Authors, Poets, Presenters and Musicians
The Bookshop Band
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About
Rock legend Pete Townshend was so "blown away" when he discovered The Bookshop Band that he offered to produce their next album.
The result is, Emerge, Return. You can hear the band - Ben Please and Beth Porter - play the album live when they appear at Llangwm Literary Festival on 9 August as part of a 70-date UK tour.
Townshend was gifted a set of Ben and Beth's CDs and admired the quality of the music and - as a former bookshop owner himself - the fact that their work is inspired by literature.
He said: "I listened to the CDs in my car as I was travelling. I was blown away, completely blown away. I got into the whole Bookshop Band technique, which is just two people making this sound like a symphony orchestra. It's quite extraordinary. Each song was special in its own way. So, I reached out."
Townshend threw himself into the project, not only producing the album at his own studio but playing on every track.
Emerge, Return is a dark album of 13 songs, all written by Ben and Beth, responding to themes including the oppression of bodies, free will and free speech that are explored in books such as:
• The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• and The Book Of Dust, by Philip Pullman.