music
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Hidden Door is a brand new mini-festival of the arts that takes place at the end of this month. On 30 and 31 January, 30 bands, 40 artists, 10 poets and 10 film makers will take over the Roxy Art House in Edinburgh and transform the space with an art maze, hidden stages and innovative
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To celebrate the fact that The Ambulance Box is now available in paperback (£9.99, but there’s 20% off at the Salt online shop, of course), here’s that wonderful track from The Beatles. The harmonies! The guitar riff! Is there a more exemplary pop song?
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It’s really been a week for new audiences. Wednesday morning was filled with meetings about a Scots language poetry project in Bo’ness Academy. They lasted longer than I anticipated and ended up running into the afternoon but some extremely useful and exciting stuff came out of them. The project gets going in earnest on Monday;
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I love the work of Michael Symmons Roberts. He’s one of the finest writers in Britain at the moment and quite possibly the best religious poet we have. This year, he has published two books: his second novel, Breath, and his fifth collection of poems, The Half-Healed. Both fine books, of which I intend to
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You know, I haven’t written anything for weeks. It’s not a case of writer’s block as much as one of writer’s break, one of those fallow periods you have now and then. In past years, I’ve found the summer a surprisingly unproductive season: I never write on holiday (so I no longer expect myself to);
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The audience for Sunday’s Shore Poets was a little thinner than usual, possibly because of the holiday weekend. Music was provided by Just Voices, a four-part acapella group, who treated us to French, Bulgarian, Scots and American songs. Beautiful stuff. Stephanie Green kicked off the poetry in the newcomer slot. I’ve seen Stephanie around the
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Well, it was a trimmed-back audience last night at the Shore Poets. I don’t know whether it was the Grangemouth strike that kept people away, but it can’t have been the weather unless everyone had fallen asleep in the sun. Whatever, we were maybe around 20 down on the usual number, but it was a
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is, as Bruce said, it always gets worse.
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Due to family circumstances, I’ve had to pull out of the 100 Poets Gathering at StAnza and won’t be able to make it to the festival at all. This means that my next scheduled reading is at the Shore Poets event in May, when I’ll be appearing alongside Kate Clanchy and my fellow HappenStancer, Rob
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… but I couldn’t possibly comment.
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On Saturday night, the Shore Poets celebrated Stewart Conn‘s 70th birthday at the Counting House in Edinburgh. The evening, which was open to the public and more or less sold out with various bodies from the poetry world, involved readings from a number of poets whom Stewart admires and counts among his friends, including Anne
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Friday’s reading went really well. It was held in the lounge of Bryerton House, aka St John’s Christian Centre, in Linlithgow High Street. The lounge set-up lent a cosy, intimate atmosphere to the evening, but it was bittie cramped for some of the 20 or so folk who came! Guitarist Phil Melstrom kicked us off
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What would life be without it? Radio 3 is the cut and polished diamond of radio in Britain. I love it for the breadth of its music programming. I love it for the fact it presents whole works by default, unlike the bargain basement Classic FM. I love it for the regular new drama, even
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No, I’ve not undergone a road-to-Pittodrie conversion to the Church of Two Halves; the season I’m talking about is the Shore Poets autumn programme, which got off to a superb start last night with Jackie Kay, Christine De Luca, Mandy Maxwell and music from the Linties. Mandy Maxwell is a graduate of the creative writing
Amy Jo Philip 