The Bookshop Band are Ben Please and Beth Porter, who write songs inspired by books and play them in bookshops. Their performances are inextricably linked to the books themselves, as the band take it in turns to describe where the inspiration for each song came from.
It all began in late 2010 as collaboration between three songwriters (including their original third member, Poppy Pitt) and their local independent bookshop - Mr B’s Emporium of Reading, in Bath – to inject some music into the shop’s events. The band would read the book of the visiting author, write a song inspired by their response to it, and then play it back to the author and audience at the very intimate author events upstairs in the shop. After one year The Bookshop Band had written and recorded four albums of book-inspired material.
After releasing a staggering 10 brand new albums of material last year, 2017 finds the Bookshop Band building its own momentum with a rapidly growing schedule of concerts all over the UK and beyond. And the band will of course be returning to their spiritual home, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, to write new songs inspired by new great books.