June 2005
The Blue Room on Sunday 5th June featured readers Carol McGuigan, Claire Morgan and Crista Ermiya. Noreen Rees presented - with the aid of some actors - some dramatic extracts, and there was music from Lake Me.
Our June poet, Claire Morgan, performed as her alter ego Domain Jane. Domain Jane is a founder member of the all girl punk band, The Arts School Dropouts. She describes herself as "Artists Conceptual", and shared some of her obsessions with us.
Crista Ermiya is of Filipino and Turkish-Cypriot parentage and grew up in Hackney, London. She moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2002. She is the co-ordinator for small press collective Independent Northern Publishers and is a co-editor of Other Poetry magazine. Crista is an original member of identity on Tyne, a group that promotes the work of Black and Asian writers. Her poetry has appeared in the anthology A Taste of Liquorice (id on tyne, 2004), and she has read her short fiction in Hexham at the BlackWords festival and at Newcastle's Morden Tower. She is the managing editor of dogeater press.
Noreen Rees is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. In 2001 she won the 'People's Play' competition with her play Bloodlines. She then wrote a community passion play which literally brought Whitley Bay town centre to a standstill. The sea (and its many moods) often informs Noreen's writing. The pageant enabled her to expand this theme. She particularly enjoyed the process of fictionalising an historical event.
It started with one, then mutated into a collective of people; over the years, Lake Me have evolved from a one-woman project to an audio/visual forum of four. Hailing from Newcastle, Lake Me create stripped down blues-infused rhythms, offering a range of delightful tunes and battered rock anthems.
The band boasts members of defunct BBC Radio 1's John Peel darlings Comatose and retired Swedish poptastic Candysuck.
On stage, one half of Lake Me offer a fusion of almost Shellac-esque guitar riffs and intimate vocals on top of a foundation of syncopated drumming. This is captured on camera by the other half who deliver a live mixed projection of the action on a screen to the audience.
Returning from a successful tour of the UK and Ireland, Lake Me are about to launch their debut album in the summer.
