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The Bookshop Band is to release over 100 book-inspired songs, serialised as 10 albums over the next 10 months.
The band has collaborated directly with many of the authors whose work has inspired them, with writers performing on tracks, helping to produce artwork and reading extracts from their work, including Man Booker Prize winners Ben Okri and Yann Martel.
The first album in the series is titled "Curious and Curiouser", and will be released on 27th May. The album is inspired by ‘books with a sense of the fantastical’, including Alice in Wonderland, Sam Leith’s The Coincidence Engine (Bloomsbury) and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The album also features an extract from David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (Sceptre) read by actress Fiona O’Shaughnessy, and Stanley Donwood reading from his book Humour (Faber & Faber). The cover art was designed by BAFTA-winning animator Mikey Please.
Consisting of Ben Please and Beth Porter, The Bookshop Band formed in 2010 to write songs for author events at their local independent bookshop in Bath, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights.
They began their ‘Bookshelf’ tour at Mr B’s this weekend on 23rd April, and will continue throughout the UK and Ireland this year at venues including Glastonbury Festival, the International Literature Festival in Dublin and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
The band’s upcoming series of albums will be sold both digitally and on CD in music shops and bookshops, and subscribers to the whole set will also receive a custom wooden bookshelf. A limited edition vinyl copy of Curious and Curiouser is available exclusively from Mr B’s.
Pre-orders for individual albums or the entire series, as well as details of the band’s tour dates are available at The Bookshop Band's website.