The Vinyl Say 012: The Superimposers

In every collection there are records that get played all the time, many of them for years, decades even. Then there are those that, while no less treasured, somehow fall by the wayside to lie in wait, ripe for rediscovery. This occasional series chronicles some of those nuggets as they resurface from my own back pages. So, Read More…

Gordon Haskell: The return of the native

What on earth is Gordon Haskell doing here? Nearly nine years after he beat a tactical retreat from his beloved Dorset to start a new life on the Greek island idyll of Skopelos, the Bournemouth-born singer-songwriter-musician is back under grey skies on frozen home soil. He obviously hasn’t come home for the weather, but he Read More…

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra 15:11:2017

Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts In a night of intense drama the home audience was gripped by the raw, physical power of a performance in which passages of near silence teetered on the brink of stillness without ever quite surrendering to the void. Every inch the favourite general, Kirill Karabits marshalled his musical troops Read More…

In praise of Poole artists

Its founder members include Augustus John and Henry Lamb, two of the best known names in 20th century British Art, and George Spencer Watson was an early president, but today’s Poole and East Dorset Art Society is a much more approachable group than the one they helped initiate in 1924. Conceived as a means of Read More…

The Vinyl Say 011: Bob Dylan

In every collection there are records that get played all the time, many of them for years, decades even. Then there are those that, while no less treasured, somehow fall by the wayside to lie in wait, ripe for rediscovery. This occasional series chronicles some of those nuggets as they resurface from my own back pages. So, Read More…

Shaftesbury’s Big Cheese

It might have started as an accident of geography, but over the last fifteen years, Charlie Turnbull’s relationship with Dorset has blossomed into an abiding passion. Just as he has taken its many moods to his heart, so too is Dorset assimilating the energy, expertise and barely bridled enthusiasm of this most irrepressible of settlers. Read More…

Conserving the past for the future

If history is all about the evidence, then how its sources are recorded and stored is of manifest importance. So the task of conserving and protecting the historical record for posterity is a vital part of the work undertaken at Dorset History Centre, the county’s archives service and local studies library. As a result of Read More…

Faking it: Nina Camplin’s trompe l’oeil

Rarely has fake been so fashionable – from fake news to fake tans, faux is determinedly à la mode. All of which causes some amusement for Poole-based trompe l’œil artist Nina Camplin, who has made the art of faking it into something positively authentic since moving to Dorset at the turn of the century. ‘Within Read More…

The Vinyl Say 010: Orgone Box

In every collection there are records that get played all the time, many of them for years, decades even. Then there are those that, while no less treasured, somehow fall by the wayside to lie in wait, ripe for rediscovery. This occasional series chronicles some of those nuggets as they resurface from my own back pages. So, Read More…

Rudolf Schwarz – from Belsen to Bournemouth

He arrived in Bournemouth in a blaze of publicity seventy years ago as the first post-war musical director of the re-formed Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra in its brand new home – the re-commissioned Winter Gardens – but the appointment of Rudolf Schwarz was not without controversy and even elicited questions in the House of Commons. A Read More…