Alasdair Roberts THIRD BLACK HUTS FESTIVAL • HASTINGS etruscan books At the end of the 20th century England presents a Festival of was a country in turmoil. Privatisation, miners' strikes, inflation and poll tax had writing/music/film left its inhabitants disillusioned with 29 October – 2 November 2014 successive governments. Patron: Andrew Kötting However, nestled in the south east corner of the country was a little old town called Tickets for all Festival events: Hastings, where the townsfolk seemed http://blackhutsfestival.eventbrite.com immune to the political issues around Tickets for Electric Palace events: them. It was full of colourful characters – www.electricpalacecinema.com from artists to fishermen – who often met in a tavern called the Lord Nelson. Tickets for The Beacon events: From here they organised strange events [email protected] such as pram races, pub crawls, bike Tel: 01424 431 305 races, tug-o’-war competitions and beach Tickets for ALASDAIR ROBERTS and concerts. All they wanted was fun. MEG BATEMAN also available from Glenn Veness film maker Music’s Not Dead 71 Devonshire Road, Bexhill-on-Sea Tel: 01424 552 435 SEASON TICKET £50 / £40 concessions www.e-truscan.co.uk Tel: 07905 082 421 Find us on facebook Roland JarvisRoland 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 London 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 poet 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 Scotland’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. Iain Crichton Smith 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 poets 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 Scottish Gaelic 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.