The Bookshop Band – the offspring of an artistic love-affair between a duo of English folk singer-songwriters and a multi-award winning independent bookshop in the UK, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. They writeand perform songs inspired by books, inspired by hundreds of authors from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman, Here they perform A Shop with Books in, at The Bookshop in Wigtown, Summer of 2014.
The Bookshop Band consists of Ben Please and Beth Porter. The songs are the musical outpouring of the band’s own response to books they have read. “A great book intensely fires your imagination over the time it takes to read it. You are living the life of that character or exploring a time or place you’ve never been to before. As we turn to write, trying to evoke what it was about the book that most resonated with us, what emerges are highly personal songs but from new points of view, inevitably influenced by the different perspectives experienced whilst reading the book.” Ben Please
The Bookshop Band formed in September 2010, releasing their first album in December that year. They have since released 13 albums each exploring a different theme in their responses to over 100 author’s books. They have toured extensively around the UK and abroad, from bookshops to festival main-stages, and have been commissioned by BBC Radio 3, The V&A Museum, The National Portrait Gallery and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, most recently writing two songs for the launch of Philip Pullman’s The Book Of Dust. They are currently working with The V&A Museum on a musical series of banned books.
Between them Beth Porter and Ben Please bring the books to the stage along with a multitude of instruments, including cello, harmonium, glockenspiel, guitars and ukuleles which, along with their distinct voices, create a cinematic sound that draws the audience right in to a highly intimate performance, at once touching and mesmerizing, heart wrenching and funny.
