A regular house guest at Port Eliot, Sandy took inspiration for her winning designs from clothes she found in the house.

Sandy will be appearing on the Bowling Green stage on the Saturday afternoon of this year’s festival, when she will talk about her work and life. As Martin Scorceses’s favourite costume designer, she has a lot of good stories to tell… Not to be missed…

The full 2010 festival line-up will be announced at the beginning of April. Book your tickets now!

With this year’s Early Birds tickets selling out in record time, the buzz around the 2010 festival is growing steadily. The line-up will be announced soon, but in the meantime rest assured there’s lots to look forward to…

This year will see some stunning new areas and collaborations which promise to inspire, provoke, fascinate or tickle you before getting down to the music, food and starlight adventures that await around our riverbanks, woods and hidden gardens.

With memories of last year fuelling the fire, tickets are already selling fast so why not book now for one of the most magical weekends of the summer?

Limited edition Port Eliot Festival 2009 t-shirts, featuring Ralph Steadman’s beautiful script, are now for sale – while stocks last…

Only 100 ladies and 100 gentlemen’s t-shirts have been made, designed by Lady St Germans and Captain Levack (and modelled by the lovely Florences and Roo). The distinctive black, white and red designs feature Ralph Steadman’s illustration and the 2009 festival line-up on the back. Each t-shirt has been hand numbered.

The men’s is a classic t-shirt style, while the ladies’ garment is slightly narrower with softly capped sleeves. They both come in one size, but rest assured they will fit and look fabulous! 100% organic and manufactured by Earth Positive Apparel.

Price: £20 plus £3 postage & packaging.

Please send a cheque made payable to Port Eliot Festival to: Port Eliot Festival, The Estate Office, St Germans, Saltash, Cornwall, PL12 5ND.

First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who came to this year’s festival and helped make it the most magical, memorable Port Eliot Festival yet. So many highlights, we won’t even try to list them in this space – but as we all know, “a picture says 1,000 words”, so head to our gallery section to peruse a colourful selection of albums that really sum up Port Eliot’s unique charm.

As well as the great pictures taken by our official photographer, Bill Bradshaw, you’ll find albums by Hadley Freeman, the BBC Culture Show and tens of other great photographers – be it professional or passionate amateurs – who explored our woods, groves, gardens, river banks and tents on the weekend of 24-26th July 2009.

Don’t forget to send us your best pictures and you could win a pair of free tickets to next year’s festival! We have two pairs of tickets to give away, and the competition is open until 31st August – so head to the Port Eliot Festival Official Facebook page and post your pictures in the ‘fan photos’ gallery.

If Martians wanted to collect the sound of summer in a jam jar and take it back to Mars, the world could do no better than sending them off with an album or two of The Magic Numbers. Possibly the happiest band on earth, the magic lads and lasses were shortlisted for the 2005 Mercury Prize showing they didn’t just induce smiles from the audiences alone but also from the high-brow musical critics. The band, brothers and sisters Romeo and Michele Stodart, and Sean and Angela Gannon, have released two studio albums and a mini album since their meteoric rise to fame in early 2005. They’re currently building a studio before working on songs for their third album, due next year.

Expect to hear fan favourites ‘Forever Lost’, ‘Love Me Like You’ and ‘Love’s a Game’, which have rocketed festival crowds into euphoria the world over.

www.magicnumbers.net

Video:

The Magic Numbers – ‘Forever Lost’:

The Magic Numbers on Jools Holland:

Hanif Kureishi lives in London and has written six novels, three works of non-fiction and nine plays and screenplays. His new novel, Something to Tell You, has received critical acclaim as Kureishi again explores the themes of sex, love and religion that have been at the heart of his most celebrated works.

Something to Tell You is described by the Guardian as a “return to the 1970s, and the territory of his enduringly lovable The Buddha of Suburbia… His narrator is an analyst looking back on the violence, confusion and first love of his youth, while deeply engaged in contemporary politics and culture: Kureishi’s London landscape is a vivid kaleidoscope of larger-than-life characters.”

The Financial Times was also full of praise: “Hanif Kureishi has written a subtle and strikingly topical novel… [his] skilful anatomisation of how it feels to be an atheist Muslim in contemporary England punctures many a stereotype… Something to Tell You has much to tell us, and does it extraordinarily well.” Meanwhile, the Independent said: “Kureishi – a great comic writer, and a peerless connoisseur of the human mystery… delivers a prose, and a perspective, that throbs with unruly life.”

www.hanifkureishi.com

“There is more that is worth thinking about in Hanif Kureishi’s new book than in the work of almost any other current British novelist.”
The Evening Standard

Links:

• Full profile on Contemporary Writers
• Interview in The Telegraph, with the option to listen to Hanif reading an extract from Something To Tell You

Video:

Hanif Kureishi on The Book Show (Sky Arts)

Exploring themes more likely to be seen in a poem by John Donne Noah and the Whale have been wooing new folk fans since their first gig in 2006. The four piece are a musical oxymoron. Marrying joy with morbidity their tracks have the knack of inducing tears and smiles within the same beat let alone bar; never before has death sounded so melodic. No wonder one of their biggest influences is original celebrator of sadness Morrissey.

Frontman Charlie Fink’s precoccupation with all things metaphysical – life, love, death, time – and strong sense of narrative – whether that be strolling around a zoo in the sunshine or throwing a new born baby to the wolves - is beautifully backed up by his brother Doug on triangle and tambourine, string prodigy Tom Fiddle on classical violin and the simultaneous bass guitar and glockenspiel playing Urby Whale.

Noah and the Whale have come along way since gigging in corners, on table tops and even inside cupboards. They have played 150 shows in less than 18 months, recorded their first album, Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down, and had a top ten hit. So if you want to learn about the shape of your heart and give a little love in the process seek Noah and the Whale out at this year’s Port Eliot and celebrate broken hearts and inevitable death with a jolly old knees up.

www.noahandthewhale.com

“Noah and the Whale are still confounding the public but their new single looks set to be a global smash.”
The Times

“Never mind the whistling and harmoniums, their kindergarten anti-folk is heavier than it sounds, with most of Fink’s clap-along ditties addressing the usual big issues like love and death and hanging round zoos with your girlfriend while you pretend to be James Dean.”
The Guardian.co.uk

Links:

• Noah and the Whale’s Myspace page
• A selection of Noah and the Whale videos

Video:

Noah and the Whale - FIve Years Time

2 Bodies 1 Heart

Dominic was the youngest of six children in an Irish Catholic family growing up on the moors that fringe Sheffield. His father worked in the plastics industry, making vandal-resistant bus shelters and this afforded him to send his final child to the most elite of private schools. He studied at Eton (a couple of years below David Cameron) and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 1995.

His early screen appearances included Mona Lisa Smile, True Blue and Chicago opposite Renée Zellweger; he also played Spartan politician Theron in 300. But his career-defining move was securing the role of Jimmy McNulty in The Wire. “I just did my best De Niro impression,” he told the Guardian. And there are obvious similarities with some of the skulking, unpredictable, but somehow competent characters associated with De Niro.

As a theatre actor he has extensive experience and has appeared as Konstantin in Peter Hall-directed The Seagull (1996), Orlando in David Lan’s As You Like It (2005) and more recently he played the lead role of Jan in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll (2007) in London’s West End.

Guardian columnist Marina Hyde will be interviewing Dominic at the festival this year, where he’ll also be reading with Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s from her dark new play, Wisconsin.

www.hbo.com/thewire

Video:

Jimmy McNulty gets trashed

Sarah Waters’ first novel, Tipping the Velvet, was published in February 1998 and the Telegraph claimed “this could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson”. It was also adapted by Andrew Davies for BBC drama in 2002.

Her second novel, Affinity (1999), prompted A N Wilson to hail Sarah as “such a brilliant writer that her readers would believe anything she told them”, while the Guardian predicted Affinity to be “the very type of book which may turn out to be the signature of late 20th-Century fiction in Britain”. Sarah was awarded the Somerset Maugham prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for Affinity, as well being runner-up for the Welsh Book Of the Year Award, all in 2000. Affinity was also shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and dramatised on ITV earlier this year.

Sarah’s third and fourth novels, Fingersmith and Night Watch, were both shortlisted for both the Orange and Man Booker Prizes. Fingersmith won the CWA Historical Dagger prize for historical crime fiction and was picked more than any other novel as a Book of the Year 2002. It was dramatised as a major 3-part BBC1 drama starring Charles Dance and Imelda Staunton in 2005.

Sarah’s new novel, The Little Stranger, will be published by Virago in June this year.

www.sarahwaters.com

“One of the best storytellers alive”
The Independent

“This outstandingly gifted novelist releases her imagination into her most compelling depiction yet of women’s struggles for various kinds of liberation.”
The Times

Links:

• Sarah Waters feature in the Guardian about writing Night Watch
• Sarah Waters feature in the Independent
• Sarah Waters interview for Powells Bookshop

Video:

Sarah Waters interviewed at Brighton Book Festival 2006:

Sarah Waters on The Book Show (Sky Arts):

Idolised by musos and musicians alike, Mairead Nash and Tabitha Denholm could organise a revolution if they weren’t so busy shouting support for up-and-coming bands from the rooftops of Shoreditch, backwashing neat vodka and daintily spinning their decks.

Enthusiastic to the core, Mairead and Tabitha broke onto the scene in 2002 with five hours of record flicking in Shoreditch’s famous 333 club. Over the ensuing years the twosome haven’t lost any of their defining zeal but rather rocketed through the glass ceiling to become renowned indie DJs Queens of Noize. Rubbing shoulders with the London artistic elite, the girls inspired the name for Pete Doherty’s second band Babyshambles and have recently produced the soundtrack for Kate Moss’ new range for Top Shop. The Queens’ infectious enthusiasm has caused their services to be enlisted for high profile events from The Maldives to Benicassim, not to mention rallying crowds on various cross-country jaunts with the likes of The Liars, Club NME and, most surreally, Pink.

Expect a sunshine soaked set featuring Brit pop legends such as Graham Coxon to American imports the Von Bondies. Spanning late 1990s happy fun-filled tunes through to The Libertines-led indie renaissance of the early naughties to the modern day kafuffle of nu-rave and old ballads, get ready for Mairead and Tabitha to rock your indie universe.

They also manage Brit Award-winning Florence and the Machine and have promised to bring some very special guests to perform at the festival…

www.queensofnoize.com

Links:

• Queens of Noize review in This is London
• Fashion tips from the Queens of Noize

Video:

Queens of Noize – Video Booth No. 3

The Queens of Noize preview the 1234 Shoreditch Music Festival