It was such a treat to get the train to Dumfries & Galloway last week for this conversation with Nina Mingya Powles, who was doing a residency at CAMPLE LINE gallery. We talk everything from zines to dreams, and all the bright colouring in-between. The zine above was made by Nina during her stay at the gallery and it’s a lilac accompaniment of the land I took home with me, leafletting through on the lonesome journey home. Thanks so much to Tina and Emma for looking after us, and for the amazing pineapple buns, and to Dave Borthwick for lunch talks and seeing the geese.
It’s been a real pleasure and twang of the heart to work with Aaron Kent on this anthology for Frightened Rabbit. How to make sense of all that salt and the greys in your eyes looking back through the years as if to still be sitting in the living room with a whisky, listening to ‘It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop’ or like analysing lines with the passion of teenagers trying to make sense of everything that can only be felt in the body, or walking backwards or into the wind and sea. Thank you to everyone who sent us work and especially to our brilliant contributors who have shared something really special. This will be with us in the world at the end of March, a weird three years on since my first Broken Sleep release with Katy Lewis Hood which came out on 31st March 2020. What times we constantly live in.
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The Last Song is a poignant tribute to one of the most beloved bands of our time. This book takes readers on a journey through the heart and soul of Frightened Rabbit’s music, exploring themes of love, loss, and the human condition with raw emotion and lyrical beauty. Each page is a powerful reflection on the band’s songs, offering a new perspective on the music that has touched so many lives. Whether you’re a die-hard fan or discovering Frightened Rabbit for the first time, The Last Song is a must-read for anyone who appreciates the power of music to move us and inspire us.
PRAISE for The Last Song:
Scott and Frightened Rabbit left us a wonderful legacy of music and words in their wake. This collection shows that that legacy doesn’t have to be a passive, inert thing; the ripples of their writing continue to spread ever outwards, making tiny changes as they go. This is a beautiful tribute to art, and to an artist we still hold in our hearts.
— Frank Turner
List of contributors
Foreword by Aaron Kent and Maria Sledmere Laura Theis Ian Farnes Emma Whitelaw Alice-Catherine Jennings Catriona Murphy Anthony Desmond M Mccorquodale Geraint Ellis Michelle Moloney King Aaron Kent Jo Higgs jade king Carl Burkitt Tulian Colton Andrew Blair Charlie Rose Evans Maria Sledmere Kyle Lovell Vita Sleigh Gavin Baird Lynn Valentine Al Crow
I just saw you play in Glasgow last night. One time back in like 2017 I wrote a poem that compared some kind of narrative flip of my speaker’s life to the flip of your hair, back when it was longer and so mid-2010s nothing else compares to it. That whole decade followed the narrative arc of a terrible prom date, seriously, culminating in the good morning after vibes of the curly girl method. After your gig, which we arrived late for but still in time for everything, I got home and watched you on youtube talk with Zane Lowe about the various loves and how you used to want them all at once, all the loves of 10,000 people and your lovers and the love of a friend, but they’d be in conflict so the ‘malady’ of one love would taint the rest and you didn’t like them to bleedthrough each other. How you wanted to make the loves exclusive as possible. I wondered about that as a kind of ars poetica for what we are supposed to do with creation. How the song changes once someone adores it. When you pour all love for one person or many people shining into the same thing and each time someone reads or listens they replenish it with their love. Sincerity is scary! One time I walked through Manchester in semi-lockdown the rain was incessant, my love and I sheltered in shopping centres amidst the paramount sensation of repeating our steps, one of us was half without vision the other depressed in white lace like willows drooping in winter etc.
I learned from Chicken Shop Date that you’re an Aries. The only other Aries I know are poets or massage therapists. People with fire in the tips of their fingers.
You said your favourite lyric from the new album is I’m in love with you for me it might be Central Park is Sea World for trees…
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10k Loves
O prince of the internet climbing the stage you want to dismantle every night in the city sets itself ersatz sun inhalations of metamodernism I am twenty nine for the last time being twenty nine in your song many lambent americas remember you some guys behind us screaming “CHANGE OF HEART YA CUNT” all night until security confiscated their vapes and their jumping excesses I think your ardent excesses are ascent to attention, this gelatine of the early set nodding to lockdown makes me jealous she’s turned the weans into a kind of wine against us sucking a stranger’s thumb Scott and I debate what’s in the vessels is it water, true wine, lemsip or lucozade various Platonic essences mid-century realism never looked so good as you peeling back the paint of the not really wood or having a cold thrusting up from the job opportunity of being a pop star’s Harold Pinter pretence smoking fake cigarettes around too many scented candles after your shift at the financial centre of everything what’s a fiver kids want the same dream supremely whole crowd shouting I took all my things that make sound the rest I can do without right back at you in the common heartbreak fake smoking out the window where the stars of a trillion iPhones are When he came around to switch off the lamps, gently I silently recited my cloud password in the hope of being swallowed in the play of the warm, exterior moment omnicringe to believe lust songs are still possible how earlier I had watched a square of you playing ‘These Days’ on guitar for Lucy, Phoebe, Jack and Natalie all in a moment’s notice becoming a teenage rationalist addicted to ballads like Caroline going live to eat pasta you’re like our favourite band in the world is The Blue Nile singing the present gift I fucking miss once imagined myself lost in the rain of sleeping lightly sugar guitar coming so far I used to walk around in the love made myself into a sound walking around helps to be happy wintering too many lines You’re like even remembering the original camera shot always saw you remembering to almost die a lot in the same dream fuck it everything tastes the same when you can’t be enlightened trying really hard to try silver hairs newly sprung from my skull in the metafiction of being a genuine person ringfencing fresh crush superlatives The outside is horrible I grow shyness in expensive monstera to never water it better than when I am kissed This is still a review of your gig! Talk of the fourth wall fell for it inside the house beat of collarbone I feel like shiny roadkill At what point did the feeling thaw more jumping, climb the rig inside its precious oil only knows you want folk influence like I want to be guys augmented on stage to climb through a video saxophonist of the lonesomeness inside all brass of the bar turning the lights off marrying a new year to the same way it felt I can’t forget
Glasgow folks! I’m doing my first reading of the year next week.
A reading on Thursday 12th January 2023, 6pm-8pm at Good Press, with Honor Hamlet, Dom Hale, Helen Charman, Peter Manson and me. Thanks to Leo Bussi for organising. Poster by Elisa de la Serna.
Grating ginger from spoon feeling, lambent idea of no lucre to save, nothing at all, deposit of warmth – start using joy as a doing, you said I was joy, joying, unjoyed, a joyride ~ this belongs to you!
mariaology 