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.