Poet of London - Iain Sinclair at 80
'Fifty Catacomb Saints' plus music from AMMAS on Resonance FM
Iain Sinclair turned 80 July 2023. As a tribute, Haggerston Hound Printworks will be putting out a limited, signed edition, entitled IS 80, on 30 September 2023, featuring 170 contributors, including Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Bergvall, Keggie Carew, William Gibson, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Toby Jones, Stewart Lee, Esther Leslie, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Meades, Dave McKean, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, and Marina Warner. For sale exclusively from the London Review Bookshop, it can be pre-ordered here.
On 12 December 2018, Iain Sinclair checked into the Resonance FM 104.4 studio on London’s Borough High Street to read from his new poem, Fifty Catacomb Saints, with live free-improvisational accompaniment by the AMM All-Stars (Peter Baxter - percussion; Robert Goldsmith - baritone sax; Paul Shearsmith - trumpet, pipes, squeakers, Jew's harp; Dave Black - electric guitar; Graham Davis - synths; Luke Davis - typewriter; Out To Lunch - splash'n'klang, piano, mouthnoise).
Fifty Catacomb Saints, with colour artwork by Dave McKean, was published in a limited edition of 500 signed copies. According to Chris McCabe's postscript, "Fifty Catacomb Saints is our 21st Century Illuminations, only this time the light does not glint from the upturned rose bowl of the Crystal Palace, it is from the gold-sprayed teeth of the dead." The edition sold out and is now a ‘collectors item’.
The Resonance FM event was described by Ben Watson, the show’s presenter, as follows.
“Developing a sudden penchant (quixotic and mercurial) for psychogeography, that dodgy fad which swept the UK in the 1990s, the AMM All-Stars drift towards the Old Kent Road, the A2 and the pantechnicon-shaken domicile of the band's public poet, only to wind up drinking Guinness in the Dover Castle on Great Dover Street in SE1. In a corner, mumbling to himself, there's a 75-year-old mendicant in a shabby, moth-eaten brown velvet suit. Stooping to listen, Baxter and our crew of bolshie musos are charmed by his rants about Roman Catholic reliquary, Dover Beach and Brexit. He's given a stiff whisky and a brush-up, and dragged along to Resonance FM radio on Borough High Street and presented as Iain Sprinkle, top London author, on Ben Watson's Late Lunch with Out To Lunch. So that was how this particular episode came about, laities and gentlenuns.”
Less prosiacally (so to speak), the session was completely unrehearsed; we had no idea of what Sinclair would spout into the microphone, and we had no idea about what we would play to accompany him. The red light went on in the studio at 2.00 pm and off we went - for an hour.
A recording of the Resonance FM session can be found here