Hello, hello, hellooooooo!
We hope you enjoyed our May edition, with our splendid headliner Jackill, as well as a busy and varied open mic which once again included some new faces as well as beloved regulars. As always, they are not in chronological order, and unfortunately I forgot to save this month’s set list.
As always these photos will be added to a gallery on our front page. Our photographer Dáibhí is hoping to create a dedicated website for his photography later this year, so they will move there when that happens.
June’s events
We now move onto our events for June - because yes, we have a double header coming your way. I don’t think we’ve ever done this in the history of Speakin Weird, so we’ll have to see how it goes. We hope you’ll manage to make it to at least one of them.
First up is our much anticipated event as part of the Light the Blue festival, where we have the legend that is Len Pennie headlining.
The poster for our upcoming event with Len Pennie for the Light the Blue Festival.
Len Pennie is a poet who writes in both Scots and English. She writes passionately about the promotion of minoritised languages, survivors of domestic abuse and the destigmatisation of mental illness. Her two poetry collections poyums and poyums annaw were instant Sunday Times bestsellers. poyums won Scots Book of the Year in 2024 and was the winner of the British Book Awards Discover Book of the Year in 2025.
Since Light the Blue is a youth festival, the open mic will prioritise sign ups from those who fall into the 30 and under age bracket. We’ll have eight slots in each half, and we’ll have to be a bit stricter about these than normal - once we’re full, we’re full. As always open mic performers will have five minutes to show us what they can do. Going forward this rule will now apply to all open mic performers at all our events, including the poets.
Finally - unlike our usual events, where you just show up and pay on the door, it is in fact possible to buy your tickets in advance for this event. How novel! If that’s more your bag, you can do so at this link. As always, £5 entry or, in this case, £3 for those under 30.
Meanwhile, our next event will take place on the 15th of June, at Gaelic Lane Cafe as normal, at our usual time of 6:30pm doors for a 7pm start. This time our headliner will be Ian Spring, who is coming all the way up from Perth to launch his new poetry collection.
IAN SPRING is a writer, historian and publisher from Glasgow, based in Perth, Central Scotland. He has written several works of non-fiction, fiction and fiction, and crime fiction as Simpson Grears. Seal Song, published by Tippermuir Books, is his first collection of poetry.
He has been a judge for Scotland's National Book Awards and has appeared at several book festivals in Scotland. He is currently publisher with Rymour Books, an award-winning Scottish small press.
It goes without saying that we’re super excited to be working with both headliners in the coming month, and to work with APA for the first time ever. We hope you’ll join us for one or both of these performances.
Buy us a Coffee (please)
Finally - we have opened a profile on Buy Me a Coffee, in order to try and generate more of an income. As we’re sure many of you already know, Speakin Weird is as grassroots as an arts organisation can get. We aren’t currently getting any external funding (although we do keep an eye out for it), so essentially we’re running on a tiny budget comprising entry fees, personal incomes, and vibes. We had to put the entry fees up a little while back in order to better cover our running costs, and while this was inevitable we’d like to try and keep them at current rates for as long as possible before doing so again. We figured this was probably one of the best ways to make extra income - it is completely optional, you can pay us as much or as little as you wish, and you don’t need to do it regularly. Payment for BMaC is taken through Stripe and any money we get from it will go straight into our kitty and towards paying our headliners’ fees and expenses.
That’s all for now - we’re looking forward to seeing you next month.
Hannah, Aron and Esmond