Music

Beneath the surface we are all connected . . .

'An authentically soothing, powerful, thought provoker.'
MATT HAIG

'On Connection is soul work ... The truth-speaker Kae Tempest takes to non-fiction with grace, musicality and innate essayistic skill. The book glows with their trademark honesty and questing integrity. On Connection is medicine for these wounded times.'
MAX PORTER

‘On Connection came to me when I needed it most, and reminded me that the links we have to places, people, words, ourselves, are what keep us alive.’
CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS

Drawing on twenty years' experience as a writer and performer, award-winning poet, rapper and storyteller Kae Tempest explores how and why creativity - however we choose to practise it - can cultivate greater self-awareness and help us establish a deeper relationship to ourselves and the world.

Personal, hopeful and written with piercing clarity, On Connection is a meditation on creative connection and call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer.

Scotland's National Poet Jackie Kay brings to life the tempestuous story of the greatest blues singer who ever lived.

'A wonderful writer on a magnificent singer.' ROBERT WYATT

'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read.' IAN CARR, BBC MUSIC

'Biographies don’t usually bring the subject to life again. This one did. I finished the book then started it again immediately.' PEGGY SEEGER

'What a life! What gulpable storytelling! Exactly the kind of writing about music we need: personal, ardent, playfully confrontational, questioning, undogmatic. A love song to a complicated idol' KATE MOLLESON

'Pure joy: one trailblazing woman pays tribute to another. Jackie Kay finds the music in the short, dazzling, capricious life of Bessie Smith'HELEN LEWIS

'A passionate, personal, imaginative insight into Bessie’s art.' DAILY MAIL

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BESSIE SMITH was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she sang on street corners before becoming a big name in travelling shows. In 1923 she made her first recording for a new start-up called Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and made her a star. Smith’s life was notoriously difficult: she drank pints of ‘bathtub gin’, got into violent fist fights, spent huge sums of money and had passionate love affairs with men and women. She once single-handedly fought off a cohort of the Ku Klux Klan.

As a young black girl growing up in Glasgow, Jackie Kay found in Bessie someone with whom she could identify and who she could idolise. In this remarkable book Kay mixes biography, fiction, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.