HEADPRESS PRESENTS - Two Living Legends in One Lunchtime - an afternoon with John Sinclair

and Charles Shaar Murray featuring Buffalo Bill and Gary 'Guitar'

Lammin.

Join us for a cool afternoon of blues and conservation

In 1969, the poet-provocateur, MC5 manager and White Panther John Sinclair found himself the victim of that decade’s draconian American drug laws, and facing a twenty-year jail sentence for the possession of two joints. The counterculture Sinclair helped create came to his rescue, however, when John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and others performed at a successful benefit gig to petition for his release. Since that epochal moment, Sinclair (whom Ben Edmonds calls the “hardest working poet in showbiz”) has travelled the globe with his beat verses and inimitable growl, performing with some of the world’s finest musicians.

All his life Sinclair has steeped himself in the atmosphere of the Mississippi Delta, and some of his contributions to jazz and blues scholarship are now available in the recent Headpress anthology of his poetry and prose, It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader.

Charles Shaar Murray's six published books have significantly enriched the rock writing cannon, and his 1989 Hendrix biography (Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-War Pop) deservedly claimed the prestigious Ralph Gleason Music Book Award. Arguably the UK's foremost rock journalist, Murray's career began with the legendary Oz magazine, and he has since written for Q, Mojo, New Statesman, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and others. His longest period of gainful employment was with the prelapsarian NME, whom he wrote for from 1972 to 1984, a tenure that coincided with an era many consider as that paper’s golden age.

Like Sinclair, Murray's musical obsessions also precede the birth of Elvis (clearly apparent in his classic book Boogie Man: Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American 20th Century). Murray too is an authority on the blues, his passion for which has led him to practise as well as preach, shouldering guitar, harmonica and vocal duties for

his band Blast Furnace and the Heatwaves.

Few chroniclers of the American musical heritage have found themselves as much a part of the story they set out to document as John Sinclair and Charles Shaar Murray. This, their first appearance together, allows them to draw on their unique credentials as artists, authorities and eyewitnesses, both performing and discussing the music they love.