We are super proud to finally announce our third Real Magic Weekend, join us for three days of music and talks, workshops, walks, drinking and dancing, from Friday 30 May to Sunday 1 June. This is our biggest magic mini-festival yet!
A very limited amount of weekend tickets are on sale online now or over the counter at the shop. These will get you into every event, talk and gig (including the sold out Boy Least Likely To). Individual tickets for everything else are on the links below. Get on it early if you can, means a lot to see your support.
Here’s the quick rundown of the weekend with further full information about each event and guest below that, so keep on reading.
FRIDAY
Ros Atkins in Conversation and reading from The Art of Explanation (18:00 at Real Magic Books) – TICKETS
The Boy Least Likely To with support from Legends of Country and Diving At Dawn (19:00 at The Legion) – SOLD OUT
SATURDAY
Real Magic Food Market presented by Grandma’s Hot Sauce (10:00-15:00 in front of Real Magic Books) – FREE
Caught by The River presents Joe Dunthorne, Rowe Irvin + Tom Bolton. Two talks with a break, one ticket (11:00 at Real Magic Books) – TICKETS
Screenprinting with Private Press (13:00 at Real Magic Books) – FREE
Real Magic Book Groups presents Jen Calleja (Goblinhood), Katharina Volckmer (Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes), and Marni Appleton (I Hope You’re Happy) in conversation with Sophie and Carl (14:00 at Real Magic Books) – TICKETS
Live: Chetwood-Fisher-Burns (17:30 at the King and Queen) – FREE
Live: Gwenno + support from Avice Caro – very special solo piano performance, our debut at the church (18:30 at St Mary’s Church) – TICKETS
Disco in the Pub (20:00 at the King and Queen) – FREE
SUNDAY
Family Art and Craft Workshop Jaany Ravenscroft-Hull + Shanie Noakes (10:30 at Real Magic Books) – TICKETS
A Real Magic Walk, meeting at the shop for a communal walk up the hill (11:00 at Real Magic) – FREE
Real Magic Records with Sean Rowley, afternoon DJs at the pub (13:00 at the King and Queen) – FREE
Stone Club with Sacha Coward, Justin Hopper + Lally Macbeth (14:00 at Real Magic Books) – TICKETS
Dean Chalkley (Back to Ibiza 1998–2003) in conversation with Carl (17:00 at Real Magic Books) – TICKETS
Real Magic Closing Party: Lias Saoudi (Fat White Family) live + support (18:00 at Real Magic Books) – TICKETS
FRIDAY
Ros Atkins in Conversation and reading from The Art of Explanation
18:00 at Real Magic Books
Ros Atkins is BBC News’ Analysis Editor and the creator of the ‘Ros Atkins on…’ explainer videos. He’s also been a BBC News presenter for over twenty years and has reported from around the world – mostly recently in Washington DC on Donald Trump’s election victory and inauguration. In addition, Ros is also co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show. He also DJs and made his debut at Glastonbury last year.
In his book The Art of Explanation, Ros shares his approach to clear confident communication, showing how skills and techniques he’s learned from years in high pressure newsroom, can be useful in many areas of our lives.
Whether at work, school, university or home, we all benefit from being able to articulate ourselves clearly. The Art of Explanation is filled with practical examples and stories from his career and Ros will join us to share some of them.
The Boy Least Likely To with support from Legends of Country and Diving At Dawn
19:00 at The Legion
A very special hometown show from Wendover’s very own The Boy Least likely To. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of their debut album – The Best Party Ever – and also the first night of our third Real Magic Weekend.
“We always dreamt of playing a show in Wendover but somehow it just never happened, so we’re really excited to finally be doing one. I imagine all the shops will close early and the streets will be lined with cheering, flag waving children just like when the Queen drove through the village.”
The Boy Least Likely To released their debut album, The Best Party Ever, in 2005 to widespread critical acclaim, earning spots in both Pitchfork’s Top 50 albums and #8 in the Rough Trade Shop top 100 of that year. Pitchfork called the album “a thing of wonder, made of rubber and springs” and they were featured in Rolling Stone’s top ten bands of 2006.
To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of The Best Party Ever, the band are performing the album in its entirety for the first time ever along with a selection of their greatest hits.
SATURDAY
Caught by The River presents Joe Dunthorne, Rowe Irvin + Tom Bolton
11:00 at Real Magic Books
We are delighted to be joined by the wonderful Caught by the River and some very special guests.
Joe Dunthorne is the author of books including Submarine, which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award. Children of Radium, published by Hamish Hamilton in April, is his first work of non-fiction.
Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home.
The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew…
Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one ‘jolly grandpa’ with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found – will we be able to live with it?
Tom Bolton has published five books: London’s Lost Rivers: A Walker’s Guide Volumes 1 and 2 (Strange Attractor), Vanished City (Strange Attractor), Camden Town: Dreams of Another London, and Low Country (shortlisted for the New Angles Prize). He works in architecture and urban design, and has a PhD on London’s railway terminals. He also writes on theater and music for publications including Plays International and The Quietus. Soon to be published by Strange Attractor, Tom’s next book Atomic Albion is a journey around Britain’s nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex marshes to the Anglesey coast, from the Dungeness shingle to the far north of Scotland, Tom Bolton explores how nuclear sites shape the places around them, and enters the impossible world of nuclear power and weapons.
Here, we bring Joe, Tom and their latest books into a conversation sure to emit a radioactive glow.
Rowe Irvin is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in Prototype 5, Unquiet Slumbers: A Collection of Folk Horror Tales (Nepenthé Press) and The Stinging Fly. She was awarded second prize in the 2024 Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize and the Bath Short Story Award. Her hotly anticipated debut novel, Life Cycle of a Moth, will be published on the 5th June 2025 by Canongate.
Maya and Daughter live in complete isolation in a secluded woodland, their days aligned with the light and changing seasons, a complex pattern of routine and ritual. Daughter has never questioned the life her mother has chosen for them; the life that has meant she’s never met another soul, or known anywhere except their forest home. But one day, when Daughter is almost sixteen, a red-haired stranger steps into the confines of their territory. Where there was always two, suddenly there are three – and the carefully constructed world that Maya has built to keep her daughter safe may not survive it. Urgent, haunting and thrillingly alive, Life Cycle of a Moth explores both the tenderness and ferocity of maternal love, asking what we might find ourselves capable of – and willing to sacrifice – in order to shelter those we hold dear.
Caught by the River was founded in May 2007 as an online space to write and read about offline pursuits. It publishes stories about arts, nature & culture at caughtbytheriver.net, as well as nurturing various offshoots — including gigs, festival stages, print media and the Rivertones record label.
Real Magic Book Groups presents Jen Calleja, Katharina Volckmer, and Marnie Appleton
14:00 at Real Magic Books
Join us for an afternoon with three of our most exciting young female writers for discussions that will cut across fiction, short stories and innovative, creative non fiction. We’ll be joined by Jen Calleja, Marni Appleton and Katharina Volckmer and discussing human connection, dead end jobs, fleeting encounters, empty couplings, break ups, bust ups and of course goblins.
Via the everyday experiences of friendship, family, dating and desire in Marni Appleton’s short stories (I Hope You’re Happy), Jimmie’s sly, sharp, melancholy insights into the indignities of a world in Katharina Volckmer’s Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes and Jen Calleja’s theory of Goblin Hood explored through pop culture from film, literature and art.
This is a unique chance to listen to three brilliant writers discuss their vital new work, ask questions and pick up all three books signed. This will be three talks, each writer will be separately in conversation with Sophie and Carl throughout the afternoon.
Live: Chetwood-Fisher-Burns
17:30 at the King and Queen
FREE
Singer-songwriter Hero Fisher, guitar virtuoso Adam Chetwood and poet-musician Will Burns take the stage together for a loving homage to the Emmylou Harris songbook. Featuring the country legend’s best known originals, the cover versions she effortlessly made her own, and of course a section of specially selected Gram Parsons numbers, expect a suite of timeless Americana propelled by Fisher’s incredible vocals and Chetwood’s peerless guitar work.
Live: Gwenno + support from Avice Caro – very special solo piano performance, our debut at the church
18:30 at St Mary’s Church
43 years into her life, Gwenno Saunders has been many people. The disaffected Cardiff schoolgirl; the teenage Las Vegas dancer; the singer in indie pop group The Pipettes. There was a turn in a Bollywood film, a nightclub tour, a stint cleaning floors in an East London pub. Long before she would become an acclaimed solo songwriter in both Welsh and Cornish, a winner of the Welsh Music Prize, a nominee for the Mercury, a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedh, there were the days of Nevada, London, Brighton; of Irish dancing, techno clubs, messiness and chaos.
Utopia, Saunders’ fourth solo album, is an extraordinary exploration of all of these selves. If the singer regards her first three solo records — 2014’s Y Dydd Olaf, 2018’s Le Kov and 2022’s Tresor as “childhood records”, rooted in her upbringing, her parents, her formative identity, then Utopia captures a time of self-determination and experimentation. These are songs of discovery, of the years between being someone’s daughter and becoming someone’s wife and someone’s mother. They range from floor-fillers to piano ballads, via contributions from Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline, and encompass William Blake, a favourite Edrica Huws poem, and the Number 73 bus. It is her finest work to date.
There is a sense of revelation to Utopia, a feeling markedly different to that of previous records. Having released three albums in Welsh and Cornish, Utopia is Gwenno’s first album recorded predominantly in English, and presents a very different side to her life and songwriting.
“I feel as if I’ve written a debut record, because it’s a different language and it’s a different part of my life,” she says. “It’s about that point where I go out into the world on my own, which people generally write about first, and then get on with their lives. But it’s taken me so long to digest it — I needed 20 years just to make sense of things, and I realised the starting point of my creative life isn’t Wales, it’s actually North America.”
Saunders was a teenager when she left school to take the lead role in Michael Flatley’s ‘Lord of the Dance’ show in Las Vegas. For two years, she lived in an apartment complex with her fellow performers. They were seven miles from the strip, 40 teenagers with nothing much to do. There was a pool and a gym; drink, drugs, eating disorders. “Then every Saturday we’d go to this techno club called Utopia and just get completely spangled until Monday, when we had to go back to work,” she says.
She named the record Utopia in part to honour the wonder of those nights and that time, but also to nod to the fact that each of the album’s 10 songs belongs to its own place and time. “In the original Greek, ‘utopia’ doesn’t mean the ideal place, it means ‘non-place’,” she says. “And that’s the point of the record as well.”
When she returned from Vegas to the UK, via a stretch in Europe, Saunders moved to London. “I didn’t know anyone or anything, I would just hassle people and answer adverts in The Stage magazine, and go to really silly auditions,” she says. “I was looking for people to hang out with and make tunes.”
She thinks now of that time — of Irish dancing in a Bollywood movie, and attempting to make club hits melding techno and Celtic music, as a distinct part of the early Noughties’ aesthetic. It was the days of musical mash-ups and the clumsiness of the early digital age. It was butterfly tops worn with sparkly low-slung jeans. “It was really disparate things being stuck together in the tackiest way possible,” she says.
This was a period of long nights out in the subterranean bars of Dalston, cigarettes and bottles of Efes, dancing, DIY gigs, the sense of the city sprawled out before you. In the thick of this time, Saunders joined the Brighton-based band The Pipettes, recording two acclaimed albums and acquiring a reputation for their spirited live sets, complete with coordinated costumes and all-male backing band.
After The Pipettes fell apart Saunders took a job behind the bar at the Haggerston in Hackney and wondered what to do next. “There was so much nihilism around, suddenly, and it felt like no one really gave a shit about anyone,” she says. She decided to head back to Cardiff. “By 2011 I was quite traumatised from that whole experience,” she says. “I think so much about going back to Wales was finding the root of something again, and not retreating as much as healing, and reviving, and digging the earth, and turning it over. I just creatively needed to go back to the start.”
These are curious times to capture in song, but Saunders writes about them with a kind of fascination and tenderness. On ‘London, 1757’, tracing the migratory channel between Wales and the English capital; on ‘73’, the surprise of learning of her family’s roots in Dalston; on ‘St Ives New School’ — the first track written for this record, an exploration of creativity and motherhood. And on the unbridled ‘Dancing on Volcanoes’ she conjures the wonder of nights out and the relationships we forge along the way.
Utopia began quite differently to its predecessors. First came the realisation that in order to capture this specific time in her life she would need to use English. “I think the way I’ve managed to write in English is by acknowledging that I can’t translate a lot of memories,” she says. “I’ve found that idea really important to explore. I think if I’d just stayed in Wales, and I hadn’t lived anywhere else or experienced any other culture then it would be really different. I would’ve made records in Welsh, but I left home at 16.”
Up until this point, Saunders’ songs had also always started electronically. On Utopia, she began each song on piano — the one exception is album closer, ‘Hireth’, written on harp. In part, she saw her return to piano — an instrument she has played since childhood, as a reflection of her shifting relationship with sound. But it was also a way to develop her songwriting, to explore the idea that songs that “perhaps can’t be made by a machine, that can only be made by human experience, have a far more potent value.” She took a similar approach to recording — the album set down in her living room, live, with her band, and produced once again by her long term collaborator, Rhys Edwards.
To look back over this period of her life has been a strange sensation for Saunders. “I feel compelled as a songwriter to keep digging it all up,” she says. “Everything’s a diary entry for me. And in writing about all of this I’ve remembered the chaos of myself.”
It is an album that spans 25 years. “All of adulthood,” she points out. “You get to this point and you go ‘God, that quarter of a century went fast.’ But I want to acknowledge it, and respect it and say, for better or worse, all of that happened.”
Disco in the Pub
20:00 at the King and Queen
FREE
Our traditional pub disco is back at the King and Queen! Hosted by Sophie and Carl expect dance floor classics and lots of curveballs – rock n roll, reggae, soul, disco, house and garage. Last time out was brilliant.
SUNDAY
Family Art and Craft Workshop with Jaany Ravenscroft-Hull + Shanie Noakes
10:30 at Real Magic Books
Be inspired by Spanish artist Joan Miro and create a freestanding mini sculpture using foam clay. Weird shapes necessary! One sculpture per family. Led by Jaany Ravenscroft-Hull (Wendover Art Hub) & Shanie Noakes (Wildwood Wonders)
A Real Magic Walk
11:00 at Real Magic
FREE
Meeting at the shop for a communal walk up the hill, blow out the disco cobwebs ready for a pint at the pub after. This is how we do it.
Real Magic Records with Sean Rowley
13:00 at the King and Queen
FREE
Sean Rowley packs his own bag of records and heads to the King and Queen for an afternoon of vinyl delights. All the best stuff from his now legendary pop up record shop but this time he’s playing them all for you! They’ll be a few guests along too no doubt too.
Stone Club with Sacha Coward, Justin Hopper and Lally Macbeth
14:00 at Real Magic Books
Founded by artists Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw, Stone Club was set up as a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate, to muse and most importantly to stomp to stones.
Stone Club believes the journey is as important as the destination and encourages people to pause and think about place in new ways; connecting ancient sites through community and conversation. Stone Club aims to bring new perspectives to prehistory in a collaborative and inclusive way.
Sacha Coward is a researcher, historian and public speaker. He has worked in museums and heritage for fifteen years, running tours focused on LGBTQ+ history for museums, cemeteries, archives and cities all around the world. Sacha has featured on a variety of television, radio and podcast shows and written articles on topics as varied as Turing’s Law, the rainbow flag,
Caravaggio’s paintings and Viking burials. Queer as Folklore is Sacha’s first book.
Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new. Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.
Justin Hopper presents The Great Satanic Swindle: A bizarre true tale of tabloid England. Once, a mysterious stranger arrived in a small Sussex village and told a tale of witchcraft, trapped souls and a life-or-death struggle with Satan himself. A group of church-goers, millionaires and aristocrats stepped in to save him, and things got very weird.
A raunchy, true-crime folk-horror comedy of 1980s England, The Great Satanic Swindle is a story about two friends who challenged what it means to believe in something – and someone – no matter how irrational.
Lally Macbeth will be talking about her new book The Lost Folk! A fresh and engaging celebration of the customs, places, objects and peoples that make up what we know as ‘folk’ in Britain.
By its nature, folk is ephemeral: tricky to define, hard to preserve and even more difficult to resurrect. But folk culture is all around us; sitting in our churches, swinging from our pubs and dancing through our streets, patiently waiting to be discovered, appreciated, saved and cherished. In The Lost Folk, Lally MacBeth is on a mission to breathe new life into these rapidly disappearing customs. She reminds us that folk is for everyone, and does not belong to an imagined, halcyon past, but is constantly being drawn from everyday lives and communities. As well as looking at what folk customs have meant in Britain’s past, she shines a light on what they can and should mean as we move into the future – encouraging us to use the book as an inspiration, and become collectors and creators of our very own folk traditions.
Dean Chalkley (Back in Ibiza 1998–2003) in conversation
17:00 at Real Magic Books
We welcome Dean Chalkley to talk about and show pictures from his amazing photobook Back in Ibiza 1998–2003 upstairs for our final talk of the weekend.
Renowned photographer Dean Chalkley has created exciting imagery at the intersection of music, fashion and culture for the past three decades. His affinity and understanding of his subjects and how they sit within the cultural tapestry informs his output. The results are highly stimulating images packed with authenticity and integrity. Fueled by his devotion to music and its potential for self-expression, his work manifests itself in many ways and celebrates a broad range of subjects, including participants in sub-cultures,‘underground’pioneers to popstars and people in the public eye. Through seminal projects, Dean has explored topics including contemporary Mod and Northern Soul scenes as well as 21st-century Rudeboys.
At the tail end of the ’90s, he found himself in Ibiza, the capital of the clubbing world. For many, the turn of the millennium represents the peak of club life, when clubbers would lose themselves for days in the often-surreal abandon of their favorite Spanish party haven. Working for Mixmag, the biggest dance-music magazine in the world, Chalkley amassed a vast archive of images from this unrivaled golden era in the island’s near-history
Back in Ibiza 1998–2003 offers a thrilling deep-dive through those images, illustrating the unfiltered and sometimes unhinged club scene from a world before Snapchat and TikTok reels. This unique collection is essential viewing for partygoers and clubbing fans, a joy to behold, and a nostalgic reminder of what a real party can look like.
Real Magic Closing Party: Lias Saoudi (Fat White Family) and more!
18:00 at Real Magic Books
Our final event of the weekend features another very special guest, Lias Saoudi. Lead singer, founding father and only remaining constant of the legendary Fat White Family. Lias has survived all four albums and has also embarked on amazing musical projects with The Moonlandingz and more recently with electronic titans Decius. He also found the time to write the Sunday Times bestseller, Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure. It is a true honour and delight to have him play a very special solo set here in the shop to close out our third Real Magic Weekend. If you don’t come and drink the bar dry we won’t do it again! Xx
