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        Pete Atkin >> Gigs >> Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
        
(Message started by: S J Birkill on Today at 21:49)
Title: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by S J Birkill on Today at 21:49
Pete has now confirmed his forthcoming appearance at the Ledbury Poetry Festival (Ledbury, Herefordshire) at 20:00 on July 5th. Their website (https://ledburypoetry.org.uk/home/ledbury-poetry-festival/) isn't as yet giving much away, but we expect more.

Steve
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Andrew Long on 16.03.23 at 12:17
Hurrah! First Kings Heath just 30 minutes drive away and now Ledbury less than an hour's drive from home in the opposite direction :). Have registered for Ledbury Poetry Festival for their updates, it being something I'd never heard of before!
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by S J Birkill on 03.05.23 at 05:52
https://www.peteatkin.com/images/ledburypete.jpg  https://www.peteatkin.com/images/burgage.jpg

Public booking opens tomorrow, Thursday May 4th at 09:00, for The Ledbury Poetry Festival's 2023 season, beginning 30th June.

Full details of events can be found on the festival's website at ledburypoetry.org.uk (https://ledburypoetry.org.uk/), or go directly to Pete's page (https://ledburypoetry.org.uk/events/clive-jamess-words-and-my-music-with-pete-atkin/) there to book your seats.

As ever, all Pete's confirmed upcoming gigs are detailed in our Gig Guide (https://www.peteatkin.com/pa.htm#gigs).

Steve
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Terry_Caster on 21.05.23 at 08:31
Ticket duly booked and looking forward to it. I would love to have seen a mash up with Attila The Stockbroker, who is in town the previous evening. A bit of his "Acoustic dub industrial punk poetry" accompanied by some Atkinesque tunesmithery would be just the thing!
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Andrew Long on 26.06.23 at 09:51

on 05/21/23 at 08:31:49, Terry_Caster wrote :
Ticket duly booked and looking forward to it. I would love to have seen a mash up with Attila The Stockbroker, who is in town the previous evening. A bit of his "Acoustic dub industrial punk poetry" accompanied by some Atkinesque tunesmithery would be just the thing!


My ticket successfully booked too!  The Atkin/Attila mash up sounds a great idea; coincidentally my last two trips to the Kitchen Garden at Kings Heath were to see precisely those two - but separately, not together.

T'will be fascinating to see the Ledbury event. The Festival website seems to have some emphasis on poetry...(!) and is it really only an hour? They make hit sound like a talk interspersed with music, rather than songs interspersed with talking. Though perhaps that's a distinction without a difference...
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Terry_Caster on 28.06.23 at 12:55
The POW looks as though it may also be a 'helpful' place just next door! https://www.visitherefordshire.co.uk/discover/prince-wales-ledbury
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Andrew Long on 02.07.23 at 19:17
Event now showing as 'sold out' on the Ledbury Poetry Festival website....!

(I know the Burgage Hall Ledbury isn't the size of the O2, but this is a very good outcome - an idiosyncratic and charming venue at full capacity)
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Terry_Caster on 06.07.23 at 09:18
A lovely night, Mr A in fine form and good voice. I particularly liked the Thirty Year Man rendition and Beware of.

It would have been splendid if there had been a little longer allowed, but overhearing comments from others on the way out it seems to have either introduced or reintroduced Pete and Clive's work to quite a few. Hopefully books and CDs were taken home aplenty!

A couple of poor quality snaps to prove it happened attached... https://www.peteatkin.com/userpics/631376-Terry_Caster-Ledbury_PF_Pete_A_Nording1.jpg
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Andrew Long on 06.07.23 at 17:43

on 06/28/23 at 12:55:31, Terry_Caster wrote :
The POW looks as though it may also be a 'helpful' place just next door! https://www.visitherefordshire.co.uk/discover/prince-wales-ledbury


Indeed it was! Thanks for the tip-off.

Another great evening, with some  favourite old songs. Pete sought to explain and illustrate the differences between a lyric and a poem in view of the nature of the event/audience. The event was a great success - the audience seemed to really enjoy it, though I couldn't make out what proportion were entirely new to the PA/CJ canon.
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Pete Atkin on 08.07.23 at 12:38
Thanks for the generous comments.  And yes, I'm sorry not to have had the chance to play a bit longer, but that's always the way it was going to be, given the format and constraints of the Poetry Festival.  I certainly got a sense that quite a high proportion of the audioence members were perhaps James-and-Atkin newbies - which is always good.   The shibboleth for this assumption is usually how many spontaneous laughs there are during Beware Of The Beautiful Stranger, and there were quite a few this time.   Anyway, here, for those who are interested (as well as for those who aren't), is my setlist -

Have You Got A Biro? (guitar)
Touch Has A Memory (keyboard)
Thirty Year Man (k)
The Last Hill That Shows You All the Valley (g)
Canoe (k)
History and Geography (k)
Wristwatch For A Drummer (g)
An Empty Table (k)
The Way You Are With Me (g)
Beware of the Beautiful Stranger (g)

As a small acknowledgement to the festival context, I talked here and there a bit about some of the differences between poems and song lyrics, which included pointing out that the lyric to The Last Hill is written (like several other Clive lyrics) in iambic pentameters, five-stress lines on the Shakespearean model.   I even recited the first verse in that regular kind of rhythm, before singing the song as a demonstration of how the music can take that kind of basic rhythm apart and create an unexpected change of emphasis.

One other idea I'd had as I was running through The Way You Are With Me beforehand - a song which started out as a collection of reminiscent sketches of Clive's early years in Australia - is that the whole song is perhaps a love song to Australia itself, rather than to the girl on the beach.   That may not have been Cive's conscious intention, of course, but it doesn't mean it isn't true, at least to some extent.

All of the festival staff and volunteers were notably friendly and helpful, so it's a big thankyou to all of them, not least to Andy the sound guy who provided me (as you can see in the pic) with a personal mic, which seemed to work brilliantly well:  great to be able to just sing without paying any attention to the microphones at all.

And thanks most of all, of course, to everyone who came.
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by Terry_Caster on 10.07.23 at 20:07
T'other image I failed to uplod successfully - nothing to do with any time spent in the excellent Prince of Wales opposite! https://www.peteatkin.com/userpics/016010-Terry_Caster-Ledbury_PF_Pete_A_sign2.jpg
Title: Re: Ledbury Poetry Festival, 5th July
Post by S J Birkill on 12.07.23 at 21:38
Great photo, Terry!
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