Live in Concert – 13 June 2025

What has a book ever inspired you to do?
To plant a Sara van Fleet rose? Climb the Cairngorms? Run away to sea?
Perhaps to bake peach cobbler? To make the perfect martini? To drink fewer martinis?*
To go gently, look closely, sit quietly, write a diary, send letters?
To howl at the moon? Protest? Rage?
Set up a bookshop?**
Film a video tribute?
Chase after an author to tell them that you love them and gush about their Thomas Hardy-esque writing?***

In Steve Page’s case, the answer is: to write songs. Join us at 5pm in the shop tomorrow, Saturday, to enjoy the result. We are very excited to kick off Independent Bookshop Week with our first gig. Prizes awarded, in the form of great respect and a top-up to your drink, for identifying all the intertextual references and authorial inspirations in Steve’s songs. (No tickets but please do let us know that you are coming.)

Ian Penman’s Erik Satie Three Piece Suite inevitably inspires one to listen to the composer’s ‘old as sand’ but also ‘strangely contemporary’ miniature piano pieces as well as leading one to so much more, these well-known compositions being only a small portion of Satie’s work.

‘Dip a toe into the Satie rock pool and you soon discover a cove, a coastline, an entire horizon,’ Penman writes. It’s a playful biography of a consistently contradictory man, a study of Satie’s art and of Art and a brilliant example of how to write about music, evoking the sound of and responses to his compositions without over-analysing.

Forming one of many to be read piles – the wobbly towers by the bed and the dangerous stacks on the stairs have now put out roots stretching into the hallway and it is a struggle to get through the front door; thanks for asking – are further tomes on tones:

Women and the Piano by Susan Tomes presents the lives of fifty women pianists, celebrating their performances, compositions and actions and the ways in which these changed the male-dominated profession, from the eighteenth-century Anne-Louise Boyvin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy to Nina Simone. An extraordinary pianist herself, Tomes also interviews others to explore the many barriers that women still face in the world of classical music.

3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan explores three geniuses of jazz, this art form, ‘that boiled forth from a gumbo of ethnic musics in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans and coursed up rivers and railroads and blue highways to Oklahoma City and Kansas City and St Louis and Chicago and New York City irresistibly…’ In 1959 when they came together to record Kind of Blue its audience was changing and diminishing but Kaplan captures the rousing pulse of this ‘viscerally thrilling’ music.    

Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown follows Melvin Ellington, on his way home to Harlem after several years in prison for objecting to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the novel, his memories loop back to his time in prison, his college days and his childhood, his storytelling imbued with jazz in both style and content. Like Coltrane said to Miles (according to the ‘cat with a heavy jazz jones’ whom Melvin meets in prison) Melvin is getting it all out. ‘I used to keep it all in and wound up knockkneed in a jive humble…Thanks to jazz my toes don’t knock no more.’

Neu Klang by Christoph Dallach is a history of Krautrock told through interviews with its pioneers and artistic collaborators, though they cannot agree on their feelings about the name itself. Iggy Pop comments, ‘It’s a loathsome, stupid term but like my own first name it has eventually become a kind of affectionate positive, because the music is so good.’ The oral narrative trips along deftly whilst drawing in decades of musical and political history.

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen is a remix of a novel, set in a world in which deceased historical figures have returned. Music producer Darnell is summoned to meet the woman he considers America’s first Black superhero, Harriet Tubman, and her band, The Freemans, who want help taking their songs on tour to tell their story.

Aspiration and inspiration are offered by the rhythm of two delightful picture books:
In Marching Band by Kael Tudor, illustrated by Kate Hindley, a glorious and unlikely musical combination grows with each place that its members visit, from a construction site, to the beach, to the bottom of the ocean to outer space.
In Little Sheku and the Animal Orchestra by Sheku Kanneh-Mason, illustrated by Rekha Salin the orchestra are struggling through a terrible performance, off-key and out of sync. Realising that their conductor has gone missing, they must venture out to find her, accompanied by the music of the outside world. (Add to the mix Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s autobiography The Power of Music and I can’t now move in the hallway but his episode of This Cultural Life was so brilliant that I must read it.)

Many other things were put on pause this week as I tore through Jasbinder Bilan’s excellent middle-grade novel, Naeli and the Secret Song. Living in Hyderabad, all that Naeli has to remember her English father is the violin he gave her and the song he taught her before he left India. When a ticket to England arrives, with no indication of who has sent it, she hopes that it might be from him and decides to brave the ship to London and seek him out. (I have some concerns about the adults who let her embark alone but I can’t argue with the wonderful writing and the music which resounds through the book’s pages.)

Next week a chorus of booksellers will be hymning the joys of independent bookshops. I hope you get the chance to sing along. We are partnering with Foundry Editions throughout, as I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, and cannot wait for our event with Chiara Valerio, author of The Little I Knew in the shop on Wednesday. Do come along.

May your weekend thrum with music, blues, jazz, classical, rock or whatever beat you choose to march to,
Lizzie    

*No reference found.
**It would be weird to link to The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald given how that ends…
***This definitely did not happen.