Sleeve Notes at International Anthony Burgess Foundation

To celebrate this year’s Record Store Day, ten writers have teamed up with musicians for Sleeve Notes, a unique collaborative performance response creating new writing and music.

The artists have offered their take on how records have shaped their lives and thinking, with each pair creating a brand-new track combining spoken word and music. The pieces will be performed live by the writers and musicians at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on the evening of Record Store Day – all precisely timed to coincide with you being able to queue and procure those all-important discs and hotfoot it over and grab a drink and take the weight off and chill out.

All tracks will be available as a limited-edition cassette (£8, or included in the £10 ticket price option) and as a free download on Bandcamp.

The teams are: Sarah-Clare Conlon x Jez Dolan, David Gaffney x Minimums, Rosie Garland x Tom Ashton and Mat Thorpe, David Hartley x Rickerly, Lauren Sarah Anne McLean  x  Tombed Visions, Fat Roland x Fritz von Runte, Nicholas Royle x John Foxx, Vik Shirley x Billy Fuller, Adrian Slatcher x Distant Listening (Andy Hodson), and Joe Stretch x Joe Cross.

Bringing the words are experimental poet Sarah-Clare Conlon, short story writer David Gaffney, poet and lead singer of The March Violets Rosie Garland, UNESCO City of Literature writer Dave Hartley, poet Lauren McLean of the band Locean, writer and electronic music journalist Fat Roland, novelist and short story expert Nicholas Royle, surreal poet Vik Shirley, musician and writer Adrian Slatcher, and ex-leader of the band Performance and novelist and lecturer Joe Stretch.

Yorkshire-born Sarah-Clare Conlon has been writer-in-residence at Ilkley Literature Festival and Victoria Baths in Manchester, where she lives. She is the author of prose collection Marine Drive (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and poetry pamphlets cache-cache (Contraband Books), a Poetry Book Society Winter 2022 Selection, Using Language (Invisible Hand Press) and Lune (Red Ceilings Press), a PBS Winter 2023 Selection. Her next pamphlet, Wanderland, is published by Red Ceilings. She is a regular performer at the European Poetry Festival, a member of the Critics Collective at Manchester Poetry Library, and a contributor to PN Review and The North.

David Gaffney is the author of the novels Never Never (Tindall Street 2008), All The Places I’ve Ever Lived (Urbane 2017) and Out Of The Dark (Confingo 2023) plus the flash fiction and short story collections Sawn-Off Tales (Salt 2006), Aromabingo (Salt 2007), The Half-Life of Songs (Salt 2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (Salt 2013). His short story collection Concrete Fields (Salt Publishing, 2023) was longlisted for the Edgehill Prize last year, and his pamphlet, Whale, came out in 2024 on Osmosis Press. His story The Staring Man was featured in Best British Short Stories. He has published two graphic novels with Dan Berry – The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head (2018) and Rivers (2021) – and their third, Did Deep, is out in 2025 on Top Shelf.

Rosie Garland is a writer and singer with post-punk band The March Violets, whose new album Crocodile Promises is out now. She has a passion for language nurtured by public libraries. Her poetry collection What Girls do the Dark (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and Val McDermid has named her one of the UK’s most compelling LGBT writers. Her novel The Night Brother was described by The Times as “a delight…with shades of Angela Carter”. Her latest novel is The Fates, a retelling of the Greek myth, and her short story collection Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond has just come out with Manchester’s Fly On The Wall Press. In 2023, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

David Hartley is a short fiction writer and performer based in Manchester whose work has appeared in Ambit, Black Static, The Ghastling and Sans Press. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester where he studied the connections between autism and science fiction. He was writer-in-residence in Tartu, Estonia, for the Prima Vista Literature Festival in 2024, and in November 2024 writer-in-residence in Gothenburg, Sweden, via the UNESCO Cities of Literature network. His short story collection Fauna was published in 2021 by Fly On The Wall Press and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. In June 2024 he devised and hosted The Embassy of Utopia, a two-day spoken word forum for the Festival of Libraries in Manchester Central Library.

Lauren Sarah Anne McLean is a poet who has performed in Japan and the United States, collaborating her poetry live with musicians including Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch and Tatsuya Yoshida. She was commissioned to write poetry for the William Burroughs Centenary and the Basquiat Boom For Real exhibition, the latter culminating in a performance for The Barbican Hall where she read her poetry live to improvised jazz for an audience of over 2,000 people. She is associate lecturer for Martin Keaveney School of Creative Writing, Ireland. She has released her poetry and music with: Box Records, Keele University, Artificial Head Records and Tapes, Tombed Visions, Concrete Tapes, Samarbeta and Tesla Tapes.

Fat Roland is a performer and music writer, whose comedy spoken word show Seven Inch was set in a cartoon record shop and featured 200 illustrated props. The show was commissioned by The Lowry as part of their Developed With artist programme, and was later adapted for the Edinburgh Fringe. Fats is a champion of Literary Death Match, and was a long-time compère of Bad Language, which won awards as the UK’s best regular spoken word night two years in a row. Alongside short story writing, he pens a monthly column for Electronic Sound magazine, commissioned after editors read his long-running music blog, which turns 20 years old in 2024. He has recorded music as Hounds Of Hulme, whose album was released on Electronic Sound Music Club. Under his real name Ian Carrington, Fats wrote the sleeve notes for the 2019 compilation album New Clockwork Music, which featured Gabe Gurnsey and Blancmange.

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt Publishing, who also published his White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf. Forthcoming is short story collection Paris Fantastique with Manchester’s Confingo Publishing. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, which publishes original short stories as limited-edition chapbooks.

Vik Shirley is a poet and writer from Bristol now living in Edinburgh. Her books include Corpses (Sublunary Editions), The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla), Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) and Cassette Poems (above/ground). Vik is a regular performer at the European Poetry Festival and her work has appeared in Poetry London and PN Review. She co-edits Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius and Firmament online for Sublunary Editions. Vik has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.

Adrian Slatcher writes poetry and fiction and lives and works in Manchester. He has published two poetry pamphlets Playing Solitaire for Money (Salt Publishing) and Extracts from Levona (Knives, Forks and Spoons), and a collection of short stories, Loners, a collaboration with the artist Steven Heaton, which came out with Manchester’s Confingo Publishing in 2024. His short stories “Life Grabs” and “Dreams are Contagious” were chosen for Best British Short Stories in 2018 and 2020 respectively, and he has been published in The Rialto, the Barcelona Review, Confingo and VLAK. A longstanding music obsessive, Record Store Day has long been one of his favourite days of the year.

Joe Stretch is the author of three novels – Friction, Wildlife and The Adult, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. His short fiction has appeared in Dazed & Confused, Five Dials and The Independent. His album, (we are) Performance was number 2 in the NME’s 100 Greatest Lost Albums. He lives in Edgeley, Stockport.

The composers are: Andy Hodson, known for his dynamic work as the drummer of Warm Digits and his collaborations with Paul Smith of Maxïmo Park; former Ultravox singer and musician John Foxx; Billy Fuller who has played bass guitar for many bands including Robert Plant, Portishead and Massive Attack, and is now in Beak>; artist, theatre-maker and double bassist with art-folk band Sherpa K Jez Dolan; Joe Cross, bassist with the Courteeners (and who was previously in the band (We Are) Performance with Joe Stretch); Fritz von Runte a record producer and DJ known for his remixes of New Order, David Bowie and The Beatles, and whose latest project is TRAMBIENT, a free app that soundtracks journeys on the Manchester tram service with original ambient music; electronic musician Rickerly; Tombed Visions label head and composer/improviser David McLean; electronic and ambient producer, composer and collaborative artist Minimums, and Tom Ashton and Mat Thorpe of post-punk band The March Violets.