Emerge, Return: Signed Red & Black Vinyl LP The Bookshop Band

Signed by Beth Porter and Ben Please!

After hearing a set of CDs by The Bookshop Band, Pete Townshend was so taken he messaged the duo and offered to record their next album. Emerge, Return is the result of this discovery by Townshend, who threw himself into the project – performing on every track, and fans will recognise his musicianship woven throughout.

Pete Townshend: “I listened to the CDs in my car as I was travelling. I was blown away, completely blown away. I got into the whole Bookshop Band technique, which is just two people making this sound like a symphony orchestra. It’s quite extraordinary. Each song was special in its own way. So, I reached out.”

The Bookshop Band began in 2010 as an artistic collaboration between a group of musicians and their local indie bookshop, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. They would read a book, chosen by the bookshop, then write two songs inspired by it – a reader’s response – to be performed to the author and a tiny audience, crammed in above the shop.

They have so far existed largely off-grid, occupying a creative space between the music and book worlds, writing songs inspired by books and bringing them, through music, to a new audience. They have written and recorded 13 albums and performed in hundreds of bookshops.

Emerge, Return marks the band’s first album to have a wider commercial release and will come out, alongside a podcast series of conversations with the authors, during Independent Bookshop Week (15-22 June).
The artwork for the cover was created by Stanley Donwood (Radiohead / Glastonbury Festival). The album was mixed by Nick Drake’s trusted recording engineer, John Wood.

It’s one of the band’s darker albums, responding to themes surrounding the oppression of bodies, free will and free speech, explored in books that include The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and The Book Of Dust, by Philip Pullman. The title comes from their song inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, which glimpses our underworlds and morality in the scale of deep time.
The books were chosen through a number of curations, including the author events at Mr B’s, but also by the V&A Museum, written for their season on banned books, and for the National Portrait Gallery, responding to their exhibition on the Brontë sisters.

The band will support the release with a full, 70-date UK tour, mostly in indie bookshops, and starting at Glastonbury Festival with a set at Toad Hall..