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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    All Power to the Bookshop, Steve's latest album, began as an Arts Council project about our relationship with books and reading. He explores how our memories, our hopes and dreams, our thoughts and emotional responses can be formed by the books we read and share. It’s an eclectic collection of songs that acts as propaganda for bookshops and reading.

    Wild and chaotic, capricious and frustrating, there are certain physical laws that govern secondhand bookshops and like gravity, they're pretty much nonnegotiable.
    Kathleen Tessaro

    Includes unlimited streaming of All Power to the Bookshop via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 2 days

      £9.99 GBP or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      £1 GBP  or more

     

  • Buy the Full Digital Album

lyrics

Several books have saved my life and
changed my life.
I still have the book of Victorian verse
that the guy, who used to own the
local second hand bookshop I went
to as a punky teenager, put in the
20p box for me as he knew I didn't
always have much money.
I'd climb up onto a flat roof garage at
the back of my house with a blanket
and a flask of tea.The lady of Shalott
and Lord Tennyson were a beautiful
distraction when life was bad.
Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey
was another second hand book that
had a huge impact on me and I'd
read that when my parents were
shouting and plates were being
thrown.
I read everything I could get my
hands on.I always loved books of
folktales and fairy tales.Enid Blyton's
Enchanted Wood and Wishing Chair.
Ladybird book versions of
Rumpelstiltskin and The
Gingerbread man.I discovered
Tolkien, Le Guin and a raft of fantasy
authors.
I read classics like Dickens, Hardy, the
Bronte's and my favourite,Jane
Austen.
These are my best childhood
memories.
When I want to recall my childhood
And there's nowhere left so I can take
a look
For they've built on the fields and the
wildwood
I can always take a visit in a book.
Ralph, the second hand bookshop
owner, some lovely librarians, one or
two English teachers and my Nana
influenced my early reading habits.

Seeing John Cooper Clarke in my
early teens prompted me to go out
and find living poets and even write
and perform my own stuff.
I think the beauty of fictional
characters is you can identify with
them.You see yourself as you could,
would or might be and you escape
into some other person's head and
world.You see through their eyes,
you live through their mistakes and
hopefully learn something from
every character you encounter.
I had a turquoise petit typewriter
that I lugged everywhere when I
was small.It was a toy really and I
used to have to beg for new ribbons.
I wrote and performed poems in my
teens and it was whilst doing a
poetry gig that I was approached to
write a play.I didn't have a clue how
to write a play but I was a bolshie
working class teenager and I said
'yes'.I got my first play
commissioned at 19 and I've written,
devised and made over 30 plays
since.
I have a poem carved into stone in a
park in my hometown.
So books, books are a life raft when
everything else is terrible.They help
you escape, they show you your
own world can be different.
Books are friends, best friends
sometimes.
I know it might sound trite but I do
believe books have saved my life.

Spoken lyrics by:Sarah Miller
Chorus lyrics by Steve
Piano:David Oliver
Chorus sung by Craig

credits

from All Power to the Bookshop, released January 1, 2022

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all rights reserved

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Steve Roberts Glossop

Steve was/is the singer and songwriter with Liverpool’s 16 Tambourines who signed to BMG and toured and recorded throughout Europe in the late 80s and 90s.
He’s since recorded 3 solo albums and one with the band Captain Pop. He’s also written for TV and semi theatre pieces about the Cold War and Surveillance. He lives in the Peak District. ... more

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