This year’s Hebden Bridge Arts Festival has just been announced. I’ll be taking part in two events this year.

On June 22 I’ll be in conversation with Tracey Thorn (Marine Girls / Everything but the Girl) – talking to her about her book Bedsit Disco Queen which was recently published on Virago. The event is at the Birchcliffe Centre in Hebden Bridge, tickets are onsale via this link.

A week later, on June 29, I’ll be chairing a panel for Carol Morley’s screening of her cult film The Alcohol Years with guests including Carol Morley, Cairo Cannon, Alan Wise, Dave Haslam, Dick Witts, Stella Grundy and Douglas Hart.

So here’s a few details about The Alcohol Years. What a cracking line-up…

THE ALCOHOL YEARS

Screening, interview & discussion with Carol Morley and Cairo Cannon

Saturday 29 June. 7.30PM-10PM

Tickets £8/£10: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/223708

The Trades Club, Holme Street, Hebden Bridge, HX7 8EE

Part of Hebden Bridge Arts Festival 2013: http://www.hbaf.co.uk/

The Alcohol Years (2000) is a poetic retrieval of the years Carol Morley spent in Manchester in a blur of inebriation. The acclaimed documentary attempts to piece together Morley’s past by interviewing friends, lovers and drinking partners from the 1980s. Morley herself never appears on screen, a clever device as the viewer is left to piece her story and her character together. This poignant insight is perhaps the first time a female version of Manchester’s mythologised music scene has been told on screen. This brutal, painfully revealing, sometimes hilarious and often reckless portrayal was BAFTA nominated and won Best Documentary at the Melbourne International Film Festival. It also received a Grierson Award.

Carol Morley will discuss the making The Alcohol Years with her producer Cairo Cannon, who also worked with Morley on their recent film Dreams of a Life. This event also features some of the people who appear in the documentary; Dave Haslam, Dick Witts, Alan Wise, Stella Grundy, Douglas Hart and more TBC will attend the panel discussion, chaired by Adelle Stripe.

About Carol Morley

Carol Morley is an artist-filmmaker who makes films that challenge, in different ways, how stories are told and which often cross the boundaries between fact and fiction. Her work has been shown at major international festivals, at galleries, cinemas, on Channel 4, Film4 and has received many international broadcasts, including The Sundance Channel. She has been the recipient of the Arts Foundation Fellowship for documentary film.

Morley’s first narrative feature film Edge – made on a micro budget – was premiered at The London Film Festival in 2010. Dreams of a Life is her first documentary feature film.

Press Quotes about The Alcohol Years

‘Compelling… uproarious… heartbreaking…’ UNCUT ****

‘Of all the memoirs and myth-maps that have been generated by Manchester’s music scene, few could be as raw as Carol Morley s wretchedly poignant film documentary’ Dazed and Confused

‘Morley’s wonderfully frank and intimate film study of the person she once was…’ Guardian

1. Falling and Laughing: The Restoration of Edwyn Collins, Grace Maxwell
2. Beach Party LP, Marine Girls
3. Quarry Hill Flats Revisited, Peter Mitchell
4. The Alcohol Years, dir. Carol Morley
5. Journey Without Maps, Graham Greene
6. Turning Blue, Benjamin Myers
7. Pennies from Heaven, Dennis Potter
8. Elijah Rockin’ With Soul (single), Hank Jacobs
9. i cannot bring myself to look at walls in case you have graffitied them with love poetry, Dan Holloway
10. British Social Realism, Samantha Lay

It couldn’t have happened at a more pertinent moment. That morning I jumped a train to Bradford, the skies pregnant and bruised, and wandered through the railway precinct, staring at the wall claddings of Titus Salt, J.B. Priestley, the Brontës, the Black Dyke Band – all those people that made Bradford great. No sign of Andrea, though.

I walked past the queue of taxis and huddled junkies making roll-ups in the biting wind; beside me, St. George’s Hall, where I once threw gladioli at a faded northern star from a crumbling balcony. Life was easier then.

Overhead, decorative lampposts lined the street onto the concrete square where a feature lake – nicknamed ‘the puddle’ – parts like the Red Sea for pedestrians. I turned right, towards a gaping hole in the city centre, ‘Wastefield’, a crater that resembles a meteor crash. Buildings once stood here. The land now earmarked for another faceless shopping arcade. Wastefield, the local symbol of failed capitalism; a hole, where people should be.

I stared at the TO LET boards and peered towards the glorious Little Germany, an area unmatched for architecture in the West Riding. The streets were quiet and empty, but the Italianate columns and iron gates (built by German Cloth merchants) are quite unlike anything I’ve seen in the north. This is the jewel in Bradford’s crown. It’s a shame nobody wants to live here.

Wrapped in my long cord coat, I tried to imagine what was here in the 1980s. Did Bradford feel as neglected then? Something about this city kept reeling me in. The tagline for Rita, Sue and Bob Too was ‘Thatcher’s Britain with its Knickers Down’. I mouthed the words and laughed at the words that graced posters throughout the country.

At that very moment, my phone rumbled. It was a text,

“Thatcher’s dead innit.”

And another,

“She’d dead! Ole Iron C*nt is dead!!!”

A friend of mine – a cripple, communist, printmaker and voodoo priestess – was the happiest woman alive. She had just bought a dog-eared copy of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and a ‘magic jacket’ with golden hunting dogs embellished on the sleeve from Oxfam. She swears it was this combination of objects that united, causing a massive stroke to Baroness Thatcher, and her untimely death.

“It’s perfect Ju-Ju!”

I walked towards the Town Hall and watched people checking their phones. A ripple effect made its way through Bradford’s population.

Even I was overcome with emotion, letting a small tear of solidarity for the miners and Hillsborough victims drip down my cheek. Salt water for the decimated north.

Calling into a newsagent – past the empty shops, pound shops, mobile shops, charity shops, pay day loan shops, mucky windows, pigeon nets, pawnbrokers, and signs to out-of-town retail parks – I bought a red fountain pen to mark the occasion. And these are the first words written by my pen on the day Margaret Thatcher died.

Chris Killen – author of The Bird Room, co-creator of Wizard’s Way and former Straight from the Fridge contributor – has helped research a documentary on BBC R4 this Thursday (11^th April) at 11.30am called Norway’s Soul: Re-evaluating Knut Hamsun. It explores the unlikely career and startling fall from grace of a great writer. I’m a huge fan of Hunger so this is well worth tracking down. Interviewees include Geoff Dyer, Knut Hamsun’s grandson Leif Hamsun, Vigdis Hjorth, DJ Taylor and Hamsun’s biographer Robert Ferguson.

“The Norwegian author Knut Hamsun was a self taught farm boy who beat
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Modernism. With his ground-breaking
novel, Hunger, published in 1890, he revolutionized world literature.
By 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and was one of
the most famous writers in the world, feted by everyone from Kafka to
Hemmingway. Yet he ended his life in poverty and disgrace after his
public admiration of the Nazis. He even sent Goebbels his Nobel Prize
medal. Today he is largely unknown outside of his native country. Per
Kristian Olsen considers the best of Hamsun’s writing against the
worst of his political thoughts and deeds and asks whether it is
possible to separate life from art.”

1. Holy Motors, dir. Leos Carax
2. Nocturne, James Attlee
3. Naples ‘44, Norman Lewis
4. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose
5. Berberian Sound Studio, dir. Peter Strickland
6. You Don’t Mean It (single), Towanda Barnes
7. Jockey Full of Bourbon, Tom Waits
8. Shirley, Andrea Dunbar
9. Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been, Chase Twichell
10. Cream of the Young (single), Fat White Family

I’ll be appearing in Oxford later this month as part of Not the Oxford Literary Festival on March 22nd at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore in Jericho. Dan Holloway has organised it & you can find out more about the line-up here.

Alex Woolley from Oxford’s Cherwell Newspaper has interviewed me this week, click here for the online version.

I feel a bit funny about posting this – something about being from Yorkshire and not wanting to draw attention to myself – but anyhow, here’s the blurb from Eight Cuts. Come down & say hello? And bring your friends!

1. The Singing Detective, Dennis Potter
2. Woman in a Dressing Gown, dir. J. Lee Thompson
3. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
4. Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer
5. Broken English (Deluxe Edition), Marianne Faithfull
6. The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane
7. Look Back in Anger, dir. Tony Richardson
8. Dressing for Pleasure: The Films of John Samson
9. Conflict, Ebo Taylor & Uhuru Yenzu
10. 8½, dir. Frederico Fellini

I’m pleased to announce that Dark Corners of the Land was named ‘Poetry Book of the Year’ in the 3:AM Awards 2012. Thanks to all at 3:AM for voting.

It joins winners Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child (Granta), Christine Schutt’s Prosperous Friends (Grove/Atlantic), Simon Sellars & Dan O’Hara’s Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with J.G. Ballard (4th Estate), Chris Ware’s Building Stories (Jonathan Cape), David Byrne & St. Vincent’s Love This Giant (4AD/Todo Mundo), The Turin Horse dir. Béla Tarr, The New Inquiry, Sylph Editions, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

There are only a couple of copies left of Dark Corners – it will be going into a second edition shortly. Blackheath Books’ Manufactory will be creating something special, look out for the new design on their website…

Welcome to 2013. For the first time in years I spent NYE in Tadcaster, drinking cheap wine and Sambuca on the banks of The Wharfe. The party was named ‘House of Leather’ and featured a parade of young gentlemen in black lederhosen, peak caps and cut-off denim, dancing to techno. It could have been a Berlin gay bar in 1982. It was most enjoyable, despite my room-spin and ‘leg-out-the-bed’ a few hours later. Today I am still slightly nauseous, although Alka Seltzer is my new best friend…

Thought it was worth mentioning that my cloutie tree poem Bad Blood appears in Issue 1 of The Penny Dreadful, Cork’s sumptuous new literary journal. This stunning publication features writing by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Alan Titley, Will Schutt, Roddy Doyle, Mercedes Helnwein and some breathtaking examples of contemporary Irish poetry. I really was impressed by the quality of work & urge you to buy a copy. I have a feeling these will be incredibly collectible. Copies can be ordered here.

Dark Corners of the Land has been chosen by Jenni Fagan (author of this year’s most talked-about book The Panopticon) as one of her books of the year in The Scotsman. A full review has also appeared on Sabotage.

I would normally be running some sort of End of Year round-up on my blog, but there are so many out there that I can’t be arsed to write anything this year. However, I have just written a list of some sorts with Ben Myers for Ivan Smagghe’s blog Discipline in Disorder, I’ll post a link when it appears.

On February 1st I’ll be reading in Leeds’ Flux Gallery at Steve Ely’s book launch for his new collection Oswald’s Book of Hours on Smokestack Books. Ian Parks and Ed Reiss will also be reading, if you happen to be in Hyde Park, pop down and say hello…

Wheelchair Crowd, Preparatory Study for Blue Plague, Lisa Cradduck, 2012

My friend, fellow black sheep and all-round partner-in-crime, Lisa Cradduck, has an exhibition opening at WestLane South in Bermondsey on Jan 9th. She also has a new website if you’re curious to find out more. I’m putting the full press release here to help spread the word. This is going to be one hell of a show.

Lisa Cradduck ‘Blue Plague’   

WestLane South, 16 West Lane, Bermondsey, London SE16 4NY

Jan 10^th – Feb 16^th 2013 | Opening Times: Thurs-Sat 12pm-6pm | Special Exhibition Preview Jan 9^th 6.30pm-8.30pm | The Blue Plague Print School runs Thurs & Sat 12pm-4pm, places are free but booking is essential, email mail@westlanesouth.com for further information

Working from photographs captured by the kettled crowd, and cutting Calaveras in the vernacular of Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, Cradduck poses vignettes of awkward violence with a cast of grinning skeletons. Blue Plague was created as an inspirational classroom poster for the Blue Plague Print School- a fully functional lino printing workshop that will be led by the artist and operating within WestLane South for the length of the exhibition.

Blue Plague and the Blue Plague Print School respond to the relentless attacks on arts education and culture by the current British government. Cradduck comments that; “Tory influence is a bubonic miasma polluting the atmosphere and poisoning the social body. To disadvantaged people, it can be fatal.”

The finished print will be presented in place of its block at a closing event to be announced.

BIOGRAPHY

Lisa Cradduck was born in Wembley in 1980. A Fine Art graduate from Sheffield Hallam University and Chelsea School of Art, she studies printmaking under Frank Connelly at City Literary Institute and Morley College. Cradduck also teaches workshops and short courses at both schools. In 2010 she undertook a residency at The Venice Printmaking Studio in Murano, Italy. The work she produced, a large-scale etching of the moon, has been selected for inclusion in The Venice Biennale of Large Format Printmaking 2013. She has previously exhibited work at The Horse Hospital, The Communist Gallery, and the Ghetto Biennale (Port-Au-Prince, Haiti) 2009.

Her work is characterized by traditional printmaking techniques, laborious mark-making and scholarly research. Her prints are typically monochromatic. Current research interests include Constructivist dressmaking, 19^th century Asylum Architecture, and Mexican printmaking 1910- 1960. She lives and works in North London.