Of bookish music
On The Bookshop Band that performs original songs inspired by ghost stories, fantasy, crime literature and books about love.
The Bookshop Band, that writes songs about books and plays them in bookshops and at literary festivals around the world, came to life in 2010 as an artistic collaboration with Bath’s best known bookshop.
Nic Bottomley, the owner of Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, was looking to change the bookshop game and came up with the idea of creating a multisensory experience – theming each night around an author and book, bringing in food and drinks from the author’s country, and adding music.
“Initially, Nic had asked if I could play songs from or about that country, but I was keen for a new songwriting challenge. I said that I would put together a small group of songwriters and we would write songs relating to the theme to perform at the event,” says Ben Please.
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Please corralled his friends, Beth Porter and Poppy Mosse, to write these songs for “a glass of wine”. They began by writing songs on folk tales from a particular country and did five events between September and December 2010. “We wrote 10 songs, recorded them and made an album, Travels From Your Armchair, which was in Mr B’s in time for Christmas. We named ourselves the Bookshop Band, as that was where we existed,” says Please.
Because the first season had been such a huge success, Bottomley asked the band to return for “two glasses of wine and parking money”. The overarching theme of the second season was dystopian books with the first event being titled Adultery Night. The book chosen was Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, a fictionalised biography of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.
“Reading a book is so subjective. Words and elements of stories ricochet of our own lives, as they would with any other reader. The songs were a combination of something quite personal and our experience of reading the book,” Please recalls.
The response from the author, the audience, and Bottomley was intense and emotional. “Ever since then we have always turned to a book. So, The Bookshop Band was never an idea, it was something that emerged over time from the context of writing songs in a bookshop, performing in front of an author,” he says.
For the next six years or so, the band focused on local events, becoming prolific songwriters.
“Their high-speed songwriting talent was unbelievable – they would conjure up beautiful songs with perfect lyrics that caught some essence of a moment or theme in the book in the very short time they had,” Bottomley recalls. The literary events would begin with the band, wedged into a very small space with an array of guitars, ukuleles, a cello and percussion instruments.
Audiences were always pleased by their playful folk sound, as were writers whose books served as their muse, including McLain, China Miéville, and Andrey Kurkov. Philip Pullman, who heard the band in Oxford at the launch event for his book, La Belle Sauvage, said they were “very agreeable” and “people who knew what they were doing”.
“After our first year at Mr B’s, we had recorded four albums. We got 1,000 copies of each and then put them on sale in bookshops. We spent the next three years touring, and kept coming back to do the events at Mr B’s Emporium,” Please says.
By the time the band recorded their fourth album, Porter and Please were a couple. They had an amicable split with Mosse.
Today, the UK-based band tours extensively – around the UK, Europe, the US, and Canada – and finds itself at home at every kind of event: in a bookshop, arts club, literary festival, or creative centre.
The couple has collaborated with top authors, including Margaret Atwood, Philip Pullman, Yann Martel, Joanne Harris, Louis de Bernieres, Robert Macfarlane, Patrick Gale, Rachel Joyce, Ben Okri, Ruth Ozeki and many more.
“We quite often weave their stories and our own stories into the songs. Books are a great way of connecting to our own experiences in life, as well as escaping to a different world,” Porter says.
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In June 2014, the couple moved to Wigtown, the unofficial literary capital of Scotland. When their daughter was born, they would take her along for events. The pandemic wasn’t easy – and the pair made ends meet by writing music for a movie and giving online concerts.
“We loved working with Jackie Morris over lockdown, creating an audio book for her book of dreamlike musings, The Unwinding. We wrote two songs and lots of instrumental snippets, which we really enjoyed layering different instruments on to create this soundscape,” Porter says.
The Bookshop Band has released 14 studio albums so far. These have been inspired by ghost stories, fantasy, crime literature and books about love and the human condition. Porter has also performed and recorded with Peter Gabriel and The Proclaimers and is part of The Lost Words: Spell Songs.
“We have just released our 14th album, called Emerge, Return, which unlike the previous 13 wasn’t recorded on the fly, in found spaces, but was produced and recorded by The Who’s Pete Townshend. He discovered us through our previous albums and had approached us offering to record our next. He ended up playing on every track too!” Porter says. Mr B’s hosted one of the biggest shows on the group’s 2024 tour of UK bookshops.
“This collaboration has brought us some of the most fun yet touching moments – watching authors cry when hearing their novels interpreted by the band; getting to introduce them to play a song for Margaret Attwood in a room of 1,000 booksellers, and playing roadie for them at a concert in snowy Durango, Colorado, at Maria’s Bookshop – to name a few,” Bottomley says. “Their home may be in Scotland now, but their spiritual home is at Mr B’s,” he adds.
What is the Bookshop Band’s favourite song? “This is a hard question!” Porter says. “There are songs that we really enjoy playing live. There are a few favourites that get requested at gigs, including We Are The Foxes (Glow by Ned Beauman) Smog Over London (Burton and Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder) and Faith In Weather (inspired by a couple of folk tales including The Seven Ravens),” she says.
“Ben might say Cackling Farts inspired by The Horologicon by Mark Forsyth! I also really enjoyed creating a song for The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell called The Other Side,” she adds.
What’s next for the band? Ben is attending lectures at Exeter University, listening to professors of philosophy of sciences; he will be followed by Beth. The idea is to write some songs inspired by lectures, findings, and ideas.
“We have a few songs that we would love to record. We have a collection of nature songs, about snow geese, wild and medicinal plants, animals, walking, and more. We also have a children’s album of Scottish Literature to release,” Beth says.
The couple also has bigger plans: the US for another tour and other bookshops around the world, and writing some more film music “as that is an exciting job we can do from home and fits around family life with our two small girls”.
Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.