Saturday 4 November 2017

100 Books again

Liver & Lights No 23 100 Books

This project was inspired, if that's the right word
by the execution of the writer Ken Saro Wiwa
by the Nigerian Government twenty odd years ago,
along with the recent random
executions of various writers by the Iranian government.

I tried to create a song in response to these acts and realised that
after fifteen drafts or so
that I wasn't doing the subject matter justice
and that the song, or at least its simple meaning,
 was staying the same  even 
though I was moving the words around. ...


So..I continued the editing and changing
and eventually stopped at 100
different versions of the poem, 
some with one word only changed.

 ......the words themselves were
writhing out of the reach 
of a mythical tyrant who was trying to ban them.

The Tyrant  executes the singers,
but the song sings on and on, eventually
coming to haunt him forevermore in hell.



In order to celebrate these 100 songs,
each one different but the same,
I constructed 100 completely different books 
to contain them...
some of them are illustrated here.


A touring exhibition of the hundred books was banned by five of the venues
who originally booked it for being 'political'....

Earlier this year the wonderful Chiara Ambrosio
brought the project back to life after
20 years dormant by arranging for 100
singers to come together at The Horse Hospital
in London to perform the  cycle in its
entirety for the first time.

The recording of this by Mikey Kirkpatrick will be
broadcast for the first time on the Radiophrenia
performance radio station in Glasgow
on Sunday 12th November at 10.30 pm