BARROWFULL / INTO THE MUSIC

Back at the Lock In for the first of 2 sessions to record the MIND In Furness women's group, and the work they've been doing with me and writer Kate Davies. The group have been writing individually and collectively about personal and public encounters with music, and their work is linked by short pieces from Kate and  bits of conversation from the sessions.   Nicola, seen here at the Mic with Robbie from the Lock In In, has done most of the work today, reading poems about the rituals and strategies leading up to the Night Out, and a short story recounting a visit to the Radio One Road show.   Nicola worked in Virgin Records and Kenneth Gardner in Barrow and we have a marvellous account of her working day behind the counter and amongst the sales reps.     The work from each of our writers is funny and touching, but goes beyond the anecdotal and into the thinking behind those personal rituals and strategies, into what makes them necessary.  This is the last of our Into The Music

 After a week away we were back at MIND in Furness, listening to pieces of each other's 'homework' and burrowing deeper into what music is, where it takes us, and what is the thing that hooks us.  For some  it's a mood created by a sound in the right place and the right time, a soundtrack a shared one-off experience, or a route to a peaceful feeling. For some its a voice singing with quiet conviction.  We are working towards a single piece that will take our listeners on a tour of the intimate spaces in which music goes to work on us. Some of these are public spaces, spaces in which we might feel alone and  vulnerable, or connected , confident, unstoppable. The work mingles anecdotes, reportage from clubland, evocations of  feeling and states of grace.  The atmosphere in the room is warm and generous, the talk is interesting, the writing is touching, empathic, funny, full of sharp observation.  Sue brought chocolate. Thanks Sue. 

We are two sessions into our work with our MIND women's group. Poet Kate Davis is introducing writing techniques and examples and offering them as means of recording some accounts  of our personal and public encounters with music and with the social worlds it helps to build.  It's a lovely group;  Kate began with an exercise on group writing around a remembered sound and the atmosphere surrounding it.  The conversation has explored  the pleasures of sharing a parents music with them, of working in record shops, and of shared and sharply contrasting accounts of the ritual preparation for a night out. As before, we are working towards a recording.  It will reflect the process we go through, the personalities involved, and their experiences.     

This is Daz Burke, musician. We talked on saturday about his relationship with music and pop culture.   We agree that pop is information, and we talked about how, in the right - or wrong - hands, pop can inform, enable, and subvert;  how part of its allure is the search and the sniffing out of the next bit of info and the one after that.   How recorded music  inhabits us and the places we move around in;  its agency and affect and its ability to act as a stimulus, a point of cohesion. How It  arrives, moves in, and leaves us changed. If it leaves at all.  We talked about where Daz found the info on his doorstep in Barrow,  about the current draining ubiquity of pop, on the need for a local underground of some sort, where if only for a short period you can find community,  and enjoy those sudden shifts in the landscape when the mode of the music changes.You can hear the outcome in June.   Thanks Daz, nice afternoon. Daz's records...Chaino " Jungle Echoes" Esquivel " E

 Wandered down to the MIND allotment today to run some mixes past Glenn and Arnie, and met a few more of their colleagues who were happy to become our first, informal, audience.  Everyone laughed and nodded in the right places, and made some interesting connections between the voices, the words and the music...Trainspotting, Sleaford Mods and  the Doors got a mention, which, I must say, I think I took very well.... The excerpts from group conversations at the start of the project give the work a bit of additional context, and have turned out to be useful throughout. I've used them as the basis for questions and topics to be explored in other  interviews and conversations.  There's a lot of cross referencing throughout, suggesting a lot of shared priorities and pre-occupations, spanning different periods in the life and times of the local scene.

 This is Derek Brook, accidental record shop manager.  From 1976 for seven years,  the doorway of Earthquake records was the threshold of a scene. Blissed-out West Coast psych imports rubbed against the first spitty shrapnel shards of punk.  Behind its counter - scrounged from a Rawlinson Street Chippy - Derek would sniff at your requests,  get you to an all dayer at  Knebworth to hear something better, and flog you his Vindicator fanzine to read on the coach. Derek gave me a morning and told me the story of the shop. Born out of a need to do something -anything-  for a year while waiting to do a Uni research project on footy hooliganism, Earthquake was different: it was open when everyone else was shut; it recognised  that you might want to actually hear records before you paid for them, and it understood that local scenes need a place to coalesce, a home-made place, built from the ground up  where a small town's 2 Captain Beefheart fans can meet, stand around, and, maybe, buy som