Why is the London Review of Books putting out records? We liked the idea of marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, and drawing on our rich archive of poems made sense (LPs of readings by Dylan Thomas or Stevie Smith used to sell by the bucketload). A 7-inch record has space for about eleven minutes of spoken word. Happily, this equates to a long-ish poem – the kind that takes up a whole page or even a double-page spread in the LRB – being read in full.
We will be releasing ten new recordings in total, in four volumes of three, each made in a connected location whose particular resonances you’ll hear in its background textures. (That’s ten poems over twelve records because Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’ is so long, it requires a full batch of three all to itself.) Volumes 1 and 2 are available below; volumes 3 and 4 will be released later this year.
Volume 2
A handmade box-set containing three 7-inch singles and an accompanying 32-page photographic booklet in a numbered, limited edition of just 360.
Volume 2 contains a new recording of the 112 quatrains of Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’, first published in the LRB in January 1985. Maxine Peake read it in Highgate Cemetery, on the path leading up to Christina Rosetti’s grave, on a cold bright day a few weeks before the 40th anniversary of the poem’s publication.
Buy it now
Volume 1
A handmade box-set containing three 7-inch singles and an accompanying 40-page photographic booklet in a numbered, limited edition of just 360:
Edwin Morgan’s ‘Byron at Sixty-Five’ (1987), read by Dominic West, recorded at 50 Albemarle Street
Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Requiem for Mohammad Al-Dura’ (2000), read by Khalid Abdalla, recorded at Palestine House
Jorie Graham’s ‘To 2040’ (2021), read by Adjoa Andoh, recorded at the Grant Museum of Zoology
