e:0950241 Findusonfacebook Tel: 07905 082421 www.e-truscan.co.uk SEASON TICKET£50/£40 concessions Tel: 552435 01424 Devonshire71 Road, Bexhill-on-Sea Music’s Not Dead MEG BATEMAN alsoavailable from Tickets for ROBERTS and ALASDAIR Tel: 431305 01424 [email protected] events: Tickets for TheBeacon www.electricpalacecinema.com Tickets for Palace Electric events: http://blackhutsfestival.eventbrite.com Tickets for allFestival events: Patron: Andrew Kötting 2 November 2014 29 October – writing/music/film presents aFestival of HUTSFESTIVALTHIRD BLACK etruscan books concerts. Alltheywanted was fun. races, tug-o’-war competitions andbeach such aspram races, pubcrawls, bike From here theyorganisedstrange events Glenn Veness met inatavern calledthe tofrom –whooften fishermen artists them. Itwas fullof colourful characters – immune to thepoliticalissuesaround Hastings, where thetownsfolk seemed of thecountry was alittleoldtown called However, nestledinthesoutheastcorner successive governments. itsinhabitantsdisillusionedwith left miners' strikes,andpolltaxhad inflation was acountry inturmoil.Privatisation, At theendof the20thcentury film makerfilm • HASTINGS Lord Nelson

Roland Jarvis .

Alasdair Roberts WEDNESDAY 29 OCTOBER 8.00pm from the army, gone to ground in many The Grass Arena by John Healy. It’s a group long known as tinkers. Cheaply countries. long and brilliant postcard from hell. made, it is a simple, old-fashioned film. ELECTRIC PALACE A brutal childhood, alcoholism, a It portrays a fascinating, vanishing group In prison Harry the Fox taught Healy to 39a High Street, Hastings underworld – this is what it’s like to touch of British nomads who have maintained play chess. Out of prison he was a lookout 7.15 for 8.00pm bottom, then find your way up through an essentially palaeolithic lifestyle across for a mob that ran scams on post office the game of chess. Ian McEwan millennia. We see tinsmiths and pearl £7.00 / £5.00 concessions books using a public toilet washroom as fishers, hawkers and horse-dealers, and Barbaric Genius: their HQ. THURSDAY 30 OCTOBER 7.00pm hear great songs sung by unique tradition Documentary on John Healy He won 10 major British chess tourna - bearers. by Paul Duane (Eire, 72 mins, 2011) ments, forcing a draw from Soviet grand- ELECTRIC PALACE Timothy Neat will give an illustrated talk master Rapheal Vaganian, then second- 39a High Street, Hastings A bottle of ‘Blue’ was a cheap way to tackle on his photographs, including those of best player in the world. Frustrations 6.15 for 7.00pm – note early start the cravings for alcohol. It also took the 1960s rural Spain, and of travelling people. between Healy and his editors led to the edge off the morning’s hangover, helped £8.00 / £6.00 concessions He will then discuss his work with the book being deemed out of print by the day slip by and lessened the terrors of audience and introduce Rathad nan Caird Fabers. Over 5000 copies of this best An evening with Timothy Neat rough sleeping. (The Tinker Roads). This documents seller were destroyed. The reputation of and friends and folklorist Hamish Henderson and But you need to dilute the poison of surgical Healy was destroyed. He would become Two films The Summer Walkers (Timothy Gaelic piper Norman Maclean renewing spirits – and the easiest place to get fresh invisible, shoved out of the writing world. Neat & Hamish Henderson, Scot, 53 mins, contact with many of The Summer water would be scooping it from the font of It would be harder to reappear. a church into a milk carton. 1976) and Rathad Nan Ceard (The Road of Walkers, 20 years later. What became of Healy, almost forgotten the Tinkers) (Scot, 28 mins, 1995) in Scots Henderson wrote The Freedom Come All Ye. Dan Carrier Camden Journal for a dozen years is explored in the first Gaelic (with subtitles) Billy Connolly saluted him at the Cultural documentary about Healy’s life. The In 1988 Faber published The Grass Arena, The Summer Walkers is a documentary Olympics as ’s great-uncle. Grass Arena was described on Newsnight an acclaimed autobiography of a former about the Scots Travelling People – a Etruscan Books published Hamish vagrant alcoholic John Healy who spent by Kirsty Wark as a literary sensation, fifteen violent years in a wino jungle and Matthew Sweet declared it one of when begging carried an automatic the great works of the twentieth century prison sentence. Healy had been a boxer, on Radio 3. winning many amateur titles, absconded Barbaric Genius The film unfolds like a detective novel, following the clues along the way, tracking down the real story. The Grass Arena is about to be rescued by an American editor at ‘Penguin Modern Classics’ who knew nothing of – and cared less about – the insidious way the system conspired to pretend the book had never existed. Here is the evidence that shows Healy’s paranoia is based on something very real – a subtle conspiracy of class and education against a man who wrote a masterpiece. What had become of Healy in all those years, and who remains culpable? Tinker Camp Silhouette: Timothy Neat, 1976 Timothy Camp Silhouette: Tinker Photo: Glyn Roberts 2 3 Henderson’s first collection of poems and Ticket includes a complimentary copy songs in 50 years in Pervigilium Scotia. of Listening To The Stones, Poems of New Caledonia, by Nicholas Johnson – a post A photographer, migratory bee keeper, colonial work about French occupation wild mushroom gatherer and writer, in New Caledonia, and the events that led Timothy Neat was raised in Cornwall. to the Heingene and Ouvea massacres, He wrote the biography of Hamish subject of Mathieu Kassovitz’s Henderson, and he filmed Hallaig with controversial film Rebellion. Sorley MacLean. Play Me Something (made with John Berger) won the Europa Prize The deep feeling for the West Country at Barcelona 1989. His new book is These terrain, the vernacular outcroppings that Faces – Photographs and Drawings. Neat is run like ripples through the text, make an HRSA and Fellow of the Association of Nicholas Johnson’s poetry a haunting Scottish Literary Studies. and wonderful reading experience.

Alasdair Roberts recorded his song of Edward Dorn Regueiro) Clara Alasdair Roberts (photo: Neat’s poem The Ugly Mountain. wrote that Meg Singer, guitarist, songwriter based in PLUS FRIDAY 31 OCTOBER 7.30pm Bateman “seems to display with deep Glasgow, born in Swabia, Germany. Since Here We’m Be Together (Eng, 13 mins, 2014) feeling and exact imagery the women’s 1997 he has released 11 albums, mostly on THE BEACON experience of love in a manner that recalls Drag City. Roberts’s extraordinary lyricism A field-recorded encounter with some of 67–68 St Mary’s Terrace (opposite steps the great songs of the sixteenth and takes its place in the lineage of a Scottish the more eccentric folk rituals of the of 12 St Mary’s Terrace), Hastings seventeenth centuries.” literary tradition encompassing modern - Norfolk Broads – through the eyes of one Doors open 6.00pm for supper menu ist such as Iain Crichton Smith, homegrown fabulist. Rob Curry and Tim Performance 7.30pm Rhyme in her early poems link her poems Sorley MacLean and Hugh MacDiarmid, Plester’s long-awaited follow up to Way of to the tradition of popular Gaelic song. In £10.oo / £8.00 concessions back through Robert Burns and Robert the Morris features music by Sam Amidon these songs, Bateman finds a precedent Tannahill to the mediaeval ‘makars’ and as well as iconic Norfolk artists Billy Alasdair Roberts (solo concert) for a feminine voice in Gaelic bards of Dark Age Dalriada. Bennington and Sam Larner. and Meg Bateman poetry. While entry into the professional caste of poets who dominated Gaelic Alasdair is driven by collaboration, in They have recently started production on Two sets by Alasdair Roberts, and two sets culture until the seventeenthth century diverse mediums : with Shane Connolly, The Ballad of Shirley Collins, a lyrical by Meg Bateman, one of her Gaelic poetry, was entirely closed to women, the whom he worked on a puppet theatre response to the life and work of Hastings- in Gaelic and English and the second, of anonymous, vernacular song tradition interpretation of the Scottish folk play born folk legend Shirley Collins. her translations from Gaelic poetry, that survived the destruction of the Galoshins, film makers (including Luke www.shirleycollinsmovie.com Songbook of the Pillagers. bardic system often spoke with a female Fowler, contributing a soundtrack to his Nicholas Johnson presents 3 short films by It was your lightness that drew me, voice. Her four books are Òrain Ghaoil / film All Divided Selves) and, last year the Rebecca E Marshall filmed in West Devon The lightness of your talk and your laughter, Amhràin Ghrà – 1989, Aotromachd agus poet Robin Robertson, with whom he where much of his Collected Longer Poems, The lightness of your cheek in my hands, Dàin Eile / Lightness and other Poems made Hirta Songs, a song cycle about the And Stood upon Red Earth All A Round, is Your sweet gentle modest lightness; (1997), Soirbheas / Fair Wind (2007) and remote Scottish archipelago of St Kilda. set. These are films “responding to folk in Transparencies ( 2013). And it is the lightness of your kiss His musical work mainly consists of rural Devon – the playing of skittles with That is starving my mouth, Alasdair Roberts two parallel strands: self-written song its remarkable rhythms, hearing the And the lightness of your embrace A master of scordatura techniques on the material – on Farewell Sorrow (2003), naming of fields only in spoken word not That will let me go adrift. guitar… an exceptional lyricist… the sound The Amber Gatherers (2007), Spoils (2009), on maps, the red soaked earth in winter of new myths and new music being hewn A Wonder Working Stone (2013), and and a strange poet with his inside out Meg Bateman from folk’s stone. The Wire Alasdair Roberts (2015) – together with outside in house and family.” 4 5 interpret ations of traditional songs and Tunisian born, raised in Venezuala and “T.H.White is part of my story,” she writes. at Kings Cross, he wrote his savage ballads from Scotland and beyond – on Belgium, he’s lived in Iran and Romania. “I have to write about him here because masterpiece The Grass Arena, which The Crook of My Arm (2001), No Earthly He has edited exemplary editions of poets he was there. When I trained my hawk I has been almost universally acclaimed. Man (2005) and Too Long In This Condition T.E. Hulme, Marcel Schwab and Lynette was having a quiet conversation of sorts, The book and the film of the book have (2010). He collaborated with the Scottish Roberts. His first novel The Last Hundred with the deeds and works of a long-dead between them over a dozen major Gaelic singer Mairi Morrison on Urstan Days was set during the fall of Ceausescu., man… whose life disturbed me.” national and international awards. (2012). He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Helen Macdonald has assisted with the An extraordinary man, a remarkable life. Alasdair Roberts is a member of the management of raptor research and John Healy’s other works include The English/Scottish quartet The Furrow conservation projects across Eurasia, Metal Mountain, Streets Above Us and Collective. Their first album is At Our and bred hunting falcons for Arab royalty. The Glass Cage. They all should be put Next Meeting. They recently played at She’s also sold paintings, been an into print. Etchingham, the closest Alasdair had antiquarian bookseller, shepherded a got to performing in Hastings. flock of fifty ewes and once attended an In Rome, 2000 years ago, the sand they arms fair by mistake. Her poetry work used for the arena was specially imported SATURDAY 1 NOVEMBER 2.00pm Shaler’s Fish (2001) will be republished in from Egypt because it soaked up blood a new Etruscan edition in 2015. quickly. I was thinking about that, and THE BEACON I thought we were in an arena ourselves 67–68 St Mary’s Terrace (opposite steps SATURDAY 1 NOVEMBER 7.30pm when I was living on the street, only it was of 12 St Mary’s Terrace), Hastings covered in grass. I was trying to convey a Doors open 12.00 noon for lunch menu THE BEACON subculture where there is no law; it’s life

Performance 2.00pm Pogorzaly Marzena Phot: 67–68 St Mary’s Terrace (opposite steps or death. All over Britain there were grass of 12 St Mary’s Terrace), Hastings arenas. I was trying to bring the reader £8.00 / £6.00 concessions Helen Macdonald’s, H is for Hawk is this Doors open 6.00pm for supper menu into my world, to experience it with me – poet and falconer’s life with Mabel, a Helen Macdonald and Patrick Performance 7.30pm a vicarious experience, at least. McGuinness, poets and authors hawk, “an exemplar of the mysterious of prose works: H is for Hawk alchemy by which suffering can be £8.00 / £6.00 concessions Then out of the blue I remembered a and Other People’s Countries transmuted into beauty”. John Healy, author of The Grass book I read about ancient Rome and the Melissa Harrison Financial Times gladiators. It was set in the time of Nero, (with Cape’s support) Arena, (Penguin Modern Classics) the people were starving but the Games She bought Mabel for plus a reading with Stuart Patrick McGuinness “has written the were still going on. £800 on a Scottish Christie, author of Granny Made great book on Belgium and modern quayside and took Me An Anarchist, and Pistoleros There was a passage about a Harbour memory, Other People’s Countries. He her home to Master in Alexandria. He asked should he takes his place among those singers and We are utterly compelled both by the power Cambridge. Then she load the boats with food for the people or painters of the haunted, the melancholy, of Healy’s story and his great power in the filled the freezer with sand for the arena? He was told: “You fool, the diminished, the caricatural, the hum - telling of it to stay by his side until the last hawk food, ready to load the boats with sand for the arena.” drum: Ensor, Rodenbach, Sax, Huysmans, word is writ. Daniel Day Lewis embark on the long, Translated from Latin into English, ‘arena’ Simenon and Magritte.” strange business of John Healy, a former wino and street means ‘sand’. The surface of our arenas Michael Hoffman trying to train this thief, spent 15 years as a vagrant alcoholic was grass. John Healy wildest of birds. H is for Hawk has been on the streets who rose to become a Patrick McGuinness is that vanishing Spanish Civil War historian and anarchist highly acclaimed since its summer chess master capable of playing several figure: the multi-lingual, multi-cultural, writer, editor of The Hastings Trawler and publication for the beauty of its prose, for games simultaneously whilst wearing a pan-European literary polymath. He is the Anarchist Film Channel, Stuart Christie its portrayal of the hawk, of T.H.White, blind fold. In 1986, living from hand to poet of The Canal of Mars, translator of returns to Hastings to read with Healy. and of grief. mouth on a rundown council estate Mallarmé’s For Anatole’s Tomb. 6 7 www.christiebooks.com hosts over 800 the anarchist monthly Black Flag, and was films and documentaries with anarchist later arrested and charged with seven and related libertarian themes. others of being a member of the ‘Angry Brigade’ in what became – at the time – Born in Partick, Glasgow the son of a the longest trial in British judicial history. hard-drinking trawlerman and a Acquitted on all charges at the Old Bailey hairdresser, Christie was named after trial Christie set up the anarchist the country’s best-known Stuart, Bonnie publishing house Cienfuegos Press. Prince Charlie – “the only man in history to be named after three separate sheep - Anarchists have a ‘bad name’ in the media, dogs” as his fellow Partiquois, Billy not because they can point to one Connolly, once said. indiscriminate massacre by anarchists – there have been none – but because the Like Andrew Kötting’s Gladys in Gallivant, one thing holders of power fear is that Christie was also much influenced by his they personally should be held responsible grandmother. She “provided a moral for their own actions. barometer which married almost exactly with that of libertarian socialism and Stuart Christie Dreams Dreams, Dreams, anarchism, and she provided the star which I follow.”

SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 1.00pm Nichola Bruce: Christie met Spanish anarchist exiles ELECTRIC PALACE took the young surrealists to the brink He is author of Poems of Frank Rupture, in Bristol and decided that “I had to do 39a High Street, Hastings of insanity as a revolutionary new era (Sancho Panza) and Adjunct: an Undigest. more than just demonstrate and leaflet. 12.15 for 1.00pm in Art History was born. I offered my services.” The mission he A seven-year creation, it manically folds was assigned was to deliver explosives £8.00 / £6.00 concessions Tymon Dogg, a singer-songwriter and together rueful diary entries, irreverent composer, has collaborated with artists comments on artists, writers and to Madrid for the latest attempt – the A WAVE OF DREAMS, Louis Aragon thirtieth, as it happened – to blow up as diverse as The Clash, Nico, Enrique musicians, gleeful misprints, and all sorts General Franco. Two leftfield treats based on Susan De Morente, Hugh Hopper, Charles Hayward of found and heard material. Undigested and . Until Joe in appearance, but regurgitated in combin- Duncan Campbell Muth’s translation of Aragon’s surrealist classic: a spoken word performance of Strummer’s sudden death in 2002, Tymon ations either crafted or mathematically But his mission was infiltrated. Christie extracts by actor, Alex Walker, with live was a member of the Mescaleros and determined, the consistent hilarity of its was arrested in Madrid, aged 18, in musical accompaniment by Tymon Dogg composed the music for a number of Joe relentless, deadpan juxtapositions has possession of plastic explosives, and and Alex Thomas PLUS a screening of Strummer’s Mescaleros songs including inescapably serious implications too. sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. film-maker Nichola Bruce’s magical Mondo Bongo – to the strains of which Robert Potts The Guardian The action was co-ordinated by the interpretation of an extract from the Angelina Jolie fell in love while filming clandestine anarchist armed resistance work, Dreams, Dreams, Dreams. Mr. & Mrs. Smith. His 2012 Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse organisation Defensa Interior for which (Miami University Press) were, in the Louis Aragon’s 1924 prose-poem-essay The Irrepresible Tymon Dogg 1968–2009 Christie was acting as courier. The family’s account of Ian Thomson in the Financial (Une vague de rêves) is a compelling, is out on Cherry Red records. Tymonn three-year campaign – supported by Times: “a marvel of luminous precision. lyrical, first-hand account of the early Dogg played Hastings Pier with Joe many writers, including Jean Paul Sartre – Sensitive at all times to Mallarmé’s ideal days of surrealist experimentation in Strummer and The Mescaleros in 2002. was mounted, and Christie was pardoned. of a literature stripped to the bone, the Paris. Aragon vividly describes, and PLUS a performance by special guest translation glows with a melancholy On his release from prison in 1967 Christie philosophically evaluates, the inner Peter Manson, Glasgow-born translator sense of absence (‘The flesh is sad, and was involved in the re-formation of the adventures, the hallucinations and of the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. I’ve read all the books’).” Anarchist Black Cross and the launch of encounters with ‘the Marvelous’ which 8 9 SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 4.00pm Alongside many short poems, Fisher collaborated locally with Liane Carroll, establishment in as many ways as it’s wrote seminal long poems and prose and John Harle. possible for one man and a typewriter ELECTRIC PALACE poems: The Ship’s Orchestra, City, to do. Rosemary Goring The Herald Sometimes men make sounds as birds do – 39a High Street, Hastings The Cut Pages and A Furnace. 3.15 for 4.00pm just to sing. That need is so clear a fact of His poems written in Glaswegian are Featured jazz musicians in the film ’s poetry men would do well brilliant moral beauties, as perfect in every £8.00 / £6.00 concessions include Roy Williams, John Barnes, Len to listen. They will not so soon again have way as the lyrics of Hugh MacDiarmid or Two readings: poets and prose Skeat, Peter Cotteril, and . so lovely a man to inform them. the best of William Carlos Williams. writers Tom Leonard and Tom Andrew O’Hagan The Observer Pickard, plus a film by Tom Pickard Roy Fisher: Birmingham’s SUNDAY 2 NOVEMBER 8.00pm What I Think With (England, 50 mins, 1991) ELECTRIC PALACE 39a High Street, Hastings There’s a scene in the film in which Roy 7.15 for 8.00pm Fisher happens upon the house in working-class Birmingham where he was £8.00 / £6.00 concessions born in 1930 and lived until he was 23. An evening with film director The house has a fresh, new door, and the John Krish poet, a large white-haired gent in a parka, gives it a knock. A young Sikh boy For viewers who have enjoyed Tom Photo: Al Bunting Photo: answers. Fisher introduces himself and Pickard’s film with its evocation of the inquires whether he might have the old Tom Leonard was born in Glasgow. Pivotal waterways in dizzy sunlight, then its to the Glasgow renaissance, Leonard’s abrupt cut to a different kind of peace door, which he had noticed in the rubbish. Chris Killip Photo: His courteousness wins the boy over, and poetry is visual, sonic and vital. He is also when old newsreel of Dylan Thomas with later we see the two studying a sandstone Failing the 11-plus Tom Pickard attended a great reader. Tom Leonard’s 1984 poetry creaky music is broadcast, stay awhile crag in a nearby wood; Fisher takes out a a secondary modern school in Blakelaw, collection Intimate Voices remained in longer for the end of the festival. often in the remedial class, until 14 when print for almost 20 years through five penknife and digs in, showing the boy Hastings is honoured to welcome John he joined the Tyneside dole queues where print-runs and with three separate how easily sandstone crumbles. Upon Krish, who worked on Humphrey his real education began. At 17 he met his publishers. In 2010 it was supplanted by that foundation, the poet points out, Jennings’ Listen to Britain in 1942. Birmingham was built. Ange Mlinko mentor, poet , and began outside the narrative (Poems 1965–2009), co-running readings at the Morden Tower then in 2013 his collected prose writing John Krish selects and introduces an in . was published as Definite Articles. evening of film and television documen - tary, spanning the 1950s to the 1970s, As well as a librettist and director of His Places of the Mind: The Life and Work including Captured, a Prisoner of War documentaries he has also worked and of James Thomson (B.V.) remains the sole drama – a lost gem of British post-war ‘survived’ as a benefit claimant, a dyker, modern biography, with its epigraph from filmmaking – and a directed episode labourer, book dealer, oral historian, Swedenborg, of the poet of The City of of The Avengers, for which he designed itinerant poet, driver and scullion. He lives Dreadful Night. the intertitles. www.richwhitehead.com in the North Pennines near the Scottish His translation of Brecht’s Mother Courage border where he makes recordings of In 2008, The British Film Institute and her Children was published this year. winds on Fiend’s Fell, while walking and published Land of Promise, a history of watching cloud shadows on distant hills. Regarded by many as one of Scotland’s Documentary film making in Britain most influential writers – a revolutionary from 1930 to 1950. With it came DVDs of He reads from Hoyoot, Collected Poems poet who has shaken up the literary 40 films made by 25 directors.

Photo: © Richard Whitehead Whitehead © Richard Photo: and Songs (Carcanet). Tom Pickard has 10 11 (1953) The Elephant Will Never Forget The Elephant Will Never The BFI then decided to do the same tram journey. It was shown in a much thing, for the years 1951–1977. They acclaimed quartet of his pictures that published Shadows of Progress and chose travelled the country in 2010, including four films from one director, John Krish his infinitely moving I Think They Call to represent that entire period. This Him John (1964). collection is called A Day In The Life and Philip French The Guardian in 2010 it won the Evening Standard Award for Best Documentary. Captured (65 min, 15), made for Military Intelligence, shows unflinchingly what The BFI describe John Krish as “one of it was like to be a British prisoner of the British cinema’s best-kept secrets: a North Koreans in the 1950–1953 War. It master of post-war documentary film - was screened only to selected members making who repeatedly turned his works of the Services. into, not just effective non-fiction films, but truly stirring cinema to rank along - This remarkable 1959 docu-drama was side the world’s greatest directors.” made for the Army Kinematograph Corps as an instructional film following the John Krish entered the cinema as a revelations about different forms of teenager early in the second world war, interrogation used by the enemy in the working for the Crown Film Unit (on Harry Korean war. Performed by such actors Watt’s Target for Tonight) and the Army as Alan Dobie, Ray Brooks and Wilfrid Film Unit (as an editor on Carol Reed and Brambell, it’s a harrowing movie that Garson Kanin’s The True Glory), before illuminates its time and has immediate joining British Transport Films. It was with relevance for our own. It was, however, the latter group that he made his classic marked ‘restricted’, screened only to The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), a selected members of the Services, and beautiful movie about London’s last withheld from the public until 2004.

Small Publishers Fair • Conway Hall,Red Lion Square,London,WC1R 4RL • 14–15 Nov 2014 John Healy reads– together with Nicholas Johnson and John Hall– on Sunday 5 October 2014 at 6.00pm in the South Bank Centre, as part of the London Literature Festival Design/typography: Neil Crawford/typoG Design/typography: