“a brilliant night” (For Books’ Sake)
The New Libertines is a touring troupe of troubadour tearaways who raise our underskirts at a venue near you any time now.
It Only Hurts the First Time
August 1st, 6.30, at the Crisis Skylight Cafe, Oxford, tickets £5/£3 concessions, available here (tickets include an exclusive chapbook)
The New Libertines are back with a show designed to deliver a slap in the face to a media that refuses to cover the most bold, brave and brilliant of self-published work. On August 1 we will be in Oxford showcasing a whole panoply of writers who do it for themselves and push both form and content to its limits. Acts confirmed so far are multimedia experimentalist Rohan Quine, Polly Trope – author of the stunning confessional Cured Meat who is coming all the way from Berlin where she runs a column on underground indie culture for IndieBerlin magazine, experimental poet Lucy Furlong, transgressive Literary Death Match winner Dan Holloway, Alice Furse – a writer in the vanguard of a new wave of lyric, edgy 20-something fiction, multiple slam-winning poet Davy Mac, and the wonderful Rebecca Woodhead, who teaches independent spirits how to earn a living through their passions, writes columns for Writing Magazine and What’s Working Now magazine, and is an Amazon best selling indie author. All supported by the brilliant indie band Superhand.
The New Libertines stand for human experience in its glorious, messy, complex entirity, and stands against everything that is blank, bleak, and brutal, one dimensional or slick in contemporary culture, especially current literary culture. With roots that spread to burlesque, Beat, fin de siecle France and ecstatic mystics before slapping its influences around the face with a knuckle-dusting of postmodern wit and Modernist anger, New Libertinism is a celebration of light in dark corners, desire in the face of boredom, despair hidden beneath the underskirts of affluence – of everything it means to be human.
“We need writing that serves up the whole of life, in the smallest microcosms maybe, single truths told in single voices, but told in the full – the ugly and the beautiful; the hopeful and the despairing; the angry and the aspiring; that wrings art, words, life itself until they offer up every last secret, every hidden pain, every unexpected and delightful pleasure; that gives life in the full. Free from judgement. Free from taboo. Free from pretence.” (Dan Holloway)
2014 dates
1 August – Oxford
Join us for our unique no headline/no support format of voices from across the whole gamut of the poetic spectrum where the only thing missing is poetry that’s glib or one dimensional.
(Anna Percy at our Afflecks show in Manchester last winter)
(Anna McCrory at Chipping Norton Literary Festival Fringe)
WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT THE NEW LIBERTINES
“Forget the ennui of the 9-5.
Stories of bingo, of sex, knife crime, coagulated time.
Performed with passion, physicality and style.
Let your bones submerge in this bath of finely spiced voices” (Daily Information, Oxford, on Oxfringe Read Full Review)
“a compelling kind of New Libertine vibe… something different – perhaps more thoughtful – from some of Oxford’s more established open mikes. Well worth checking out.” (Daily Information on This Is Oxford Read Full Review)
“While ‘The New Libertines’ sounds like a Granta style tag for a new movement, there was too much variety on show for the acts to be pigeonholed – it does appear to be a guarantee of a good night out though” (Workshy Fop)
“the most oh-wow-this-is-tops event of 2012” (Fat Roland of Flashtag Manchester)
“quite fabulous” (Elizabeth Baines, author of The Birth Machine)
The New Libertines 