Father and son close festival
POET Ian McMillan and son Andrew, accompanied by two choirs, brought the curtain down on Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival 2016 in the Church of St Mary in the Baum.
Each had appeared at last year’s event, with Ian giving a talk and Andrew presenting a workshop.
This year they worked in collaboration, both having been commissioned to write a poem for the festival.
These were then presented to musical conductor and composer Michael Betteridge, who works not only with Cantare Ladies Choir but also with a more recently formed male ensemble known as The Sunday Boys.
He then set them to new music and each was given a debut during this performance.
Both choirs delivered their attributed song, as well as several other ‘lyrical’ songs specially chosen by the poets.
These included, in Ian’s set, sung by Cantare, From A Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson and I Will Give My Love An Apple, well known to many folk music fans and recorded by the likes of Joan Baez, Eddi Reader and the late Kate Wolf.
His selection also involved a First World War poem by Siegfried Sassoon. Everyone Sang perfectly echoed the stunning playlet delivered by Pulling Threads at the All Across the Arts fringe event the previous day.
Andrew’s choice, performed by The Sunday Boys, saw an adaptation of Yeats’ Down By The Salley Gardens which I have often heard performed as interlaced with A E Houseman’s When I Was One And 20.
All this followed a reading by Andrew from his best-selling anthology of last year.
He writes and talks about life as a gay man in current society and his work is often a celebration of love.
The commissioned poem he wrote was called Hymn and Michael’s music featured a slightly distant, discordant piano that delighted me with its echoes of Tom Waits’ view of the beatnik life, being not unlike Andrew’s description of Manchester’s Canal Street.
Ian, very aptly, had focussed on The Maskews Bequest that helps fund these festivals.
His work was called Speaking Volumes and talked of Frank and Annie’s eyes ‘meeting across the crowded Catherine Cooksons’ and of ‘secret kisses behind the adult fiction.’
Both poets spoke fondly of Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival and together they brought a week of words to a fitting close.