Blake Morrison and the Hosepipe Band: The Ballad of Shingle Street and other poems

Saturday 20th May 2023 at 7.30pm

Doors open at 7pm

Tickets: £15

Tickets are available HERE

By phoning 01728 454022, or in person Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 10-12pm at the AJH corner office.

An alluring collaboration between one of our foremost writers and poets and a Suffolk musical collective. Blake Morrison is perhaps best known for his best-selling personal memoirs And when did you last see your father? and Things my mother never told me. However he started his literary career as a poet and his much-admired 2015 collection Shingle Street along with more recent unpublished work has inspired this project with The Hosepipe Band, originally an English ceilidh band.

The exposed Suffolk coastal hamlet, isolated, prone to erosion and invasion, is our starting point. Blake Morrison’s poetry explores love, loss, sexuality and grief, drawing deeply on the history and the landscape of the Suffolk coast, its beauty and constant elemental threats as a shifting, unstable backdrop for our lives. The music links, complements and occasionally underlays Morrison’s performances of his own work, delicate miniatures that play as interludes to powerfully observed verse suffused with the power, loneliness and beauty of the coastline just yards from our door.

Shingle Street evades mere fashion statement. It’s a bravura performance that’s also solid and heartfelt. The Guardian

The Hosepipe Band are Cara Bruns (keyboards), Simon Haines: (accordions, concertina, footbass), Nelson Surfquake (guitar, upright bass) and Val Woollard (flute, bagpipes, recorders, dulcimer).

The event ends approx. 9.30pm (incl. interval).