LONDON: The Horse Hospital

Friday 21st February, 2020

7:30pm

Event information

Bird Radio & Jeremy Reed live at the Horse Hospital
Friday 21st February 2020

Doors 7:30pm
8pm Bird Radio & pig7 perform CROW (Ted Hughes)
9pm Jeremy Reed and the Ginger Light

£8 advance (£6 concessions)
£10 on the door

Join us for a night of powerful radical poetry and music performance with two London artists and regulars on the Horse Hospital stage: Jeremy Reed & the Ginger Light and Bird Radio & pig7.

Jeremy Reed
Jeremy Reed has been for decades Britain’s most dynamic, adventurous, controversial and futures poet. Called by the Independent ‘British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie’, his poetry, fiction and performances of his work are singularly inimitable in their opposition to grey mainstream poetry. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes like the Somerset Maugham Award, and was on his coming to live in London in the 1980s patronised by the artist Francis Bacon. His biggest fans are J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty and Bjork who has called his work ‘the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.’

Jeremy Reed & The Ginger Light is the musical collaboration between the acclaimed poet and author Jeremy Reed and the musician and producer Itchy Ear. Together they create a performance dynamic unparalleled in British poetry and an excitement usually only generated by pop. The Ginger Light is an attempt to blur the boundaries that exist between spoken word, music, sound design and song – often incorporating multimedia elements into their performances. Their most recent 2019 album ‘excess and ruin’ is available from http://www.jeremyreed.co.uk/gingerlight.html.

Bird Radio
Bird Radio is a singer, flautist and composer based in London. He experiments with songwriting, extended flute technique, live looping and performance, collaborating with a wide range of artists and texts - recently he has worked with setting poetry by Walter de la Mare, Ted Hughes (his most recent album CROW was released in June 2019) and London’s Soho poet Jeremy Reed, and collaborated with artists such as Pig7 (electronics and field recordings), Akinori Fujimoto (Japanese Taiko), Nawroz Oramari (Kurdish Folk), Mosaic Band (traditional Sufi Music), John Bently (poet, singer, book artist and performer) and Emmanuel Lorien (experimental improv, Max MSP and granular synthesis).

Crow, his most recent album with electronic sound artists and improvisors pig7 (https://pig7.bandcamp.com), sets a selection of poems from Ted Hughes’ masterwork Crow to sound, music and performance in a powerful and atmospheric way never heard before. The album and show was premiered at Port Eliot Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2018, and finally launched at the Lexington in London in June 2019.

Bird Radio (AKA Mikey Kirkpatrick) has toured his music internationally since 2010, is currently recording his 4th solo album ‘The Wild Lakes’ and second feature soundtrack for RAFT (also featuring Jeremy Reed), a film by Italian director Chiara Ambrosio.

www.birdradio.co.uk

‘Crow would be thrilled, I think. Bird Radio has got the swagger, and the terrible romanticism, and the sweetness in the bleakness. It’s deeply felt and riveting. Lots of work about or inspired by Crow is scared to be beautiful. He has to be beautiful or the ugliness fails’. Max Porter

'…folk-horror of the darkest hue…his voice soaring like Scott Walker…Bird Radio fulfils his early promise as a musical storyteller of rare power.' Steve Hunt, fRoots