Fenlight - Tuesday 28th November

Fenlight, with Clare Crossman and Richard Newman.

Tuesday 28th November, CB1 Cafe, 8pm. £4 or £3 concessions.

Fenlight began as a series of occassional poems in a notebook written after exploring the countryside of south Cambridge.

A chance meeting with Producer, singer song writer, Richard Newman and some experiments in performance at Thriplow Daffodil Festival Arts Marquee (South Cambridgeshire Arts Unit), the project developed in to a serious collaboration between a poet and a musician to develop a poetry and song cycle, guided by a mutual respect for each other’s work and an interest in experiment and the elemental Some of the poems have been published in Chapman (Scotland), Scintilla, Chimera and Saw (Devon). The Orchard Underground was commended in the Haddon Library Poetry competition Cambridge University 2006.

Richard Newman has written books about the making of Tubular Bells (Mike Oldfield) and has written and presented his own Channel 4 documentary on the history and development of the early rock scene in London. His is also the author, along with Dave Laing, of a book about the Cambridge Folk Festival.

As a record producer, Richard has worked with many of the leading guitar players who in the last 30 years have emerged from this country.

As a song-writer his songs have been performed by artists such as Bert Jansch and Sue Stone.

Early in his career Richard wrote a series of songs called The Songs of the City which was made into a short television film by Thames TV.

It was when Clare Crossman heard some of these songs that the idea of Richard's collaboration with Clare on Fenlight first took flight.

Born of the acoustic tradition, and intended as a journey through a particular place, Fenlight brings poetry and music together to explore the state of woods, land, and the lives of people that live there.

Clare Crossman won the Redbeck Poetry competition with Landscapes in 1996; in 2002 Firewater Press published a pamphlet Going Back. In 2004 ‘The Shell notebook Poems' were included in Take 5 04. Shoestring Press Nottingham. She moved from Cumbria to Cambridge in 2000.