Already Bloomin' Authors..
Here are a few special authors who's new works are being released in the traditional 'physical' literary realm - and are therefore not available to download.
Either way, some of the upcoming titles that will be appearing on this page will no doubt prove to be real literary treasures and well worth seeking out in the age old hard or paperback formats.
First off is a cultural jewel of international interest up for release through the Irish Independant publishing label Seven Towers....
The Origami Crow by Eamon Carr
Our first book is a combination of both ancient and modern poetic and 'contemporary' inspiration with poetic roots reaching back to the very beginings of western and (to an extent) eastern prose . Yet these ancient poetic styles are brought together magicaly in a collision of cultures amid the mass international euphoria captured by the excitement of one mans expedition into the roar of the stadium crowd throughout the Japanese World Cup of 2002 simultaneously conjoined with his own personal pilgrimage deep into the shrines of Japans golden age of culture and literature.
It's a remarkable journey that brings together and finds a common thread among cultures which are seemingly opposite in every possible way, whose 'golden ages' were not only in completely different time zones, but whose physical geography is as far removed a is physicaly possible (both being on opposite sides of the globe) and Eamon Carr - the former founder of the Tara Telephone - a collection of sixties Dublin beat poets that included Declan Sinnot (briefly of Horslips and later of King Crimson), Peter Falon (now a 'New York Village' beat poet, DJ , artist and former musician with T Rex and John Lennon) which inspired deeply the likes of Phil Lynott, Marc Bolan and Lennon, McCartney etc along with countless other artists of all walks before doing it all again by co- founding Celtic Rock in the 70'S among the Irish Rock heroes Horslips (see Rock Cornerstone one) - has approached this lifelong cultural quest and event with the masterfull serenity of a Haiku poet, the philosophical thoughtfullness of a Celtic 'triad' and, at times, the riotus language of a novel by Jack Kerouac ( the famed cult writer of 'On The Road' - who funnily enough also just happens to be a distant relative of Eamon) .
Now if terms like 'Celtic Triad' and Haiku leave you looking slightly puzzled or perplexed then maybe we should briefly iluminate these terms... Firstly, a 'triad' is an ancient Celtic proverb - very similar in it's morals and searching out of 'excellence' to the ancient hebrew 'proverbs' and rooted from the same historical era. They usualy display three distinct statements or comparisons, with a connected meaning and emphasis usualy on the third, this being the 'defining lesson' or 'enlightining moral'. A brief example that may well have benifited the reporters who broke the 'Watergate' scandal (or even those seeking to break the 'Taragate' scandal -see international emergency-) being ...
" There are three only , whose frenzy is a benefit to their people: The Warrior on the field of battle, the Dancer in the place of dance, and the Seeker of Truth and Justice where ever they may be."
... And many early Irish oral and written poems were an expantion of this 'triadic' format and way of thinking long before St Patrick latched on to it through his 'shamrock speach'.
If we now wind the clock forward from the pre and post christian celtic golden ages of Ireland and the British Isles to the sixteenth century island nation of Japan in it's own cultural golden age of the Samauri and the Shogun we find this feint 'triadic' thread emerging through the works of one of Japans most celebrated poets Matsuo Basho. Short ancient three lined linked poems originaly called 'Renga' flourished under the hand of Basho into Haiku during a time of intense cultural rennaisance to become the embodyment of all that was sacred to Japanese culture and art (think here of all those inspiring cinematic scenes of the landscapes, villages and cherry blosom in films like 'The Last Samauri' and imagine all the emotion and beauty of those scenes captured in three lines of equaly clear and lucid writing sealed within a strict phonetic code etched in 'pitch perfect' syllables and then you should have a slightly clearer understanding of Haiku poetry). Basho travelled extensively throughout Japan throughout his life time (1644 -94) writing many diaries and journals on his travels that were overflowing with Haiku and prose, all containing and inspiring a sense of wonder in his own nations landscape and people. Many of the places where Basho wrote those poems and prose have since become shrines themselves and Japan is filled with many 'Kuhi' (stone pillars engraved with Haiku poetry) in many of the very places where the poems were actualy concieved and much of this poetic wonder is captured in Eamon Carr's own poetic journals in a work that flits and weaves between the journalistic documentary and his own prophetic Haiku as he himself ventures 'deep into the interior' ( - this poor pun being a rough translation of one of Bashos own treasured journals titled 'Oku no Hosomichi' in Japanese ) and Carr retraces the very steps of Basho's own personal pilgrimage himself.
Combine all these elements with the euphoria of the 'beautiful game' at it's best and a nation filled with the international excitements, hopes and dreams of football fans, players, tourists and reporters from every corner of the globe and you are left with a truly epic event that unfolds page by page in Carrs unique and treasured journey.
The Origami Crow is also the personel pilgrimage of one of Irelands most loved 'underground' beat poets, music and sports writers, journalists and musicians . Wether you're a fan of Haiku, poetry, prose, international football (or soccer in the Americas), the World Cup, music or travel or not, The Origami Crow is a classic work of art that deserves a spot on everyones bookshelf.
We've offered a very brief extract as given by Eamon on Irelands Balcony TV ..which also contains some contemporary 'Kerouac' styled language as he reprimands staff of the show and quotes ( as taken from the lips of Irish international football player Jason MacAteer) so we've given a red triangle for the video and a yellow for the book (...or was it a kind of yellow , orangy red..?). Links are also provided to the Seven Towers websites and also the Tara Telephone website detailing some of Eamons pre- Horslips endeavors among the late sixties beat poet community.
Eamon Carr's ' Oragami Crow ' can currently be purchased direct from Seven Towers or Amazon.Com , Amazon. co.uk, Readireland.ie and most independant bookstores so ask for the following ISBN''s..
ISBN-10: 0955534658;
ISBN-13: 978-0955534652
Strangely enough, our next featured release may well contain a secret 'characterisation of Eamon Carr as Tiffany Murrays new book 'Diamond Star Halo' features a fictional Irish band and follows the childhood of a young girl growing up in a recording studio. Many will probably know Tiffany as 'The Rockfield Queen' as many of her books are closely inspired by her own real childhood in the 70's watching the likkes of Horslips and Queen rehearse and record at the worlds first ever residential recording studio . The real studios came into being when Tiffany's mother Joan posted an add in the Times offering their house as a rehearsal and recording space just to earn a few extra pennies. An add which stipulated 'No Rock Bands' was quickly thrown out when Fritz Fryer, the legendary producer and co founder of Northern Soul, 60's beat music and The Four Pennies was one of the first to answer the add...and it wasn't long before the likes of Queen, Motorhead and Horslips were regular visitors and residents of Rockfield. Fritz became a permanent resident and lived very happily with her mother Joan until recently passing away in Portugal in 2007. The barns and outhouses that were the original rehearsal rooms were constantly filled with some of the worlds best musicians and a pile of stones in one of them became the inspirational trigger for the Oasis track 'Wonderwall'. Likewise, Tiffany's fictional books are full of inspirational triggers that reverberate with with the history of a childhood that witnessed the birthing of a new era of musical history and Horslips own Jim Lockheart has apparently been unable to put Diamond Star Halo down. Just as a taster of the real life inspirations behind the fictional Diamond Star Halo we've included a recent biographical article by Tiffany herself on what must for any musician or fan, be the most envied childhood in the world....(use the scroll button below left to read the full article originally added to the UK's Guardian newspaper in January2010)
"I stood in the fishpond, naked, as the lorry made the turn up our drive. I was six years old, a rural child, and naked in the fishpond was the norm. What wasn't the norm was the lorry struggling past our Victorian Gothic porch and the limousine behind it. What wasn't the norm were the guitars and the black Marshall amps in the back of that truck. What wasn't the norm were the hairy men coming to my house to make noise.
My mother, Joan, was trying to make ends meet. Our big house belonged to her boyfriend; our small income belonged to us. One morning she sat at the kitchen table and wrote an advertisement for the Times. "Country house available. Rehearsal space for bands. No heavy rock."
Mum had tried foreign students, but they never paid. The next logical step must be moving us into the barn and renting out the house to rehearsing bands. This made sense to her.
Our barn wasn't some luxury conversion. This was the English/Welsh borderland of the mid-1970s. It was rats and wet walls, not the World of Interiors. That first night the room smelled of riverbanks. My bed was a mattress on the flag floor. It was so cold I wore clothes. Cleo, my great dane, slept with me, and my pet bantam clucked from a shoebox at the foot of my bed. Mum hated the barn. She hated the rats and the fact that men who could quite easily sleep in the back of a tour bus were inside our glowing house, using her Egyptian cotton sheets.
The band had set up in our huge hall. Men ran about with amps and cables. The hall was enormous and went up all the way to the eaves. A gallery skirted it on one side. I would sometimes perch there, legs dangling above a 20ft drop. My mother once found me climbing up on to the gallery rail and moved me to the third floor at the back of the house. "I've only got one bloody child," she said.
The thing I liked best about the hall was the curving oak staircase, so wide the steps were oak boats. You'd be puffed by the time you reached the top. The band had chosen the hall because of something called acoustics. Still, it was my home and it was my hall, and I didn't like the invasion. Men called "roadies" had my attic bedroom: these men didn't sing, they carried things. I felt like Baby Bear. I wanted to point and yell, "What's that hairy man doing in my bed?"
The next morning I heard the crash of drums and the stab of guitar. I stomped to our front door and pushed the thick oak. I marched into the hall, walked halfway up the stairs and plonked myself down, arms folded, lips out in a pout.
The band stopped. They stared. A very tall man with a halo of dark, curly hair and a man at a piano, with fleshy lips and feathered black hair, smiled. I heard my mother creeping in. "I'm so sorry – have you seen my daughter?"
The very tall man with the guitar pointed to me on the stairs. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry," Mum apologised.
The man shook his head. "She's not hurting. Leave her."
Later, Mum said, "You had such a thing about being on those stairs, halfway up. You couldn't understand why you weren't allowed to sleep in your own room. But you loved the music."
This is where I stayed, then, day after day. The band got used to me. I'd gaze down between the carved oak posts of the staircase as these men played rock'n'roll. Loud rock'n'roll. With the whine of guitar this close, my ears would ring on my pillow.
One morning Mum was up early. She heard the piano and the man, Freddie, singing. "He was always the first up," she told me. "I sneaked into the hall and listened. The song had different parts. I could tell he sensed me behind him, so he turned and asked, "Do you like it?"
"It's fantastic," I said.
"It's a bit long," he replied, and went on playing. It was Bohemian Rhapsody.
Mum says Freddie Mercury was a lovely, though shy, man, who didn't mind when our cats wandered in.
She cooked for Queen, and would cook for bands for years. Mum has fed anthems, classics and one-hit wonders. She had wild watercress delivered and made pike quenelles. It was rock'n'roll cooking for 1970s Herefordshire.
There was a rule now: if I annoyed the bands I had to go away. The next lot arrived in a line of Mercedes. The cars had funny number plates. "Irish," Mum told me. When hairy men stepped out of the cars, she asked, "You're not heavy rock, are you?"
"Ah no," a man said. "We're a little folk band." The men laughed.
Horslips were Ireland's leading rock group of the time. They kept the windows open and the music loud. By the second week the police were knocking on our door. The combination of electric guitar and Irish number plates, just down the road from the SAS base, had alarmed the authorities, and Mum had to convince the police that these men were musicians, and in no way linked to the IRA. The evidence of guitars, amps and the sound of Horslips themselves didn't seem to be enough.
I liked Horslips. They were family men and they called me "Tiff". I loved to watch a man called Jimmy walk up and down along the high gallery, playing his flute.
The day that Horslips arrived, a black-and-white dog trotted into our barn, cocked his leg and peed on Mum's onions. "Who's sodding dog is that?" Mum screamed.
A man with Jesus sandals and a beard popped his head round our barn door. "Sorry about that." He was Horslips' producer, Fritz Fryer, though he wasn't German. Fritz was from a place called "the north".
Fritz told me his real name was David, but because he'd worn a balaclava to school like a German, they'd called him Fritz and it had stuck. Mum didn't like him; he had Horslips play loud electric guitar out on the lawn. I was also fascinated by his dog, which was in turn fascinated by my great dane. Mum had to turn the hose on that dog most mornings.
There were more bands – all men. Traxx had dyed orange dreadlocks and let me sing "Mary had a little lamb" into their live microphone. The spongy earphones made my ears sweat. Traxx had a white Rolls-Royce and Mum would ride into Hereford in it. Domestically, things improved when Black Sabbath arrived. The roadies could drive back to Birmingham, so there was room in the house for us.
When Mum's boyfriend disappeared, it seemed the house would too. Luckily, my mother's food was popular; she was asked to follow these bands, and we moved to the now legendary Rockfield Studios in Monmouth.
Rockfield was a playground. It socialised me. Clothes were firmly on. There were two resident families with children. We made tunnels in the straw bales. We sledged down the hill on bin liners in the winter. If mum was working late, we watched Hammer horror films. I loved my temporary family.
Mum cooked: suckling pig, spare ribs, chilli con carne, taramasalata. She fed Motörhead. She said getting food inside Lemmy was the hardest job. Mum cooked for Robert Plant, Squeeze, Simple Minds, Adam and the Ants, Bad Manners, Bauhaus, and my favourite, Showaddywaddy. A Canadian band, Solution, would name an album in her honour: Cordon Bleu.
One night I woke with dreadful earache. I haven't had pain like it since. Mum was washing up in the kitchen, but I could hear electric guitar. I tiptoed outside, towards it. I pushed the thick studio door, into a musty control room. Here the noise was so loud my ear roared; men with fantastic moustaches and beards sat on black sofas. It was Horslips. A man at the mixing desk turned the sound down. It was Fritz Fryer. "What's up?" he asked.
"My ear hurts."
That night I slept on an Irishman's lap. Heavy guitar and an Irishman's voice banished my earache. I knew I'd marry an Irishman, and years later I did.
The dog was back, too. The next morning I heard Mum scream at him as he pissed on another bag of onions. The dog was called Boggle, and a year later Fritz moved in with us and became my father. I knew my biological father, but rarely saw him. Fritz taught me how to swim, fish, ride a bike and make a proper fire. He would let me climb on to the roof rack of his Morris Minor and he'd drive around the country lanes as I held on, giggling. That's my favourite childhood memory; fast, dangerous and silly.
Fritz taught me how to coil a microphone lead and when he played in the local pubs, I was his roadie, aged nine. He would try to teach me guitar, but he'd have more success teaching me about music and the bands he once produced – Horslips, the Bothy Band, Smile, Motorhead.
I didn't become a musician, but a writer and academic. Fritz read the drafts of my novels and compiled a CD for the launch of my first book, crammed with tracks by Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Specials. When I wrote the lyrics for my latest, sung by my imaginary band, Tequila, Fritz made them real and recorded the songs.
Fritz died two years ago, a few precious months before his 63rd birthday. Both my mother and I were with him. I held his hand and whispered to him about Boggle. Like the best of fathers, Fritz led by example: he died without fear and without self-pity.
The last concert he took me to was the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Lisbon. We sat up on a high grass bank in the evening heat, the sandy ground between our toes, drinking Sagres.
My childhood was lonely. I was a rural, only child. But it was thrilling and finally secure because of my mother's random act; that advert in the Times. Retrospectively, it's chancey, opening your house to strangers while your daughter roams free. But this was 1970s parenting; there was little fear, little "what if?" My mother never imagined something awful. The world she created for me was damp, but it was absolute, firm, because she was.
I now see that house, filled for two summers with half-naked male musicians that my mother fed, was a houseful of different fathers. I still can't believe our luck that we found Fritz."
Tiffany Murray
Diamond Star Halo is out now on UK independant publisher Portobello with the ISBN: 9781846272073 and can be ordered from the following link with a wealth of characters that may well be very recognisable to any musician who may have stayed at Rockfield Studios from its birth in the 1970s. When Tiffany is not writing jawdroppingly realistic novels and astounding biographies and newspaper articles she is a top lecturer for creative writing in the UKs universities...and, for any musician who may have worked with Fritz Fryer, she is also in the process of planning to re record and re release Fitz's own catalogue of songs and is more than happy to hear from any of Fritz's friends and recording partners who'd like to either join in or reminise on the time when a six year old girl was one of the music worlds fiercest critics and allys -(so drop us a line at thebigape@theryanoriain22.com and we'll pass your details on). To trigger off your own wonderwall then order Diamond Star Halo here...
