A record of records

To celebrate Record Store Day 2025 (Saturday 12 April), writers and musicians have teamed up to pen ten tracks for Sleeve Notes, a unique collaborative project and live performance. I'm one of the writers.

The artists have responded to how records have shaped their lives and thinking, each creating a brand-new track combining spoken word and music. The pieces will be available as a limited-edition cassette and premiered live by the writers and musicians at Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation on the evening of Record Store Day (doors 6.30pm, £5; tickets here) – giving you plenty of time to head shopwards beforehand to get that all-important vinyl. You can also hear a preview of the album via Bandcamp here.

The project has been featured on BBC Radio 6 Music by both Guy Garvey and Marc Riley, and there's a write-up, including the full line-up of writers and musicians involved, on Creative Tourist here. I was asked to write a bit for Joyzine about the inspiration and process behind my contribution, "Breathe Silence", with artist and musician Jez Dolan. Obviously, I wrote probably way too much and it's unlikely to all get published*, so here you go...

Sarah-Clare Conlon x Jez Dolan “Breathe Silence”
When I was asked to be one of the contributing writers to Sleeve Notes, I began by nailing down a narrative, which led me to think about the ritual of selecting and playing records, especially in the context of growing up and going round to friends’ houses to listen to music. 
My jumping-off point then was messing about with the sounds of words – my aim is to imbue my poetry with an aural quality, for example through assonance and alliteration, percussion and sibilance, to create an evocative soundscape. I’ve been performing regularly since 2010, and I love creating work that will have impact on both page and stage. 
I invited artist and musician Jez Dolan to work with me, as I thought his double bass would provide the perfect backdrop to my words, and, after an initial chat about influences and ideas, I spent an evening riffling through my vinyl collection, picking out artists I listened to as a teenager – Talking Heads, OMD, Prince, Kate Bush – and making notes on the noises of putting on a record, not just the songs themselves. I have a Pro-Ject deck and it doesn’t have an automatic arm lift, so the stylus just goes round and round at the end of a side, and it turned out each LP had a different kind of rhythmic quality. 
I sent Jez a draft of the text – which I’d approached slightly as a song, with I suppose verses and a chorus, and a refrainy thing – and a quick recording so he could get an idea of how I sounded reading the words. Jez then spent a bit of time with the words coming up with some options, including a riff and some drone, and the next step was me meeting Helga (the double bass) and spending an afternoon playing around and nailing down a firmer direction for Jez to go down and develop. One thing we agreed was that my words needed to be edited down, while Jez wanted to create an extra musical element, so at our next get-together we had a more streamlined version of the written piece and a more sophisticated composition. We practised this and once happy with the end result – called “Breathe Silence” – we recorded it, then drank some wine to celebrate.

Update: *indeed (also I note I did more than one "nailing down" in the original) – you can read the Joyzine article here. It says mine and Jez's track has a "beat-generation, jazz-vibe". Niiiiice.

Tootally Wired lives on

Thrilled to have ‘Repetitions and Pauses’, originally dreamed up for the Tootally Wired project in September (thanks to Nic Chapman for the photographic evidence of part of the creative process as well as the performance event, which I also compèred), accepted for publication by Long Poem Magazine.

Issue 33 is due out in May. I was asked to send the editors an introduction to the writing process of the poem, which I think is a great idea! Sometimes I spend ages doing research and working out how to approach the actual piece – what it should look like, what it should sound like, what will stand it apart from the other pieces being written for a project – and that whole teeth-pulling procrastination part is often lost in time, like tears in rain...

‘Repetitions and Pauses’ was conceived for a commissioned performance project as part of Manchester Histories Festival. Six writers and a sound artist were each invited to respond to the Tootal scarf, a Manchester export, premiering their pieces live in September 2024 at Manchester’s Central Library for a sold-out event called Tootally Wired. I enjoy working within constraints and my approach to writing the piece was to consider the construction of the garment, and how this might be applied to my own creation. Traditionally Tootal scarves are woven and repeat printed silk with hand-applied tassels, and I wanted to incorporate this into the fabric of the poem – the ‘choruses’ not only evoke the process and the product, but also the musicality of the looms and machinery used in the manufacture, and the rhythmic back and forth of the supply and distribution network involved. As a former journalist on fashion glossies, I was interested in exploring both the history of the brand and the craftsmanship involved, so I spent some time at Edinburgh’s world-renowned tapestry studio Dovecot and with a textile artist at Manchester’s Rogue Studios, who explained the intricacies of passementerie and other weaving practices. As they require a hands-on, human skill, and with silk a natural product, I was also compelled to consider the industry’s impact on, or implication in, the landscape, where, even in the most urbanised and polluted of settings, nature manages to creep into the cracks. This in turn had me thinking, and writing, in a circle.

The Tootally Wired writers were, in performance order, Emily Oldfield, Tom Jenks, Wendy Allen, David Gaffney, me and Nicholas Royle, with a musical interlude from sound artist Gary Fisher. We had a Tootally Wired ident created by Zoe McLean, Tootal-related footage from the North West Film Archive, and mannequins sporting Tootal scarves. It was funded by Arts Council England.

Blah! Blah!! Blah!!!

Two of our favourite hangouts have closed their doors in recent weeks: one due to the decision to discontinue trading at one of their two sites (so at least they're not gone forever); the other after their estate agent landlords turfed them out unfairly (and likely unlawfully). This latter, Café Blah, were evicted with no warning (and right after paying their rent), and, following a sit-in protest and a take-to-the-streets demonstration, a Just Giving campaign is ongoing to help them get set up in a new space as soon as possible. 

A vital part of Manchester’s creative community, the folks at Café Blah regularly put on bands and DJs and sound artists and films and spoken word and art shows and all sorts of fabulous necessary cultural activity – scant days before their locks were unjustly changed, Blah co-hosted the third Party For The People and a literary quiz for the first-ever Withington Book Festival. While making our way to the demo just a week on from making our way to read at WBF, David and I decided to try and make sure Café Blah can host many more great events!

As a flurry of gigs were organised by bands at the likes of Peer Hat and Withy Public Hall, we've been busy behind the scenes setting up our own #SaveCaféBlah Fundraiser, a reading event bringing together loads of fantastic writers serving up wonderful words to contribute to the #SaveCaféBlah campaign. 

Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! Writers For Café Blah – poetry and prose for the people – will take place on Saturday 23 November, 5-7pm, upstairs at Withington Public Hall Institute, at the village end of Burton Road, between The Orion and Sainsbury's. Tickets are £10 and are on sale now – you need a ticket to get in, but if you can’t make the event and want to donate please use the Save Café Blah Just Giving link (see below for all the links).

LINE-UP: The Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! #SaveCafeBlah wordy fundraiser readers will include purveyor of fine flash fiction David Gaffney, reading from his pamphlet Whale, and Professor of Poetry at the Centre for New Writing John McAuliffe, reading from his latest collection National Gallery. The Blah! Blah!! Blah!!! line-up will also include Joey Francis and Tim Allen of Peter Barlow's Cigarette, Steven Waling and Pam Galloway oft spotted at Manchester Poets, and Anna Percy of the newly reinvigorated Beatification. We’ll also be hearing from Broken Sleep Books poet Nóra Blascsók, Confingo storyist Nathan Bailey, Dry River author Alicia Rouverol and death of workers/Red Ceilings/many other published writer Lydia Unsworth. Joining the party are The Emma Press-pamphleted Lenni Sanders, of Manchester Critics Collective, Red Ceilings Press-pamphleted Steve Smythe, of Speakeasy, Guillemot Press-pamphleted Jazmine Linklater, of No Matter, and Sublunary Editions-pamphleted Tom Jenks, of zimZalla and formerly The Other Room. I will be compèring and might read something too.

Bagsy your ticket quick, it’s less than a week away!

* Tickets are £10pp. Eventbrite will add a fee to each ticket price. Here's the ticket link.

** All proceeds go to the Save Café Blah fund. Big thanks to the artists for giving up their time and super big thanks to the Withington Public Hall Institute peeps for their support in the effort to raise funds for Café Blah, letting us have the venue for free.

*** Please note, if you'd like to contribute to the Save Café Blah fund, but can't make this event (or you'd like to contribute more than £10pp), you can donate direct to Blah's Just Giving crowdfunder here. 

Day tripper

July has just whizzed by, and I'm only just getting round to making inroads with my European Poetry Festival follow-up activities. I was teamed up with Julia Rose Lewis for the Liverpool Camarade event in the Open Eye photography gallery on the waterfront, organised by the ever-energetic SJ Fowler. Seven pairs of poets collaborated, so 14 poets in total, and we got together to perform on a Merseyside-typical sunny-windy afternoon on Saturday 6 July. It was the final date for this year's EPF on an, as usual, whistlestop tour of the UK and even, I believe, further afield.

Anyway since May, Julia and I had been chatting over email about our usual styles and themes and so on and so forth, and decided to write about the ocean between us, imagining that I was standing in the footsteps of my late ornithologist not-quite uncle (my mum's first cousin) John, on Hilbre Island, off the tip of the Wirral over the Mersey from Liverpool, where I lived until I was 10, while Julia was standing at the foreshore of Nantucket Island, off the US east coast, where she's been resident. 

I considered shorebirds coming and going, Julia thought about migratory whales; I wrote a melting snowball and Julia a snowball, and we interspersed the lines to create a sort of to-and-fro, wave-like motion. It seemed to work, members of the audience later saying they got the ebb-and-flow movement, and our props of a pair of binoculars each – a last-minute idea – also went down well. There's a video here, if you fancy seeing/hearing it. We had a great time meeting in real life and talking about the project to LiPs (Liverpool Poetry Space), and we're just about to submit our collaboration with a view to getting it published. Fingers crossed...

Behind us, and surrounding us on all four walls (and even the floor) during the performances, were some great photos of Crosby Beach, which is gradually being stripped of its top layers to reveal the war rubble dumped there after Liverpool's May Blitz in 1941. It's something I'd like to explore, especially as I recently found out that some of my dad's side grew up a stone's throw from there, in and around Waterloo, but I've been too busy until now with other projects to get time to make the trip, so as part of my recent foray into review-writing, I decided to put together a piece about the exhibition, chatting to the photographer Stephanie Wynne, and I've just submitted it to a competition. Again, fingers crossed...

The exhibition is called The Erosion, and continues until 1 September, so I'd urge you to pop in if you're passing – it's free and is part of a bigger show for the LOOK Photo Biennial 2024: Beyond Sight programme.

Holiday reading

I'm not long back from holiday, in which time I produced a villanelle (I was in France, after all!) and a melting snowball (it was hot, after all!). Here I am, sitting beneath a chestnut tree next to an old castle, wearing a kaftan (ever the pro) and knocking out a little watercolour of a nearby garden, which prompted an old fella to pop down from his very high-up balcony to find out what I was up to. I showed him the picture and explained that I'm really bad at painting, but that it's good for my <<bien-être>>, pointing to my noggin.

I also read a ton of poetry and some quite strange prose, maybe autofiction, maybe memoir, maybe a little of both or indeed neither. I bought some French books, including Michel Butor's Collation, which I've yet to start as it's quite the hefty tome, so I left it à Paris while I trained and bussed it to relax en Provence. I also bought (for the second time, accidentally) Nathalie Sarraute's L'usage de la parole (1986), a collection of short texts à la Tropismes, her first book from 1939. Not to worry, it made me read some more and brought to mind Roland Barthes' Mythologies, of which I'm a fan. On my perusal of Parisian secondhand bookshops (the first was Oxfam and the next one near Odéon with a picture of a cat on the door, this third – just down the road from a lovely little square now infested with Emily in Paris fans, sacre bleu! – was manned by a very intense young bloke, who made absolutely no comment on a blatantly English person buying a blatantly fairly difficult French text), I also picked up an illustrated copy of Françoise Sagan's Toxique (2009). This is the account of the writer's three-month stay in rehab after getting addicted to morphine following a car crash in 1957, three years after she found fame with Bonjour Tristesse, aged just 19. It's fascinating, nothing at all like her slightly romcom-y novels (which I do like, don't get me wrong – partly because they're so lovely and short), and quite an eye-opener. Perhaps I should watch the biopic, after all. 

I interspersed the two French women with – all four on rotation – some English language poetry: Denise Riley's Lurex (2022), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and The Mirror Trade (2004), the first full-length poetry collection by Zoë Skoulding. I also read Sphinx by Anne Garréta, the first novel by a female member of the Oulipo to be translated and published in English. I've tried and failed to get the original French version in a real bricks-and-mortar independent bookstore, so the internet might have to be called upon – now I've read the English, I can see that it's going to be actually a very different read again, due to a very specific constraint. I'm currently reading Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal, to keep my head in France for as long as possible. Once that is done, I will return to her Boat, which I'd left moored at the side of my bed as it was quite cumbersome for travelling. But the to-read pile is still blocking the view from my desk to the street, so...