NEW YORK, NY.- Halfway through the first show of their summer tour, the Bookshop Band introduced a song written for the launch of “Underland,” Robert Macfarlane’s epic tome exploring the mysteries of the subterranean world.
“It’s about this sense of something much bigger than we are,” Beth Porter told the audience at Rheged, an arts center in Penrith, just outside the Lake District in northern England. “Our place in history is very tiny, really, but it’s also important.”
Two minutes later, as if to emphasize this point, the power went out with a soft thud. The crowd gasped, myself included. Five emergency bulbs illuminated Porter, her husband Ben Please and their menagerie of string instruments on the small stage. The pair glanced at one another across a pool of yellow light — a quick meeting of eyeballs.
Porter kept singing. Please kept strumming his guitar. The show went on, electrified by applause.
It had been a long day. The journey from London had taken almost seven hours, significantly more time than when I first mapped the route from my desk in New Jersey. The driving was, shall we say, harrowing.
I’m not a music aficionado or even much of a fan, so it was unlike me to go to such great lengths for a concert. I grew up in the Garden State without pledging allegiance to Bruce or Bon Jovi. I went to college in Vermont in the 90s and never went to a Phish show. These days, I listen to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, sometimes up to 15 times in a row, mostly as background noise while I work.
Blasphemous? Yes. But I’ve long wondered whether the part of my brain that should be devoted to music has been overtaken by books. Describe a plot and I can name the novel it comes from. Mention a title and I can tell you who wrote it. Somehow I’ve parlayed this parlor trick into a career at the Book Review, yet I’m still envious of people whose musical taste isn’t calcified, as mine is, around the original Lilith era (10,000 Maniacs, Indigo Girls, Shawn Colvin). Who can snap or clap to a beat. Who feel music in their bones, the way I feel words.
So when a colleague told me about the Bookshop Band, a duo that performs music inspired by books, I jumped at the chance to see them. The band’s 14th album, “Emerge, Return” was about to drop, but my interest, I’ll admit, had more to do with adding variety to my personal soundtrack. If there’s one band that might sing directly to me, the Bookshop Band would be it.
“Ben and Beth are the only people doing what they’re doing,” Pete Townshend said.
Yes, that Pete Townshend, guitarist and singer for The Who, who produced “Emerge, Return" and plays on every track.
“They read a book, get a general impression of it and come up with a series of lyrics which don’t necessarily reflect back onto the book,” he said. “It’s like criticism turned into poetic music.”
The Bookshop Band has been around since 2010. They started as a trio, when Please corralled Porter, whom he’d just met, and another friend, Poppy Mosse, to write songs for author events at Mr. B’s Emporium Bookshop in Bath. Audiences responded enthusiastically to their haunting, occasionally playful folk sound, as did writers who were passing through town — Paula McLain, China Miéville and Andrey Kurkov, just to name a few.
Philip Pullman heard the band in Oxford at the launch event for his book, “La Belle Sauvage,” and pronounced them “very agreeable.” He said, “It was nice to have people who knew what they were doing.”
By the time the band recorded their fourth album on a shoestring budget, Porter and Please were a couple; eventually they had an amicable parting of ways with Mosse. They moved to Wigtown, the unofficial literary capitol of Scotland, and gained a following at bookstores. They started touring. When their older daughter was born, they brought her along. They gathered steam during a swing through the U.S., and then the pandemic hit. The pair made ends meet by writing music for a movie and giving online concerts.
For about a decade, Porter and Please were the musical equivalent of self-published authors. They didn’t have a producer or record in a studio. If, say, they were cat-sitting in a church for a week, they’d take advantage of the acoustics and “lay down a few tracks.” Distribution was word-of-mouth.
Then, in 2018, thanks to a mutual friend, Porter and Please found themselves staying outside of London at a guest cottage owned by Townshend. They left a stack of their CDs as a thank you gift.
Townshend popped in the CDs while he was driving. He kept driving. He kept listening.
“I loved it all. I still love it,” he said in an interview. “I love everything they do.”
Townshend receives his fair share of music from hopefuls, but the Bookshop Band struck a chord. He is, after all, a former bookstore owner and an author himself. He emailed Porter and Please, inviting them to stay at his place if they ever needed lodging while on tour. A flurry of messages resulted in plans for a return visit and an agreement — originally proposed by Please in semi-jest — that Townshend would produce an album that the band would record in his studio.
“When we started to work, it was quite clear that all of the songs they had were very complete,” Townshend said. “I could have stuck a stereo mic up and just recorded them, but we decided to try to present them in such a way that they had some finesse, some gloss and a few touches. Ben kept nagging me: If I said, ‘Hey, this needs a bass guitar,’ he’d say, ‘Why don’t you play it?’ If it was percussion: ‘Why don’t you play?’”
Townshend relented, happily. He got on the organ. He “joined in with the choir,” as he put it, contributing to every song on the album.
His involvement might account for the band’s ambitious schedule, which includes several months of back-to-back engagements at festivals, bookstores and libraries across the United Kingdom. The list of 50 events is printed on souvenir tea towels featuring cover art designed by Stanley Donwood, who also works with Radiohead. (Previous cover art was homegrown.)
Please said, “You do your thing, you do what you can do, and then sometimes someone else does something that you know is going to have a huge impact and it’s out of your control.”
On the Friday after the summer solstice, a bookish crowd gathered under Rheged’s grassy roof. It was hard to tell who was there for Jackie Morris — a ridiculously talented illustrator whose work was on display — and who was there for the band. The first half of the show was a collaboration, with Morris reading her book, “The Unwinding” while her ethereal paintings of foxes, fish and vast expanses of snow appeared on a screen to the tune of the band’s music.
The instant Porter’s bow made its initial sweep across the neck of her cello, I remembered something Townshend said during our surprisingly wide-ranging and philosophical chat. “The present is not as important as it’s pumped up to be,” Townshend told me. “What’s important is our helicopter shot of our own existence.”
Porter’s voice is liquid and bottomless, and Please matched her every note, providing harmony and accompaniment with the intricate, effortless choreography of a partner accustomed to navigating small spaces in the dark. In graceful unison, they swapped cello for violin and guitar for ukulele. They shared the rhythm of people who have traveled a great distance together, weaving stories along the way.
The separation between stage and audience eroded during the first half of the show, then crumbled completely the instant the power went out. In its absence, I saw what I came for, if only fleetingly: the bridge between books and music, paved with words. It was well worth the miles and roundabouts I traveled to get there.
After the show, the band circulated the ledger where they collect reading recommendations from listeners, then packed up its gear.
Porter, Please and their opinionated groupies — ages 7 and 2 — were about to hit the road for two months. Their tour bus: A used gray Citroen Dispatch purchased with the help of second mortgage. They’d requested child care and lodging at each venue, but weren’t certain of the particulars and didn’t seem terribly concerned.
“We’ve built a bed in the back of the car. We’ve got a tent for the roof,” Please said. “Who knows how we’ll be sleeping, but we’ve got options.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
