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The Bookshop Band
The Bookshop Band is a British musical duo consisting of Benedict Please and Bethany Porter who write songs inspired by books. The band formed in September 2010 in Bath as a musical collaboration with their local independent bookshop, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights who curated the books that the band wrote songs inspired by. These songs are first performed at the bookshop's author evenings in front of the author themselves and a small audience. The band have worked with over 100 authors, including Philip Pullman, Ben Okri, Joanne Harris and Louis de Bernières, as well as collaborating with Radio 3, the Victoria and Albert Museum and The Pompidou Centre in Paris, and have released 13 studio albums. The band regularly perform in bookshops and have extensively toured the UK, as well as Ireland, continental Europe and America. In early 2019 Pete Townshend from The Who began producing the band's next studio album.

Formation
Nic Bottomley, the owner of multi-award winning independent bookshop in Bath, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights approached Ben Please in September 2010 to see if he might be able to play some music at the beginning of a series of five author evenings. Ben approached fellow songwriters, Beth Porter and Poppy Pitt to see if they might be interested in collaborating. The series title of the five events at Mr B's was Travels From Your Armchair and featured 5 author's whose books were set in different countries. Ben, Beth and Poppy set about writing two songs for each evening, each inspired by a folk story from the relevant country. The songs were written on the day of the event. By the beginning of December 2010 the band had written 10 new songs and quickly recorded them all at Ben's mum's house where he was living at the time, producing their first album, also titled Travels From Your Armchair, so that Mr B's could sell the CD in time for the Christmas rush. Ben, Beth and Poppy had to come up with a name for the band. Ben's suggestion of The Lost Art Of The Mix Tape was immediately rejected, and the idea of Mr B's Bookshop Band got whittled down to just The Bookshop Band as it seemed to suit best what the band was, where it existed and what it did.

The first year 2010 - 2011
2012 - 2014

2014 -