She Walks in Beauty

New piece of audio poetry has dropped today. It’s Richard Armitage reading Lord Byron‘s poem “She Walks in Beauty”. It was found by Twitter fan MsSarah

This comes from The Royal Society of Literature who are celebrating their 200th year and, today, launch ‘RSL 200‘ : a five-year celebration of the best in literature past, present and future.

Wonder when this was originally recorded? The hair is longish but no beard

Anyway, this pinged my synapses and brought flooding back memories of my teenage years. When I was 17 I discovered the UK Indie band ‘Suede’. They turned my world upside down with their haunting echoey guitars and romantic lyrics. The band members all had dyed black hair and they wore little 70’s black leather jackets with skinny jeans. I was a huge fan for years and made some good friendships through being in their fan club. I dyed my hair black, wore a little black leather jacket aswell! lol

Suede: back in the day

On their second album Dog Man Star is the song ‘Heroine’ which borrows from Lord Byron poem.

This album was a more romanticised one than their first; all Phil Spector-esque Wall of Sound style “Characterised by bombastic, reverberating instruments which constantly threatened to drown out the vocals”

Romanticized, well leader singer Brett Andersen was heavily taking drugs which was a big influence on the album. As a 17 year old I loved it, even though I didn’t understand all the drug references at the time. It’s very much of its time, fashion was the whole heroin chic look and this fitted right in with that theme and guitar bands were Top of the Pops.

She Walks in Beauty Like The Night…

Wonder what Lord Byron would have thought? I think he would have liked Suede.