cool! And also kind of traumatic! She (Sophie de Roe) was in the water. We’d blow our air out at the top and then sink down to the bottom of the pool and I’d move around. Then I’d go back up and she’d stay down and check them. It’s amazing to see her do it! It was a unique experience.” 

Since we’re getting ‘deep’, Brook is a gay man who was born into a family of Jahovah’s Witnesses. For those of you who are unaware, Jehovah’s Witnesses condemn homosexual acts, thoughts, and feelings and on jw.org it states that they ‘cannot give homosexuality a cloak of respectability’. 

At the age of nineteen and not in the best state of mental health for obvious reasons, Brook left for Ireland where he stayed with another family of Jehovah’s Witnesses who had told him “You can just run away”. This was before his family and the Jehovah community excommunicated him in 2016. After returning to Hastings for a while, he took himself off to somewhere that “I thought no one would recognise me, and somewhere I thought I could train to be a children’s mental health nurse using painting and art. Another reason was that it was so arty with all the graffiti around and music and dancing. So I just thought, okay, I’m going to Bristol! I didn’t actually get onto the nursing course though because I failed the maths test.”

Brook immersed himself in the art, theatre and creative world of Bristol, which, although fully integrating himself into this new-found creative community helped him immensely, I find it incredibly sad that he felt he couldn’t do that here, in one of the most creative places I have ever been, let alone lived.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when I attended his show ‘Birthmarked’ in Hastings. It was the first time he had performed it here, previously showing at Edinburgh Fringe, The Bristol Old Vic amongst many other fine stages around the country. It was apparent that this was a big deal for him: bearing his soul in his hometown where he was once unwelcome by the community and family that he knew. It’s not in any way a depressing show by the way, it’s actually very funny. Brook equates himself to Jonah who (in the fictitious bible) was swallowed by a whale and much of the show is set underwater while he tells Gail the whale his story… hence the underwater photo shoot!

On returning to Hastings recently, Brook bumped into Mike Willis (a local musician and entrepreneur) who invited him to perform his show in his shop on Norman Road.

”Me and my band came and did a tiny little version of the show in his shop and in a couple of days it sold out and I was like No one knows who I am! I haven’t been here and even when I was here, the only people I knew were Jehovah’s Witnesses. So the response to that gig made me think Woah! This is incredible! People want to hear what I’m talking about.”

I had to ask Brook what it was like coming back here, to his family and the community that ostracized him.

“Me and my parents have never lost contact. They refused to, despite the church demanding that they did. During the last five years, they started fading from the church and we became close. So coming back here, and visiting my parents’ house, I feel completely safe. I now see them as friends. I had meant to go back to Bristol but as a result of the exhibition, I stayed with them and now I’m helping Steph Warren to run Stella Dore Gallery and with the response to the show… well, I’m just so grateful for how it’s all being received here!”

Brook’s inability to pass a maths exam while in Bristol led him to delve further into this, what can often be seen as a complex subject for creatives. So he developed and self-published the book Multi Coloured Maths.

“You have to engage with it to get it to click. So the foundations of maths: plus, minus, times and divide are our four bases’ of maths and I’ve been told many times that maths is a pattern. But I can’t see pattern in the numbers. All Multicolour Maths does, is it flips those elements that you can’t rotate! And you just learn a visual language that can be flipped in any direction and it’s visual and beautiful and you don’t even have to understand it as maths to see its beauty. A child of any age can look and say Oh that’s pretty! and then see that what’s on the right is in the left and then begin to see it as maths”

“So what’s next for Brook Tate?” I asked.

”I’ve got so much that’s coming up! Projects that I’ve been building over the last two years that are being developed by the TV company Hat Trick Productions at the moment, we start producing next month. They saw ‘Birthmarked’ and they were like We want to know how we can adapt this for screen. I think they recognised that I have a lot of original output and that I can deliver it myself. But they’re worried that I’m not starting as a big name”.

I suggested the concept that no one starts as a big name. “Well at least I started as a big zebra!” he laughed.

”At this time in my life, people are asking me where did you learn to sing, or paint or write music and I think I’ve just been taught by inner tuition. Intuition is just tuition from the inside and I think that was one of the little bits of inspiration that started this whole journey. Just thinking, I can be myself and if I can’t find something that does work for me, I’ll create something and think, Oh actually I am intelligent. We can all find our own ways.”

Locals have described Brook as “He’s like an alien, there’s no one like him!”, and as I said earlier, people leave his shows in tears… but happy tears… and if you haven’t heard of him yet? Well, you have now.

Photography by Sophie De-Roe