Recordings

This is a selective list of Richard Price's recordings, including those he has made for various spoken word sound archives, in radio broadcasts, and as part of music projects. Video footage is also listed and linked to here.

The Loss Adjustors

Richard has joined up with musician and producer Roberto Sainz de la Maza and singer Eliza de Leon to form The Loss Adjustors. The band has been featured on Life Elsewhere Radio with their double-A side single The World Brims / Are You Still There?.

You can see what The Loss Adjustors are up to at The Loss Adjustors Page.

The Poetry Archive

Richard recorded a spoken word session in November 2016 for the London-based Poetry Archive.

Mirabeau

Mirabeau's first album Golden Key was released on May 4th 2011 on CD, Amazon dowloads and Itunes, and was an Ian McMillan choice on Stuart Maconie's Radio 6 Music programme. The project centred round Richard Price and Caroline Trettine with Blue Aeroplanes guitarist Ian Kearey on electric on the first record. Live, the project usually play with Roberto Sainz de la Maza on electric guitar, who appears on the second album Age of Exploration (2015) alongside David Chapman on bass. Fyfe Dangerfield makes two brief cameo appearances on Age of Exploration on guitar and on percussion. More information at the project's website mirabeauproject.com

The video above is "Parkway", music composed by Caroline Trettine, lyrics by Price (also featured in the Carcanet poetry collection Rays). The video was made by Caroline.

Late Enough (film by Corinne Silva), 2015

Don't Worry, Be Scottish

Viera Cakanyova's short film about Price and his poetry

Invited back for a second session at the Archive of the Now, Price recorded nearly twenty poems: hear new works yet to be published including the ambitious long work "Boxed". There is also a version of Cavalcanti's greatest poem, Donna me prega, rendered with strict attention to the external and internal rhyme scheme but with jazz-like improvisations in line-length and delivery. This is the 'conversational' version of the abstract text Price had recorded for the Poetry Library several years before. Both texts can be found in Rays (Carcanet, 2009). Don't forget to explore the rest of this remarkable aural document of contemporary poetry in Britain!

The Verb

Richard Price has occasionally appeard on BBC Radio 3's programme about language, The Verb. Topics he has discussed include the film-maker and poet Margaret Tait, the poet and novelist Iain Crichton Smith, and the nature of feeling in poetry.

The Dirty Dozens

Benjamin Zephaniah interviews Richard Price about the late medieval poem "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy". The programme is primarily about the American insult-form, The Dirty Dozens. Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30pm on 23rd December 2008.

Darkness and Dazzle

Price reads one of his improvisations on Cavalcanti's poem, "Donna mi prega", recorded by The Poetry Library.

Fred's Archive

Broadcast on 30th Mar 2008 and then, in an extended version, on 5th April 2008, this BBC Radio 4 programme is presented by Joan Bakewell. It's about Fred Hunter's archive of poetry recorded by Stream Records in the 1960s. Richard Price is featured as Head of Modern British Collections at the British Library, describing the little magazine and small press scene of the 1960s, including the world of the independent bookshops in the UK.

PoetCasting

Recorded on 23rd September 2007 in Holborn, central London, by Alex Pryce as part of the NESTA-funded PoetCasting project. Includes a reading of Louise Labé improvisations and new poems "A Century Find" and "Waymoat".

Archive of the Now

Recorded on 29th January 2007 in a North London house for the Brunel University contemporary poets sound archive. At the session most of the text of the sequence Earliest Spring Yet is read, as well as three extra, previously unpublished, tracks. All are downloadable, though certain rights restrictions apply.

Night Waves

BBC Radio 3, 01/12/04

On this edition there was discussion of the literary relationship between France and Scotland, with Robert Crawford in St Andrews and Richard Price in London. Price reads his translation of Guillaume Apollinaire's "1909". A copy is held by the British Library Sound Archive.

Informer

Recorded at the World Book Day celebration of W. S. Graham's poetry, Scottish Poetry Library, 04/03/04

One of the three Informer poems which reduce front-page local newspaper stories to a third of their original text.

It's amazing how the oral nature of the newspapers - all newspapers are very close to the spoken word, are practically transcriptions, often using the conventions-of-shrill - is revealed in these concentrated texts, and how the reports start scrutinising their own assumptions when you put them under only a little linguistic pressure.

Geneva poems

A selection from the session recorded by Peter McCarey, Geneva 2002. Listen

A copy of this recording, with the other poems read on the same evening, is held by the British Library Sound Archive.

Club mix

In Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay (eds.), The Jewel Box, Scottish Poetry Library, 2000.

"Club mix" is published in Perfume & Petrol Fumes (1999)

In Verse

Scottish Television, 1988

An appearance of a gawky poet in patterned woollen pullover, reading some early poems. Apparently still occasionally used in the early hours as a substitute public information broadcast - like The Potter's Wheel of days gone by.

All texts unless otherwise stated are © Richard Price