As part of our 20th weekend celebrations, we will be hosting a very special Birthday Concert – an evening with The Bookshop Band, featuring, for one night-only, original band member Poppy Pitt, along with special guest authors and longstanding Mr B’s friends Patrick Gale, Jo Nadin and Naomi Ishiguro.
The Bookshop Band write original songs inspired by books and have toured hundreds of bookshops all across the UK and Ireland as well as Europe and the U.S (where Nic was their roadie for the Albuquerque, New Mexico and Durango, Colorado stops on the tour!) They have played at Festival Hall, been commissioned to write songs by cultural institutions, publishers and bookshops including for Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, the V&A, the BBC, Le Centre Pompidou and The National Portrait Gallery. They also wrote the score for the Oscar nominated Robin Robin, and their most recent album was produced by The Who’s Pete Townshend.
And it all started at Mr B’s. The Bookshop Band was first conceived at our counter as a collaboration between some brilliant musicians and Mr B’s. Our mutual histories are so closely intertwined that there was no way we were going to be celebrating our 20th birthday without them, and we thought it would be fun to take a look back to see how it all came about.
A proud mum and a car clean-out
In the very early years at Mr B’s we sold a few CDs on our “Music to Read By” shelf, a mix of some jazz, world and folk music mostly. One of our very regular customers Caroline came in one day clutching a red clothbound CD. “This is my son Ben’s band called Urusen. I wondered if you might want to stock it here?”
I took it home fully intending to listen to it, but instead it sat patiently among the mounds of clutter in my car until one day, several months later it reappeared after I cleared out my boot. I popped it into the car CD player and absolutely loved it, playing it on repeat (especially the song “Hugo” which still makes it to many of our family’s playlists). I gave it to Nic straight away telling him to check it out. Unfortunately, it then sunk to the bottom of the pile of junk in his car until I badgered him enough to finally dig it out. He also loved it so we finally agreed we should stock some copies, many months after Caroline had first given it to us. It sold really well and a few months later Urusen came and did the first of a few evening gigs at the shop, playing in our upstairs “Bibliotherapy Room”.
Booklovers Unite
Fast forward two years. Nic, I and our team were trying to figure out ways to make our author events really stand out, to be more dynamic and unique, so we thought about adding some music and food to the evenings, which we would theme each season and name “Booklovers Unite” events.
When Ben was in the shop checking on CD sales, he and Nic got chatting about our first season – a series of “Travels from Your Armchair” evenings (Japanese Night, Greek Night, Russian Night etc.) – and Nic asked Ben whether he’d consider playing a folk song originating from each country at the events.
Like any creative, of course Ben was keen to write some original songs for this, rather than covers and he suggested that he actually go ahead and form a new band to do this and planned to write two songs for each evening. This seemed ambitious but in Ben’s words….
Ben: “I had just met two wonderful songwriters, who I thought could be convinced to see this as a fun songwriting challenge too. It was only five events, after all.
Beth Porter was a well-known local cellist, often spotted, yet only visible in a crowd as the hovering top of a cello case. She went everywhere with it strapped to her back as she made her way between gigs and recording sessions. Writing on the cello seemed to inform her songwriting in a way I hadn’t heard before. Her music was intricate and beautiful, with unusual rhythms and melodies, and yet the songs seemed effortless. She might be game for it, I thought.
The other great music pub in Bath is The Royal Oak, on the cheaper side of town, my side. At that time it was legendary for its lock-ins. At five minutes to eleven you’d often get a sudden influx of musicians arriving after their other gigs in town. When the bell had tolled for the last time, and most people had left, the staff would bolt the door, get their instruments out, and anyone lucky enough to be left inside would have to pull their own pints.
One of the people who used to come and do a turn was Poppy Pitt, a singer–songwriter from just outside town, with her band Poppy and Friends – a kind of lyrical happy acoustic punk outfit. I’d often catch myself singing her songs days later. On one such evening, after chatting about my songwriting block, myself, Poppy and Dave, one of the barmen, set ourselves a challenge to kick people out of the pub at midnight, set up a couple of mics and a computer, and then write and record a whole album before the sun came up. Suitably merry, we got to work, and with the sound of articulated lorries rumbling by, we recorded a booze-infused album. If we were ever stuck for lyrics Poppy would fill a page with words before I’d had time to play the chorus again. If I could get Poppy on board for the Mr B’s events, we’d have two songs done in no time. To my astonishment and great relief, they both said yes. Like I said, it was only five events.”
Season 1 and the band picks a name (and thankfully opts with Beth’s suggestion)
And so began the first season of epic events at Mr B’s featuring Ben’s newly formed band. They wrote songs inspired by a folk story from that night’s geographically themed location.
With a random assortment of instruments and fuelled by a glass of saki/wine/ouzo, they crammed themselves into our upstairs bibliotherapy room and transported our visiting author and our customers across the world.
That first season included appearances by authors such as Francis Spufford and Edmund De Waal. Hearing these incredible writers talk after listening to the band, made for exactly the rich experience we were after – particularly in such an intimate setting.
After it was clear that this was going to work well and flyers were needed for the next performance, there was the small matter of the fact that the band was still unnamed.
Ben: “We’d just done our first event and I said to Poppy and Beth ‘We need a band name. Don’t worry, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got a great idea. What about The Lost Art of the Mixtape?’ Poppy said, ‘no Ben, that’s shit.’ So, I said, ‘okay, okay, what about Onward Came The Meteors?’ ‘No, that’s shit too,’ said Beth. And then Beth said, ‘What about The Bookshop Band?’. That is where we met, that is where we wrote the songs, that was what inspired the songs and where we played, where we existed.”
The season was a great success and immense fun for us all and, in what would become their inimitable style, The Bookshop Band somehow put together their first album in time for Christmas that year, named Travels From My Armchair and stocked exclusively by Mr B’s, with incredible artwork by Ben.
Upping the ante
For the following season, the band put forward the idea of an additional challenge – from now on they would write songs inspired by the visiting author’s book. This would require them to read each book as well as then write the song(s) for each event, a very time-consuming business but one they were keen to try.
Ben recalls that they often “panic-wrote” songs, sometimes finishing them as the mics were being checked. Their songs were “emotional responses” as readers. They represented “that interface between the story of the book and the stories happening around you, in your own life.”
Ben: “Suddenly the performances in the bookshop took on a whole new dimension. The previously bemused, slightly disinterested look on the authors’ faces turned to anticipation and trepidation as to how we might have responded to their book, which either turned to smiles or tears when the song was over. On one occasion a song we wrote caused the author to leave the building and have to be coaxed back in by the staff – recharged glass in hand – in order that the event might continue”.
Nic remembers this intensity all too well and in particular on one night when he was tasked with delivering an energetic interview with a now emotionally overwhelmed author, still recovering from hearing a brilliant musical adaptation of a scene from her memoir that described a particularly tense and formative moment of her childhood.
Ben again: “The audiences too were now confronted with an emotional connection, in song form, to a story they hadn’t yet read. The songs had also found their completion point. They had not existed at the start of that day, and there was no better moment for them than to be finished, as when they were performed, on that evening, for the first time, in front of the author whose book had inspired it.”
Things snowball, romance blooms and many songs need recording!
The band went on to perform for events at Mr B’s for five years appearing at events with themes like “adultery”, “revolution” and “adventure” and writing and performing for authors such as Patrick Ness, Andrew Miller, Michelle Paver, China Mieville, Tim Winton, Tan Twan Eng, Sarah Waters and Armistead Maupin. Andrey Kurkov played keys alongside them; Louis De Bernières brought along his mandolin.
Over these years they recorded tracks and created more albums and started to think about where else they could sell and perform their music. Where better, of course, for The Bookshop Band to play than in other bookshops. And so we helped them concoct the first of a number of tours of the bookshops of the UK and Ireland, playing over a hundred gigs in two years.
It was during this tour that Ben and Beth got together and eventually got engaged. Even bigger gigs followed at music and literature festivals, as well as radio appearances and innumerable special projects. One tour headed into continental Europe via a road trip in the back of Poppy’s parents’ converted ambulance, to Paris, where they slept for a few nights among the bookshelves of Shakespeare and Co.
At the start of 2015, Poppy, who had moved to London, called to say that she was leaving the band. Ben and Beth almost decided to call it a day too but with so many amazing songs played live but unrecorded, they all agreed to meet up to record their full archive of song writing during that year. With the help of fans sponsoring their favourite song for a credit on the albums, they raised enough funds to make a staggering nine albums of incredible, unique songs.
Various authors they had worked with agreed to either perform on the recordings or read an extract from their book too and some even hosted the band at their homes. They spent a night with Patrick Gale at his farm in Land’s End and a whole week reconnecting with Louis de Bernières who played mandolin and a plethora of other odd-shaped guitar-like instruments he had either made or repaired himself.
The band’s history and catalogue of adventures is worthy of a book in its own right. But fast-forward to 2026 and Ben, Beth along with their girls Molly and Emmy are still continuing their amazing creative journey. They are now aptly based now in Scotland’s official “booktown” of Wigtown, but they’ve made regular returns for performances at their spiritual home here on John Street.
You will not meet two more joyously creative, mildly chaotic (in the very best way), kind and ferociously hard-working people and we feel so fortunate that our paths collided when they did, so that this really unique collaboration could come about.
You see, never diss a proud mum – they know what they’re doing!
