I've been invited to be guest lecturer at the Creative Writing Department of Staffordshire University. It's a great honour. It's also open to interested members of the public – the date is Thursday 30th January 2-4pm. For details see the Gig List page.

I shall be focussing on editing and rewriting, especially fiction.

Thank you Vive le Rock magazine, for the great feature on The March Violets!

https://vivelerock.net/product/vive-le-rock-84-motorhead-girlschool-preorder/

Delighted to be featured as Commonword Writer of the Month, June 2017!

Thank you for the interview... it was a lot of fun talking with you.

Tell me about you, as an artist. How do you define art? What art do you make?

I come from the DIY ethic of punk: my post-punk band The March Violets set up its own record label in the 80s. When I moved to Manchester in the late 80s its industrious, can-do, will-do, stuff-you-if-you-say-I-can’t-do attitude was a good fit, right from the start.
I write. Not to provide answers. Rather, I’m exploring the questions that roll around in my head, and am wary of easy conclusions. I’m not interested in creating narrow worlds. I want to tell stories that create possibilities of non-conformity. It’s always been important, and never more so than now. Stories that break the mould and toss out the template. Stories that aren’t part of the relentless onslaught of blue for boy meets pink for girl. In the words of Emily Dickinson, ‘to tell the truth but tell it slant’. Stories where we celebrate ourselves – complete with all the marvellous, uncomfortable, colouring-outside-the-lines contradictions we encompass.

Continues…
Full text of the interview:
http://www.cultureword.org.uk/writer-of-the-month-rosie-garland/

Here be Tygres – fanzines and my life underground

I’ve been thinking about the impact fanzines have made on my life – and the result is this blog! Enjoy…

For someone who really was a Teenager in Devon (the poem isn’t an exaggeration http://www.rosiegarland.com/news-and-events/item/53-i-want-to-be-a-teenager-in-devon.html ), it’s hard to overstate the impact on a fifteen-year old geek girl of a let-off-the-leash long weekend in London.

Mid 1970s. Mum sets a friend and me up in a vicarage beyond the twilight zone of the North Circular. Every morning we take two long bus journeys into central London. My mate smokes cigarettes and swills cider like any normal teenager. I haunt Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, Atlantis Bookshop and the innumerable second-hand bookshops around Soho. It’s a four-day sojourn in a tatty oasis for the starved mind and spirit. As well as the books and comics I expect, I also discover fanzines.

They flick an entirely different switch in my imagination.
I’ve been making magazines since I was a kid, but now see I’m not the only nerd in the world to spend evenings with glue and a stapler. Even more groundbreaking, the zines cover interests I’ve learnt to conceal in order to limit my bullied isolation: horror movies, vampires, sci-fi, punk, weird illustration, weirder literature. The Gothic, in short. For the first time in my life, I see myself reflected. I encounter an underground community of the imagination. I know I’ll never meet any of these fellow-weirdoes, but I am not alone.

I return to the mix of beauty and soul-death of rural Devon (miles north of the artsy bit around Totnes), grit my teeth, make it to 18 and escape. In my new home, Leeds, one of the first things I do is check out the 2nd-hand / radical bookshops (a tip ‘o the pen to Austicks & The Corner Bookshop). As well as reviews in mainstream music papers such as Sounds, Melody Maker & NME, I now feature in fanzines that interview my band The March Violets (eg Rendezvous, Attack on B-Zag, The Angels are Coming, Whippings & Apologies – best zine name ever IMHO). We even produce our own Violets zine. High production values, or handwritten, it doesn’t matter. It’s all part of the vibrant build-your-own record label / indie scene of the early 80s.

Another hiatus follows when I quit the UK to work in Sudan from 1984-1986. In 1987, semi-fanzine independents Shocking Pink & Spare Rib inspire my move to Manchester where I find a thriving LGBT scene. However, it soon becomes apparent that being a dyke AND a Goth is a step too far. I have no problem making the connections between goth, punk and post-punk, fetish, feminism, queer, vampires and weird literature but I’m damned if I can find a queer pal who’ll go to The Banshee with me. As for my penchant for leather trousers, the less said about that the better. I can come out, but not about everything. However, late 80s feminism is a different blog.

It seems I can still feel isolated in a massive city, and I learn what it’s like to be marginalised within a marginalised community. I need help, and once again find it in the fanzines of the late 80s / early 90s. One particular pleasure is Dominic Regan’s graphic Dom Zombi story in AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia ) which drew everything together so succinctly. Others include: For the Blood is the Life, Bats and Red Velvet, The Velvet Vampyre, Udolpho and early issues of Skin Two (produced on Tim Woodward’s kitchen table). Listings of penpals, society meetups and clubs provide me with a flesh & blood community, not simply one of the imagination. All of it pre-internet, off the map, under the radar. I even meet a bisexual Goth.

Jump cut to the present day.
I’m excited and encouraged by the rebirth / renaissance of Xeroxed, glue-and-collage, passed from hand-to-hand zines. There’s a fresh new family of folk learning the liberating impact of turning off search engines so your keystrokes can’t be tracked in order to tailor more bloody advertising into your feed. To quote Keith Lowell Jensen: “What Orwell failed to predict is that we'd buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching” https://twitter.com/keithlowell/status/347741181997879297

Only last year I met a woman in Athens, Georgia, who knew my work because she’d come across Pink Bomb, a CD fanzine produced in Manchester by the radiant Ste McCabe . Our words don’t need wifi to span the globe. And if you can’t hold something in your hands, it doesn’t really exist.

Fanzines are still there when the battery runs out on your phone. When some yellow-haired dictator decides you can’t Google ‘that’ article any more. Fanzines can’t be deleted at the swipe of a button. So - Buy that ancient typewriter. Get stapling.

© Rosie Garland 2017‏

Pledgemusic with the March Violets: Mortality Tour and Album

Yes – The March Violets have just returned from our mammoth tour of the USA and we have a new Pledge! We reached 100% in under a fortnight, thanks to our amazing fans... let's make it twice that.
Info follows...

"One of the influential bands in the darkwave genre, the March Violets have an album coming out. And this is possible because of your help. There are many things coming up from this beautiful band. There's the Mortality tour(which happens to be the name of the upcoming album) and also goodies that they are giving out when you make your pledge.
October is a good month for this type of music. The Goth in me loves it. And I am sure the children of darkness out there are going to like the new album, Mortality. Here's the message from the band:
The 'Mortality Tour and Album' is the new Pledge from the March Violets. Throughout October pledgers get to experience a month of touring around the East Coast, with Backstage Action, Road Movie high jinx and other Purple nonsense. The Violets will be playing classic tracks live, then recording them in November in Chicago. With exclusive daily footage and a virtual Access Pass pledgers will be able to participate in the highs and lows of the entire Tour and Studio Saga. The involvement continues right up to Xmas, with an Advent Calendar with interesting Violet goodies behind each door, culminating in the Album download on Xmas day!
Physical 'exclusives', that will be shipped after Xmas, include a Double CD, a Vinyl LP and a double DVD with a full concert, a road movie, and footage from the entire life of the band, right back to the early Eighties. It's a new way of touring that DOES come to your home town, social media at its rocking best. Support the Violets, Pledge Purple! Many Thanks."

The link is here: Click for The March Violets Pledge

 Photo taken by the amazing Bobby Talamine, with many thanks.

The March Violets 'Made Glorious' Tour 2013.

ALL dates - 10 gigs - are now confirmed. That should be it now...

Please come along and have fun.

Click on this link to buy tickets for any date!

Rosie Garland: 'The Night Brother' - Reading and Book Signing

Location: John Rylands Library Historic Reading Room,
Deansgate,
Manchester M3 3EH
6-7pm
Free event

Introduced and chaired by Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Met).

Tagged ‘literary hero’ by The Skinny, Rosie Garland is an award-winning poet, novelist and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. With a passion for language nurtured by libraries, she started out in spoken word, garnering praise from Apples and Snakes as ‘one of the country’s finest performance poets’.
She is the author of Vixen, a Green Carnation Prize nominee. Debut novel, The Palace of Curiosities, won Book of the Year in the Co-op Respect Awards 2013 and was nominated for both The Desmond Elliott and the Polari First Book Prizes. Her latest novel The Night Brother (Borough Press) was reviewed in The Times as "A rich and ambitious tale set in late Victorian Manchester... Garland's prose is a delight: playful and exuberant. There are shades of Angela Carter in the mad world she creates... Full marks.'

Her most recent poetry collection, As In Judy, is out with Flapjack Press. She is half of The Time-Travelling Suffragettes. #gothfest17

https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/artshumanities/rah/gothic-manchester-festival/detail/index.php?id=6561

Goth City Festival: Black Planet - Leeds Goth in Perspective

On the discussion panel will be: Rosie Garland (writer, performer and March Violets singer), John Keenan (Leeds alternative music promoter), Karl Spracklen (Professor of Leisure Studies, Leeds Beckett University) and Tim Synystyr (journalist and A Blogging Goth), chair: Joel Heyes (Goth City Promotions)
Venue: HEART Centre,
Bennett Road,
Headingley, Leeds.
7.30-9.30pm
Tickets for this event are now on sale! £4 each, all proceeds to PAFRAS

Tickets can be purchased by PayPal. Once purchased all you need to do is bring your PayPal receipt to the event.

The first Goth City Festival will take place in Leeds in November 2016 – and I'm delighted to be involved!

Taking place between Friday 11th and Saturday 26th November, Goth City Festival will celebrate the gothic and post-punk heritage of the city and of Yorkshire generally. Events will include, gigs, clubs, discussions, spoken word, acoustic and social events at more than six venues and feature more than 20 different bands and performers.

All proceeds from Goth City Promotions events during this period will be donated to PAFRAS (Positive Action For Refugees and Asylum Seekers), a local charity for destitute refugees and asylum seekers.

http://gothcity.co.uk/

MARCH VIOLETS LIVE
November 7 @ 7:30 pm - 8:00 pm
318 Grand, Chicago

Free

The March Violets are a British band that first made an appearance in the early eighties, and almost immediately had an impact upon the Independent music scene. At that time Indie meant "not on a Major label", it was the Alternative to commercial pop, more Underground, and had it's own charts. The Violets were a Top Ten Indie Band.... and even went to Number One. The best selling single SnakeDance is still a favourite on darker dance floors. They were unique at the time, they had male and female vocalists who took equal roles, fast relentless drum machine beats and searing guitar. They explored conflict in their music which was both spikey, abrasive, beautiful yet dark and full of conflict and tension. They tried to write poetry full of ambiguities and yet make some serious points.
They released a few Singles, did a few John Peel Sessions and played a few gigs and then imploded.
They released various compilation LPs and have now reformed and made their first proper LP, 'Made Glorious'.
They recently embarked on a US Tour and are making another album whilst there. They are Joined on Bass by William Faith.

Elysium
705 Red River St.
Austin, TX 78701

THE MARCH VIOLETS featuring William Faith on bass!

Local Support TBD

Tickets: $13 advance at Click for ticket link

$18 at the door

The March Violets were a really great band. They were labelmates with The Sisters of Mercy, yet darker and infinitely more messed up than them, and through constant gigging they became integral to the whole Leeds/M62 scene in the early/mid 1980s. We loved them, John Peel loved them, and we assume you loved them too. And now they're back!

18+ Welcome · Doors open at 9:00 pm

@elysiumaustin

Click to visit Elysium website