BARROWFULL / INTO THE MUSIC

 John Murphy has travelled and he still does, often from his armchair. Lately, John has been promoting the town and  Piel Island on the world's airwaves and blogs,  his voice has been heard in Ireland, the USA and Australia. Fittingly, John first heard "Sergeant Pepper" while  in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. He describes being huddled in the bowels of a ship, watching the disc turning on a home made record player whose drive belt  looked like the wheel of a toy car.  John talks about the power of  records to transport him; but not just any records, his copies, with their accumulations of crackles and skrits. The physical presence of records, the actions and mechanisms of engagement, and the visitors they can summon.  I've asked John to list and write about his Piel Island Discs...the results will be with you soon.

 This is Brian Moxham, he runs Pepperland Collect, Barrow's Collector's shop on Scott Street.  Piled high with records, comics, sporting and film ephemera, the shop is  a hub for young explorers, nostalgics, and people like me who head into its darker corners in search of flexidiscs, film soundtracks and  production music and end up distracted by a pile of Stax/Volt soul or  pink label Island singles or whatever has arrived since my last visit. Brian locked up at four, pulled up a squeaky chair and told me of his fascination with vinyl, and the ability of tape to store unexpected treasure. We talked of the importance to small towns of shops like his and of the legendary Earthquake Records, where scenes cohered around imported obscurities and nods of approval or dismissal would greet new releases, and of the joys of browsing and idle grazing. Brian's first gramophone was a portable wind-up job. He's had these brought in by customers, either to get a price, or to provide

INTO THE MUSIC is a celebration of the pleasures of recorded music. We are building a series of audio montages for broadcast or podcast drawing on new written work, music and the sound of the town of Barrow In Furness and its people. I'm John Hall, I'm the lead artist on this project, I work with narratives, text, archives and collections and recorded sound to tell stories. Here, we are looking at the role of music in our lives, in the grand narratives and the small, quiet moments.   We are looking at how music is received and experienced, how it has featured during different times in our lives, via radio, records shops, discos, downloads, pub jukeboxes and mixtapes and in the background noise of our everyday lives. We will draw on personal and shared experiences of music, on its role as a soundtrack or an aid to memory, as a source of identity and as a means of comfort and connection...the way music gets into our sonic environment and into us, and the places it reac