Hello friends! And the warmest of welcomes to our new subscribers who’ve joined up since our epic weekend of shows at Wilton’s Music Hall. We survived the Mad Marathon! We got away with it! More accurately, we had an absolutely incredible couple of days, and heard fifteen fantastic stories, listened to some quite remarkable music, and revelled in the fellowship of old friends and new.
Honestly, it was such a delight. And though the pressure of putting together so many shows in such short succession does take its toll, the incredible bravery of our storytellers, and the wonderful generosity and support of you, our beloved audience, always makes it 100% worthwhile.
Given the sheer number of wonderful moments from our three shows last week, it’s nigh on impossible to give you a full rundown of highlights without us going over Substack’s word limit, but in case you missed it, you missed Matthew Herbert’s mini-masterclass on creating music from found sounds; you missed Alicia MacDonald’s beautiful reflections on her friendship with her friends’ five-year old daughter; you missed another great big bear hug of a story from James Rowland; you missed Natalie Gumede’s beautiful heart-wrenching tribute to her father (and her extremely soulful dancing to Stevie Wonder); you missed poet Michael Pedersen’s gorgeously lyrical ode to his late friend Scott Hutcherson; you missed our Hidden Tracks graduates Nina Gotua and Vivienne Egan telling their workshopped stories to an audience for the first time; and you missed John-Luke Roberts’s hilarious and poignantly understated exploitation of a loophole in our brief…
Closing things out for us on Saturday evening - our last guest of the weekend - was singer-songwriter Jack Garratt. Talking about how a friend changed his life by making him listen - really listen - to What A Fool Believes by The Doobie Brothers, Jack concluded his story with these words:
“Listen passively, and you’ll have a great time. But listen actively and you’ll change your life”.
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves…
Now we want to do it all over again. And we only have to wait six weeks or so to do it. Just two shows this time, (mercifully!) on Tuesday March 26th and Wednesday March 27th, but we’ll most certainly be back at Wilton’s, and we’ll be bringing ten fantastic storytellers, including Doon MacKichan, Alan Johnson, Alice Vincent, Samantha Baines, Amy Key and Thomas Leeds.
Tickets are available now from the Wilton’s website, and as always, you can take advantage of our special discount code (OTMCast) which lets you buy the best seats in the house for just £12 each (regular price £18). This offer is limited to just 50 tickets for each performance, so if you want to take advantage of it, act now!
A few other things to share with you this week:
This time last week I was only vaguely aware of Future Islands. Now, I’m pretty much convinced that they’re the best band on the planet. Their latest album People Who Aren’t There Anymore (which has the most amazing cover art by the way) came out last Monday, and I listened to it on my way into the office. Once installed at my desk, I spent much of the rest of the day trying to find out everything about them. Turns out that People Who Aren’t There Anymore is their seventh album! That means I’ve got a whole back catalogue to mine for gold - a most glorious discovery. Adam and I spent a good amount of time backstage at the weekend dancing about to The Thief, and it’s about as good a place to start if you’re keen to discover your new favourite band. You can thank me later.
As it happens, Pitchfork gave People Who Aren’t There Anymore a fairly mediocre review (6.6/10), which I can only put down to the fact that the much-loved music news and reviews site is in the process of being summarily gutted by its owners at Conde Nast. Here’s a piece in The Guardian about why it’s so important that music journalism isn’t allowed to die a quiet death…
Our old friend Prasanna Puwanarajah is a very talented fellow. His debut feature film as a director is called Ballywalter, and it is now available to watch On Demand on Prime Video, AppleTV and anywhere else you rent films these days. It’s got a stellar performance from Patrick Kielty (trust me on this), and it’s a very lovely film. Check out the trailer here.
Holly Cullen-Davies was on the show last September, and told a story about falling in love with her partner Marcus Decker, who is currently in prison, serving the longest sentence ever handed down for peaceful protest in the UK. His time in prison is nearly up, but he now faces being deported back to his native Germany. His ‘cruel and harsh’ deportation order is currently the subject of a protest of its own, as over 600 musicians, actors and artists, including Olivia Colman, Bob Geldof and Emma Thompson, have called on the Home Office to withdraw the deportation order. You can add your name to the petition to halt the deportation here.
Laura Barton writes in today’s Guardian about becoming a mother at 45 years old. It’s a gorgeous reflection on never taking anything for granted…
Right, that’ll do! Thanks for reading - we’ll be back next week. Until then, all the best,
KB.
I was privileged to be at the first OTM matinee on Saturday. What a collection of fascinating stories that "I listened to properly" and have me thinking deeply as all OTM shows do.