a very special concert at Maryport’s Wave Centre on 31 January. The week before, Brampton Live are confining eight of the nation’s finest singer songwriters and performance poets to a remote farmhouse on Hadrian’s Wall. With their every need attended to, free from all distractions apart from each other, they’ll be invited to seek inspiration from the unique landscape, history and community life around them.

The challenge is to create a new body of work—All Along The Wall – for a specially-commissioned 75 minute performance. The artists will be under pressure not only to write enough new material for a concert, but to premiere it almost immediately at The Wave.

The artists who have signed up for this exquisite form of torture are singer-songwriters:

Rory McLeod: 21st century troubadour, ex-circus clown and fire eater, one man soul band, poet, storyteller and multi instrumentalist.

Julie Matthews: winner (with Chris While) of the Best Duo gong at the 2009 BBC Folk Awards (and nominated eight times in previous years!), and now living in Cumbria.

Boo Hewerdine: Ivor Novello award nominee who has written songs for Eddi Reader, KD Lang, Natalie Imbruglia and many others. Appeared last month on the Andrew Marr Show (BBC1).

Jez Lowe: acclaimed singer-songwriter from the north east. Tours all over the world with his band the Bad Pennies.

Ruth Notman: up-and-coming singer and songwriter from Nottingham. Nominated as Best Newcomer at the BBC Folk Awards in 2006.

And the poets:

Kate Fox: recently commissioned to write and perform a poem about the first hundred days of Gordon Brown’s premiership for BBC1’s The Daily Politics. Poet-in-residence on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live.

Matt Harvey: Another Saturday Live regular, and author of the weekly Desktop Poetry slot in The Guardian’s Saturday ‘Work’ section.

Elvis McGonagall: stand up poet supreme, armchair revolutionary and recumbent rocker, as well as 2006 World Poetry Slam Champion.

Tickets for the premiere of All Along The Wall are £12.00 (concessions £10.00), from The Wave Centre’s box office on 01900 811450—open every day from 10.00am—4.00pm. Please help us to make this exciting project a success by buying tickets and by spreading the word to friends and family!

The performance will be recorded by Workington-based Fellside Recordings, producing a CD which will be on sale at this year’s Brampton Live. (16-18 July are the dates for your diaries—early bird tickets will be on sale soon.) The piece will be performed again at the festival, and for a third time towards the end of the year at The Sage Gateshead—in other words, a series of performances “all along the Wall”.

There are also plans for a smaller version of the project to tour village communities in ‘Hadrian’s Wall Country’ in both Cumbria and
Northumberland during 2011.