Change to Live Music Act encourages more performances

It’s a really important day for live music; possibly one of the most important days ever -why? Because on Monday 1st October the Live Music Act 2012 (LMA) comes into effect.

At a stroke it will create tens of thousands of potential new live music venues in England and Wales.

The LMA amends the Licensing Act 2003, introducing a new and historic exemption from entertainment licensing for performances of live music between 8 am and 11 pm. If the performance uses amplification there is an audience limit of 200. If un-amplified there is no audience limit.

In pubs and bars that already have live music permission on their premises licence, existing live music conditions will not have effect when live music is being performed between 8 am and 11 pm. Within those hours, conditions such as restrictions on performer numbers, genres, or amplification would no longer be enforceable.

Under the LMA, pubs or bars that don’t already have a live music authorization on their premises licence will now be free to host live music between 8 am and 11 pm, subject to the 200 audience limit if the live music is amplified.

Sounds like great news!

Thanks to:

Steven Flett for highlighting this important change

Porthcawl area gig guide http://www.facebook.com/live.music.gigs

and http://www.porthcawltown.co.uk/music/Music_Gigs_At_Porthcawl_Town/index.html

Just Published: New Selected Poems by Robert Minhinnick (Special Offer)

Carcanet is delighted to announce the publication of New Selected Poems by Robert Minhinnick.

To order a copy of New Selected Poems at the special pre-publication price of £11 (RRP £12.95), please go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the code MINHINNICK at the checkout. Alternatively, telephone (+44)161 843 8730

New Selected Poems is a poet’s choice of over thirty years’ work. Minhinnick’s poetry explores the complexities of belonging in the world. It is rooted in the rich particularity of industrial south Wales and the Welsh seaside resort in which he now lives, but its scope is global. New Selected Poems includes ‘An Opera in Baghdad’ as well as translations from six modern Welsh language poets; it mourns the ancient, savaged landscape of Iraq and listens to primeval echoes in the Welsh landscape; it celebrates the rhythms of the Americas. For Minhinnick, people, relationships and landscapes interconnect. The poetry that is true to that world is both lyrical and highly political.

Cover photograph © Eamon Bourke

 

Art Exhibition by Siobhan Fitzgerald Grice and Photography by Peter Morgan

Arts for the Earth member, Siobhan Fitzgerald Grice has an exhibition in Porthcawl Grand Pavilion May 16th - June 25th.

Art Exhibition by Arts for the Earth members Siobhan Fitzgerald Grice and Photography by Peter Morgan

 

Clueless Dogs by Rhian Edwards Published

Arts for the Earth member, Rhian Edwards is the winner of the 2011 John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry and Audience Prize 2011. Her first book of poetry has just been published by Seren.

Clueless Dogs is the first collection of poetry by Rhian Edwards. Already a noted performer of both her songs and poetry, this book confirms her startling talent.

Poems like ‘The Welshman Who Couldn’t Sing’ chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, south Wales, where the sensitive child escapes through imaginative games of ‘Playing Dead’ and ‘Broken Lifeboat’. Full of verve and humour, with a spiky syntax featuring hard-edged consonants, her language has a winning honesty and intensity. Later poems chronicle teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although the author doesn’t flinch from ruthless depictions in which we are often implicated by her use of the second person ‘You’, there is an underlying sweetness, an elegiac thread most evident in the poems of maturity, like ‘Back to Bed’ ,’Safe’ ,’The Wrong Season’ full of both the sensual rapture of love and a clear-eyed realization of its inevitable disappointments. Witness the poet in performance and it is impossible not to hear her distinctive tones when reading her work. Clueless Dogs is a brave and beautiful first book.