Richard O'Brien
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Richard O'Brien
@notrockyhorror.bsky.social
1.7K followers 2.6K following 420 posts
Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Northumbria University and lapsed early modernist. Working on poetry, novels, & a music memoir/podcast about the Mountain Goats: thirtyyearslater.substack.com. I make music as Groundbird, groundbird.bandcamp.com.
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notrockyhorror.bsky.social
Absolutely. Here you go!
Deleted Wes Streeting tweet from 2009: ‘Have just been abused as a ‘uni boy’ by a load of teens at the train station for having a suitcase with wheels.’
December 4, 2025 at 8:15 PM
notrockyhorror.bsky.social
They put me in the rink, mama
A statue of Pavarotti buried up to the knees in some kind of wooden structure, arms open wide, surrounded by ice.
December 2, 2025 at 3:28 PM
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4 Billionaires Crumble? I’d love to see it!
A pack of Aldi mince pies named ‘4 Billionaires Crumble Mince Pies’
November 20, 2025 at 1:07 PM
notrockyhorror.bsky.social
We had a great time on Sunday at Songwriters in Conversation: Folk Traditions, talking about the way ideas of community, impersonality, and using what you have to hand might feed into modern folk-inspired music. Here's Janice Burns at soundcheck, singing one of two beautiful unaccompanied ballads!
Folk singer Janice Burns at soundcheck before a gig at Baba Yaga's Loft, in front of a warmly-lit sign bearing the name of the bar and two comfy chairs.
November 18, 2025 at 4:11 PM
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One week left to get tickets! www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...
November 9, 2025 at 2:23 PM
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The next Songwriters in Conversation is on November 16th, 5-7:30pm, at Baba Yaga's Loft, North Shields, with two 30-minute sets from Janice Burns and Jayne Dent of Me Lost Me, followed by a Q&A about Folk Traditions and how they can shape contemporary songwriting. www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...
Songwriters in Conversation Live Music & Chat Hosted by Richard O'Brien Baba Yagas Loft North Shields 16 Nov 2025 Folk Traditions Jayne Dent (Me Lost Me) Janice Burns
October 1, 2025 at 6:53 PM
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RIP Tony Harrison: I loved how his poems addressed the shifting sands of class, education and family, and made a case for universal access to high culture. I wrote about his verse plays a bit in my PhD, which take up some of the same questions - sharing a few excerpts here.
Tony Harrison introduces the printed text of his play Square Rounds by stressing his difficulties in finding an approach which would allow him to 'rescue the actor and text from the suffocation of naturalism' (170). Harrison here expresses his desire to 'create a new poetic theatre that drew from the past, but which looked straight into the depths and disturbances of our own times' (170), but has commented elsewhere that it is difficult to do so in the present climate because 'we've got hooked on realism, and I hate realism' (Winder, 'Interview'). Against realism, Harrison opposes his conviction that 'the great tradition is all poets... And it's not just a question of poetry — it's metricality. People don't realise what its power is' (Winder, 'Interview'). Rather than continuing as if versified speech were the natural method for drama, Eliot insisted that verse 'must justify itself dramatically, and not merely be fine poetry shaped into a dramatic form. From this it follows that no play should be written in verse for which prose is dramaticallv verse for which prose is dramatically adequate' ('Poetry' 132). Tony Harrison's firm declaration to Robert Winder - 'We've got hooked on realism, and I hate realism' - illustrates more combatively than most how many verse playwrights today, in paratextual material and within their own work, take up Eliot's challenge of self-justification. Yet even for Harrison, who writes in rhymed couplets which in practice often fall into a version of the 'fourteener' rhythm popular in the 1580s, an anti-realist position leads inevitably to being viewed through the filter of Shakespeare's very different poetic dramaturgy. Nicholas Wroe, interviewing Richard Eyre in the Guardian, summarises the director's belief that 'Harrison has not been yoked to the usual list of great British dramatists because he has chosen to write exclusively in verse! The playwright finds himself having to validate, if not excuse, his dramaturgical form. In the Introduction to dramaturgical form. In the Introduction to Square Rounds, he discusses his work as a translator of 'dramas whose poetic qualities could not be avoided' as the apprenticeship through which he 'first cleared a space for my own poetic plays' (152). But when composing a wholly original work, even Harrison's pedigree translating poetic sources does not seem enough: 'defensive as even I am about "verse drama," I had to find a reason for the verse' of Square Rounds (Introduction 152). In his previous work, The Trackers of Oxyrynchus, a reconstructed satyr play in which defiantly working-class satyrs ask to be allowed to play Apollo's lyre and find themselves sternly rebuked, Harrison made Prospero the avatar of an aesthetic and cultural imperialism. The satyrs' leader Silenus draws on the internal dynamics of The Tempest to explore the elitism of high art, presented here as an attitude arising in the aftermath of the satyrs' frustrated request: 'It confounds their categories of high and low / when your Caliban outplays high and low / when your Caliban outplays your Prospero' (Trackers 137). Harrison even links the familiar Caliban/Prospero dichotomy to the flaying of Marsyas, who is portrayed as being punished by the gods for the hubris of aspiring to an elite art-form: 'They ripped off his skin / and all he ever wanted was to join in' (Trackers 136). In contrast to this violently exclusionary binary, Morra argues that the play itself, in its 'elision of satyr and classical drama, time and place, advocates for a more cohesive, inclusive definition of society and culture built upon a perpetual openness to art' — an advocacy motivated by Harrison's own 'strong social politics [and] ... self-confessed need to validate the role of the poet and to (re) connect' (207, 211). In this context, his identification with the satyrs and with Caliban seems to underpin Harrison's aggressively un-Shakespearean verse form, situating his loose couplets in a wider quest to establish an alternative tradition, carved out of aspects included in, but nonetheless denigrated by, the old one.
September 28, 2025 at 2:36 PM
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Here is another poem by Hanan Al-Kafarna in Gaza, whose writing I featured in my most recent newsletter. Since then we have worked out the best way to donate to Hanan directly: her university has a student support fund at this address: iugaza.ensany.com/campaign/7102. DM me for more details -
Let me be the Sun, Let me be the Moon, Or even a star, Just keep me far From Earth and mankind's gloom. Let me be feelingless, Free from burning pain. Let me be alone, As if I were at home. How I hate this world So cold, so cruel, Full of wicked, black thoughts. And then let me be free, Or not be at all.
August 4, 2025 at 9:44 AM
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NARC magazine here putting 'Songwriters in Conversation' in their August Highlights section! Come along if you want to find out if the rumours of a 'local folk legend' are true: www.eventbrite.com/e/1495346875...
Text from NARC magazine summarising the Songwriters in Conversation event on Sunday 17th: 'Hosted by local folk legend Groundbird, Songwriters in Conversation is a series which allows two artists to play Tiny Desk-style 30-minute sets, and then have a groundbreaking conversation about their craft. This night, the third in the series, welcomes the Young Property Developers and Nicky Bray, on the topic of comedy and music. Baba Yaga's, North Shields.
July 30, 2025 at 1:28 PM
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Here's Kyle Heslop's beautiful poster for Songwriters in Conversation: Comedy and Music. We'll have two 30-minute sets from The Young Property Developers & Nicky Bray followed by a Q&A about Comedy and Music. At Baba Yaga's Loft, North Shields, 17th August, 5-7:30. www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...
Songwriters in Conversation Live Music and Chat Hosted by Richard O'Brien Baba Yagas Loft North Shields 17.8.25 Event Theme: Comedy and Music The Young Property Developers & Nicky Bray A picture of the Young Property Developers playing guitar and the text 'exquisitely clever lyrics with poetic rebellion that cut through his chord trashing, punky guitar with razor sharp wit & poignant observation.' A picture of Nicky Bray and the text 'Freelance Community Music Worker By Day, Musical Mischief Maker By Night.'
July 20, 2025 at 12:29 PM
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Each session features two artists playing for thirty minutes each, followed by an onstage Q&A about their songwriting practice. The events will be filmed for YouTube, Tiny Desk Sessions-style, by Kyle Heslop, whose great images from our first event starring Nev Clay NOVYI LEF feature in this post.
A panel of songwriters in conversation Nev Clay singing and playing guitar Euan Lynn of NOVYI LEF singing and having a drink Richard O'Brien/Groundbird singing and playing guitar
July 17, 2025 at 4:06 PM
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The @broadsoundmag.com Sunset Tree special edition is out in the world, featuring my essay on 'You Or Your Memory' and ideas of confessionalism, form, and reshaping the past on the Mountain Goats' breakthrough album. You can get the paperback on Amazon, or whole book in pdf here: broadsoundstore.com
The Confessional Turn Richard O’Brien John Darnielle never checked into a bargain-price room on La Cienega—or if he did, he didn’t write a song about it. One online database, the Annotated Mountain Goats, laconically notes that “John has clarified that the motel in this song, the Royal Hawaiian, is not actually located on La Cienega,” a major road in Los Angeles, on at least four separate occasions. The Sunset Tree, the album that “You or Your Memory” introduces, is often billed as the songwriter’s most overtly self-revealing. It opens with a stark a cappella vocal run—an exposed singing style that itself sets up the idea of intimate disclosure—but what the first lyric we hear tells us is not exactly the truth. It’s a small decision that immediately complicates the idea of “confession,” creating a space for larger questions about the mysterious processes of both art and healing. The previous year’s album, We Shall All Be Healed, had aimed in part to dispel an image of the writer as “a very innocent professorial guy,” as Darnielle commented on Seattle radio station KEXP, lifting the curtain on his teenage experiences of addiction to methamphetamines and heroin. What the singer, in a 2019 Portland live show, called his “confessional turn” was a deliberate about-face from his earlier attitudes...
July 2, 2025 at 5:10 PM
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Cockney guru: And ‘ow do we grow??
Frew Pain
June 17, 2025 at 12:05 PM
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All timer here from the page they make you go on when you try to opt out of targeted ads on the Guardian
In the guardian headline font: This is annoying. Why are you doing it?
June 5, 2025 at 7:59 PM
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This poem, 'John Clare Reaches the Pacific,' is very dear to my heart and I'm thrilled to see it in print in the summer issue of @nimrodjournal.bsky.social thanks to @bdralyuk.bsky.social. I wrote it on an Amtrak from Portland to LA in September 2022, from which I really did see a lot of pelicans.
A poem by Richard O'Brien published in Nimrod Journal: John Clare Reaches the Pacific Half-stunned on Boston Stump, gulping your first and only glimpse of sea, my countryman, you never got to learn if you’d have vibed with Santa Monica. Come now, then: hitch-hike if you have to, get to Haight too late, freak out in citrus groves. When did you ever see a lime like this? Kick off your shoes. This is the living sea, untroubled. Someone’s even windsurfing. It’s warmer than Northborough - give it that, and once, for me, John, dream your groundbird soul into the frame of this brown pelican whose bill, grazing the waters of the bay, will scoop and dip and scoop and dip all day so fervently you’ll soon have had your fill and yearn for yellowhammers. All the same, you might find shelter in these free permissions, if you can still locate a rough wall’s shade. Too late, they realised you needed feeding. I’m here. I’m fed. I wish you could have seen.  
May 28, 2025 at 2:25 PM
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This is one of the 9 new poems on the buses me and Adam Dixon put together based on our chats with people at the Late Shows yesterday. We’ll be reading them on the route that leaves the Discovery Museum at 530, 630 or 730 - join us there/stops along the way if you want to hear this and the others!
That warm fuzzy feeling of taking the cream-soda orange Busways number 1 from Heaton into town: I’m going to the Odeon to watch Bad Boys or one of those new Japanese horror movies that are coming out now – popcorn all over the carpet – then the late bus home, praying for once that the phone won’t ring all weekend, even if it’s just Claire wanting to drink and smoke and dance all night at Rockshots in her big green scarf, the terror not subsiding till I make it back to Chilli Road for chips.
May 17, 2025 at 2:38 PM
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Could they not have got the Swiss Guards band to play this? Seems like a one off opportunity
Single art for Craig Finn’s God in Chicago. Rain on a car window. The new Pope was born in Chicago
May 8, 2025 at 5:51 PM
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Cardinal Tedesco vaping in Conclave
April 20, 2025 at 10:16 AM
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saw the pope in St Peter’s square anon pls Likely place for him to be
April 6, 2025 at 11:57 AM
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Why is there always so much pressure in today’s society to be the perfect ploughman?
A jar of ‘perfect ploughman’s pickle’
March 31, 2025 at 2:03 PM
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Oh. Oh I see.
An advert on a brick wall for ‘Landlord Discount Mattresses’ starting at £50 for a single
March 28, 2025 at 11:54 AM
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Me with all the emotional support trash in my office
The lemur from the animated movie Flow holding up a mirror from his bucket of assorted items he saved from the flood
March 23, 2025 at 7:31 PM
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Have I actually posted any poems on here? Maybe not! Here is a poem called ‘Semi-ermine,’ first published in Propel magazine
Semi-ermine The stoats are getting all fucked up. A nervous slice of marble cake, a bad split bet zigzags across the snow that didn’t fall this year, gone long enough for genes to make their own cold calculation. Our mistakes spring up before their time: red blooms in winter, systems out of tune. It’s come to this – we didn’t think – or thought had nowhere it could go except into compactor cubes which slowly stack beneath the snow that hasn’t fallen yet, but will. Prod, like an awkward attic hatch, the great piñata of the clouds: the ceiling is unsealing now, containment breached, ready to spill on stoats, on grass, on moss, on mud, on bulbs, on buds, on them, on us, on television, there in black and white. Semi-ermine The stoats are getting all fucked up. A nervous slice of marble cake, a bad split bet zigzags across the snow that didn’t fall this year, gone long enough for genes to make their own cold calculation. Our mistakes spring up before their time: red blooms in winter, systems out of tune. It’s come to this – we didn’t think – or thought had nowhere it could go except into compactor cubes which slowly stack beneath the snow that hasn’t fallen yet, but will. Prod, like an awkward attic hatch, the great piñata of the clouds: the ceiling is unsealing now, containment breached, ready to spill on stoats, on grass, on moss, on mud, on bulbs, on buds, on them, on us, on television, there in black and white. Semi-ermine The stoats are getting all fucked up. A nervous slice of marble cake, a bad split bet zigzags across the snow that didn’t fall this year, gone long enough for genes to make their own cold calculation. Our mistakes spring up before their time: red blooms in winter, systems out of tune. It’s come to this – we didn’t think – or thought had nowhere it could go except into compactor cubes which slowly stack beneath the snow that hasn’t fallen yet, but will. Prod, like an awkward attic hatch, the great piñata of the clouds: the ceiling is unsealing now, containment breached, ready to spill on stoats, on grass, on moss, on mud, on bulbs, on buds, on them, on us, on television, there in black and white.
March 17, 2025 at 7:00 PM
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Visited my parents this weekend and showed them lots of recent pictures of our cats, so now you can all see them too
Strix, a fluffy tortie with golden eyes, on a table looking up Strix with one paw on the side of a record player with the lid lifted Domino, a black and white cat, sitting in a large ceramic dish and looking back over her left shoulder Domino and Strix on a mat by the back door of a tiled kitchen
March 16, 2025 at 7:35 PM
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On the day of the California Greggsidential Primary,
Kiefer Sutherland outside a Greggs van, holding a Greggs pasty in the iconic bag
February 27, 2025 at 8:24 PM