DJs Jason Phipps and Ruth Barnes have programmed a special set list of love and hate songs for Friday night’s Insulting Cabaret – check out their blog http://insultingcabaretloveandhate.tumblr.com for more information about their song selections. Warning – not for Phil Collins-lovers, the faint-hearted or easily offended!
Do you have a guilty secret stashed on your bookshelf? Some Barbara Cartland bosom-heavers in the selection of stuff you picked up at the car boot sale? A dusty pile of Georgette Heyer in your attic that you claim came with the house? It’s time to come clean.
We need your Mills and Boon novels, your Silhouette smut, your bad romances with cheesy titles and even cheesier covers for The Insulting Cabaret at Southwark Playhouse on Friday 16th April at 9pm.
This year our compere Ross Sutherland will be hosting an intoxicating mix of music, poetry, comedy and spoken word from around the world under the banner Love vs Hate. You know us, we like to take a theme to its extreme, so your books may get read, they may get made into paperchains, who knows? But you’ll get a warm feeling knowing they’re going towards a good cause and a great evening.
So next time you’re passing a charity shop or jumble sale have a forage for us and if you do manage to acquire any, please let us know via insultingcabaret@gmail.com and we’ll arrange to collect them from you. We need as many novels as we can lay our hands on before the event on the 16th April so get searching and purging!
The Insulting Cabaret is produced by the hub. It’s part of International PEN’s Free the Word! festival of world literature, and celebrates the 50th anniversary of the organisation Writers in Prison. For more information and to buy tickets visit www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.
Phrased & Confused is taking a rain check (sorry!) on Summer Sundae this year; as part of our mission to make thing better in the world of word we’re busy working on research into for a new online tv/radio station type thing for spoken word and on new P&C festival and touring ideas for 2011 and beyond.
We do have a gig coming up soon in London – The Insulting Cabaret on April 16th at Southwark Playhouse, as part of International Pen’s Free The Word festival. The line up will be crammed full with top notch poets, musicians, comedians and writers, so if you fancy finding out more check out the event listing at www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk or find us on Facebook.
Drum roll please for the 2009 Summer Sundae videocast! Big thank you to Stuart Silver, who produced and directed the film, to our presenters Mark Grist and Mixy, and to everyone who agreed to take part. We’re really pleased with this year’s video, even if we do say so ourselves – it’s choc-full of snippets of the best bits of music and spoken word, festival vibes and genuine thumbs-up audience feedback. Enjoy!
Phrased & Confused Festival Stage. Summer Sundae Weekender 2009 from stuart silver on Vimeo.
Summer Sundae’s over for another year, but we’re still on a high. What a fantastic weekend! Not only did the weather do us proud, more importantly we had a really great programme of artists this year and the quality was awesome. A real highlight was the four commissioned pieces – all the artists raised the bar this year and produced some amazing work. Beth Jeans Houghton and Ross Sutherland also proved particularly popular with festival-goers, according to feedback to date from the e-festivals forum.
We had lots of great audience contributions to the Phrased & Confused tent, in the form of workshops with some of our poets, and fridge poems a-go-go. Check back here soon for more video and photos but in the meantime here are our daily Summer Sundae Podcasts from the festival stage which should give you a flavour of what we got up to. Check out Joshua Idehen falling through his chair in Episode 1 (we’ll be sending it in to You’ve Been Framed!)
P&C at Summer Sundae, Podcast Episode 1:
Episode 3:
Want to get a preview of the delights of this year’s Phrased & Confused tent at Summer Sundae? Well, for a mere £4, you can! This Thursday, 13th August, we’re promoting a whole evening of spoken word and music as part of Leicester’s ‘Fringe Thursday’ – the Summer Sundae warm-up party.
And we’ve got an awesome line-up showcasing the very best of this year’s Phrased & Confused Stage, including Sound of Rum, Salena Godden and the Book Club Boutique, Ross Sutherland, Mark n Mixy, Lorna Meehan and Mr Plow.
You can find us at The Hind, Leicester from 8pm. More details on the venue here
Summer Sundae Fringe Events will be happening at nine venues around the city with open-top buses running on a loop between them. A Fringe Festival wristband is required to utilise the bus service (priced at only £4, including access to the bus)
Tickets are available from: Firebug (Millstone Lane), Donkey (Welford Road) Rockaboom (St Martins Square) and DMH Box office (0116 233 3111). All money raised will be going to Leicester and Rutland Hospice LOROS.
One of the highlights of this year’s Phrased & Confused festival tent will be a solo set on Friday afternoon by mega talented singer-songwriter Jeremy Warmsley – underground hero of London’s new-folk scene. He’s a complete natural when it comes to classic songwriting with an edgy and experimental twist.
For his P&C set Jeremy will be taking requests from the audience, including covers, so if you’ve got any suggestions let us know now and we’ll pass them on to him!
Nine days and counting until this year’s Summer Sundae. We’re still holding out for sun but what the heck, we’re in a tent, we’ve got a fantastic line-up and four brand new never-been-heard-before pieces. We’re excited, oh yes.
What’s more, if you’re the kind of person who likes to prepare well for your festival experience and plot when your not-to-be-missed artists are performing you can download the stage times for this year’s Phrased & Confused stage by clicking here. Or visit our festival page for more information on the artists.
Check out the lovely videocast of Beth Jeans Houghton courtesy of the Observer Music Monthly here. They think she’s a rising star and so do we - she’ll be appearing on the Phrased & Confused stage at Summer Sundae on Saturday 15 August.
Skint & Demoralised and Byron Vincent are the latest acts to be confirmed for Phrased & Confused’s festival tent at the Summer Sundae Weekender (August 14-16).
Byron is your perfect festival poet. Not only does he look as if he’s fallen out of the Arctic Monkeys’ tour bus, his poems and performances contain just the right mix of self-deprecating humour and poignancy.
Meanwhile, Skint & Demoralised blend with seemingly effortless ease John Cooper Clarke-inspired poetry with Beach Boys pop sensibilities to joyous effect. Enjoy!
