Category: CQAF2024 Thursday 9 May

CQAF  in partnership with Ulster Presents at Ulster University welcomes Annie Macmanus to the festival to talk about her writing and her career in music and broadcasting.  Hosted by Shauna McLaughlin.

‘To be honest with you, I want to make music.’ In Annie Macmanus’ absorbing second novel ‘The Mess We’re In’ it’s the early noughties and 21-year-old Orla Quinn has made her way to London with a burning desire to become part of the music industry. Moving into a squalid house in Kilburn with her friend Neema and up-and-coming rock band Shiva, Orla works in the local Irish pub and takes work experience at a record label. Negotiating hedonism, sex, parties, the pub locals and life in London, all soundtracked by her favourite artists, Orla learns what it will take to make it.

A dynamic and enthusiastic speaker, Annie will discuss the journey she’s undertaken from discussing other people’s stories to telling her own. Annie is internationally renowned as a DJ, broadcaster and host.

Her debut novel ‘Mother Mother’ was critically acclaimed. She hosts the podcast Changes where she talks to people from all walks of life about the challenges they’ve faced.

‘Captures a time and a place with heart and irresistible momentum in a prose that can be bracingly lyrical.’THE OBSERVER

‘The writing is so vivid – I could almost feel Orla’s hangover, and everyone else’s too. [Macmanus has] created a great gang of characters, and a great variety too, all of them very human… And London – what [she’s] managed to do with London, and what London means to different generations of Irish people – is terrific, and deeply moving.’ RODDY DOYLE

‘Orla is written with unsentimental authenticity… It is her flaws, her vulnerability and her complexity that make her such a compelling character that will resonate with anyone who has ever left home in search of themselves… Orla is searching for a voice in the noise – Macmanus articulates that hunger with confidence and compassion.’ IRISH TIMES

 

 

Join Luke Haines for this in-conversation talk about his new book.

The outsider artist par excellence turns his caustic eye to the rise and fall of alternative rock ’n’ roll heroes.

In his first book for thirteen years, author Luke Haines – visual artist, writer and musician most famed as the founder member of the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder – chronologically explains how ‘freaks’ infiltrated modern culture, and almost won the rock ’n’ roll wars, only to lose to the rise of Cool Britannia and TV ‘talent’ shows that turned the strange and the outsiders into fodder for laughter.

Freaks Out! tells the story of pivotal freaks such as Johnnie Ray, Gene Vincent, Hank Marvin, Syd Barrett, the Incredible String Band and Big Youth through the prism of rock ’n’ roll, as well as through wider culture – the Cathars, the Ranters, the Hells Angels and the Yippies. Haines’ writing is the perfect mix of in-depth music knowledge, personal anecdotes and fascinating memoir that makes for the ultimate celebration of freakdom.

Pete Selby, Publishing Director for Nine Eight Books who acquired the book directly from Haines said: “Whilst the reductivism of the labels might stick in his craw, Luke is one of our greatest pop culture writers, theorists and provocateurs. A defiantly solipsistic, sacred cow skewering agitator, you may not always agree with what he says, but he says it in such an eloquent and entertaining fashion it’s impossible not to grit your teeth and applaud. Freaks Out! – part memoir, part manifesto – is the most righteous alternate history of rock ’n’ roll that you will read in 2024.”

Luke Haines is a London-based writer, visual artist, singer-songwriter and founder member of the Auteurs and Black Box Recorder. In 1993, the debut Auteurs album, New Wave lost the Mercury Music Prize by one vote to Suede. A prolific artist, he has released nineteen albums in the twenty-first century, most recently his 2022 collaboration with REM’s Peter Buck – All the Kids Are Super Bummed Out.

He writes a regular monthly column for Record Collector and is the author of two critically acclaimed autobiographical books: Bad Vibes (2009) and Post Everything (2011).