Preview: Louder Than Words Festival

This weekend the Louder Than Words festival is taking place across the 11th to the 13th of November. This is a genre-based literary festival focussing on the music industry, including oral and written work with a relation to music. The festival, co-curated by Jill Adam and John Robb, is in its fourth of incarnation and prides itself on being the only festival that “interrogates the enduring love affair between music and the written word”.  Held at The Palace Hotel in Manchester it will celebrate the relationship between words, music and writing and the crossovers that so often occur.

The festival consists of a large selection of events including an opening party on the Friday, panels, discussions, performances and readings, as well as a book launch, Thunder’s ‘Giving The Game Away – The Thunder Story’. The panels cover a wide range of topics including  ‘Sleeve Notes’ ‘The Aesthetic of our Anger – Subculture Network’ and ‘Punk’, these names don’t reveal but seem to present some fascinating points of discussion on the cross-overs of writing and music. The variety of events occurring certainly seem to crossover to all sorts of genre, with a Poetry Slam on the Sunday and some commentary on music journalism. Artists such as Wolfgang Flur from Kraftwerk; Kristin Hersh from Throwing Muses; Brix Smith from The Fall; Steve Ignorant and Penny Rimbaud, Woody Woodmansey (following the death of David Bowie, the last surviving Spider from Mars) and key authors such as Barney Hoskyns, Matthew Collin and Mick Middles will all be in attendance.

The full weekend pass costs £60 but each individual event is ticketed, so you can pick and choose whatever takes your fancy, with some events being free and others as little as £5. There is a huge amount of events going on. To book tickets and find out more go online to their website here and look out for our review of the weekend in the upcoming weeks.