The Mascara Bar -
previous events
Sunday 16th June 2019 - 5pm - 7.45pm
"Remember - Remember Molly Bloom"
Jacket Spuds are a group of musicians whose sound is rooted in the richness of the Irish folk tradition. Their musical range and emotional commitment, and their remarkable combination of traditional form and contemporary content has evoked enthusiastic responses from audiences around the world.
“………....toe-tapping traditional, and evocative contemporary songs and tunes…….”
Time Out Magazine
Pete Mona (guitar/vocals), Mick Barker (fiddle/vocals), Eileen Barker (accordion/vocals), have toured extensively throughout Britain and Europe, from the intimacy of small clubs to the large stages of Festivals and Theatres. London gigs to date include the Mean Fiddler, Dominion Theatre, Hackney Empire, National Theatre, Folk Clubs, Colleges and Arts Centres.
Upcoming Gigs:
Sunday 23rd June 2019 - 5pm - 7.45pm
FREE ENTRY
Sunday 16th June 2018 - from 4pm
A call to all Joyceans, drinkers of words and the absurd…
Join us at the Mascara Bar from 4pm for stories, poems, songs and real Dublin coddle….
Celebrate the gaiety of nations and the rebel spirit of literature…
Expect Spoken Word - Irish Music - Irish Food - Great Guinness - Good Company - Good Craic
5pm - Finnegan's Wake A Short Play by Irish Elders Theatre
Fran Isherwood reading James Joyce
Free Dublin Coddle
What they said about Ulysses:
"The most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."
"A heap of dung, crawling with worms"
"A memorable catastrophe”
All timings approximate and subject to change!
Bios to follow...
FREE ENTRY
Saturday 15th June 2019 - 9pm - 2am
(Ain’t) Misbehavin’ has been running for over 8 years and is a firm favourite at Mascara Bar! Come join us as we move to Saturdays!
Expect a night of footloose dancing to mischievous music with a sense of humour: swing that really swings, innuendo-riddled jump blues, steamin’ hot jazz, and a load of vintage songs about misdemeanours, unlawful behaviour, and flagrant imbibement in drink, drugs and illicit activity.
£5 Entry to the Dancefloor
Free Entry to the Bar
Friday 14th June 2018 - 9pm - 3am
THREE WISE MONKEYS PLAYS 50s-70s FINEST VINTAGE MUZIK LIKE,,,
RnB,NORTHERN SOUL, FUNK, LATIN,CALYPSO,SKA,ROCKSTEADY, AND REGGAE.
*SAVE THE DATE* 14 JUNE 9AM - 3AM
SELECTORS
TOMOKO KAMIKAZE
KIMI-HIRO OUE
MAZ JUNEALL
RESPECTFULLY 100% VINYL BUSINESS
FREE ENTRY
Wednesday 12th June 2019 - From 11pm
Dave's Meat and Eat - From 11pm
FREE ENTRY
Tuesday 11th June 2019 - 8pm - 11pm
Mascara Jazz jam, every Tuesday from 8 pm to 11 pm.
Each week consists of rotating guest musicians backed by host and resident drummer, Livio Polisano. Come and join us to check out and play with some of the best jazz players in the London scene.
This venue is a great place to hang and to meet new and old friends! It has a full bar with very reasonable prices.
Hope to see (and hear) you every Tuesday!
FREE ENTRY
Sunday 9th June 2019 - From 3pm
Drag queen, Sweet Charity, aka Paul Nudd gets unexpectedly interviewed by an unknown lady called Melanie. While being interviewed Sweet Charity finds out about a connection he has with Melanie.
The play is set in Key West, Florida.
Writer: Jessica Irwin
Director: Angharad Ormonde
Sweet Charity (Paul Nudd): Damian Escayg
Melanie: Jessica Irwin
Sunday 9th June 2019 - From 3pm
Local theatre writing group Sparks perform a series of works in progress, exploring themes of community, loneliness and isolation. This event features the following short works:
Behind the Drag, by Jessica Irwin;
Fascination Street, by Emma Jarvis;
Do you like my Tight Sweater? By Emma Jarvis.
£3 Entry
Free entry to the bar as usual
Saturday 8th June 2019 - 11pm - 3am
Steppin' Out busts open June! Continuing our run of top notch guests with the splendid pairing of Jules Pallett + Colin Innocenti, great mates renowned on the soul scene as selecters & collectors of rare distinction. We're really excited to get Jules & Colin together as a double act. Gonna be big fun! Dancing to a fab DJ from 11 - 3
Come early & stay late at the coolest little gin joint in Hackney. Free admission, regular bar prices, irregular clientele, quality sound, wooden dance floor, late late licence. Ain't no better place to show your pretty face!
Running time 11pm-3am (last admission 1.55am).
Travel:
More night buses than you can shake a stick at!
Rail: Stoke Newington
Bus: 67/73/N73/76/N76/106/149/243/276/393/476
FREE ENTRY
Saturday 8th June 2019 - 7pm - 11.30pm
It's The Stoke Newington Literary Festival and we have a wonderful line up for you.
Nicholas Lezard has been writing the “Down and Out” column for the New Statesman for over ten years now. A selection of his columns, Bitter Experience Has Taught Me, was described in the Spectator as “the bastard offspring of a previously unsuspected union between P.G. Wodehouse and Samuel Beckett”, which he’ll settle for. He will be reading from his forthcoming selection, It Gets Worse, to be published later this year by Salt Editions, and answering audience questions, like “why aren’t you in prison?” and “do you really drink that much?”
Jiz is a duo formed by Isabelle Saphiron and John Gosling of Psychic TV, Zos Kia, Mekon and Agent Provocateur. Their work is a cry of ancient dissatisfaction at the liberty no being ever had the courage to indulge in. Reshaping human life's sardonic drama into an out of focus paradox they mutilate the intrigue, the muse becoming the creator and the creator becoming the artwork.
Through whatever medium comes in hand they try to seduce the mundane and reconstruct it into something fascinating
Lynn Ruth Miller: I NEVER SAID I WAS NICE. The oldest female stand up in the business (RIP Joan Rivers), Lynn Ruth Miller is 85 years old. She has been there, done it all and can still make you laugh about it. Nothing scares her anymore. Not even you.
Oh Standfast: A genuinely surreal routine, packed with odd ideas.
Mark Gilfillan aka The Stokey Bard, is a performance and otherwise poet. Originally from Sheffield, Mark has lived in London for nearly thirty years. He performs mostly in the London area but has appeared at The Edinburgh Free Fringe and in Las Vegas. Mark enjoys writing haiku and romantic poetry, and has had work published in various anthologies. He is the author of Ballistic Kisses and, most recently, Ghost Moon (Alba Publishing, 2017). See www.stokeybard.blogspot.co.uk
Andrew James Brown: A poet, public intellectual and national treasure in waiting.
Fran Isherwood: Poet with a comedic bent (The Doctor says it's a bit like Housemaid's Knee).
Music from Django Hammond
In between sets, pianist John Cooper will regale us with London drinking songs. Feel free to sing along..
Then dancing to a fab DJ from 11pm till 3am.
FREE ENTRY
Friday 7th June 2019 - 9pm - 11pm
IT IS THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN.
Our time at Mascara Bar last year at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival is burned into our memories as a time of ecstatic joy. Come and join New River Press and Jan Noble again this year to stamp around Stamford Hill's late night utopia. Stretch out the bright summer night with poems and dancing. Sit at tables with small cheap beers chatting. Fill the city with wild warmth.
Suggested donation: £10 (pay only what you can afford).
7PM: DOORS
8PM: JAN NOBLE PERFORMS POETIC MONOLOGUE 'BODY 115'
"A Dantesque investigation into the identification of the unnamed victim of the Kings Cross fire and the third in a trilogy of journey works (after My Name Is Swan and Reynard) launched at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival."
INTERVAL
9PM: NEW RIVER PRESS PRESENTS A GALA OF DESPERATE HOPE. SHARP MAGNIFICENT INTERVENTIONS FROM:
Jeremy Reed
Kirsten Norrie
Greta Bellamacina
Robert Montgomery
Ana Seferovic
Niall McDevitt
Zia Ahmed
Golnoosh Nour
Kostya Tsolákis
Sophie Naufal
Jamie Lee
Magdalene Forès
11PM-3AM: DJs AND WHIRLING
---- poet biographies ----
Jeremy Reed: "the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world." (BJORK)
Jeremy Reed is one of Britain’s most prolific and transgressive poets. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes like the Somerset Maugham Award, and was on his coming to live in London in the 1980s patronised by the artist Francis Bacon. Some of his most esteemed fans are J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty, and Bjork, who has called his work ‘the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.’ Jeremy writes about every subject that British poetry considers taboo, glamour, pop, rock, sci-fi, cyber, mutant, gay, drugs, neuroscientific, the disaffected and outlawed, and the fizzy big city chemistry of the London in which he lives and creates.
Kirsten Norrie: "Occulted, fire-warped, close-stitched in freshly butchered skin, MacGillivray's keening rant is prophecy, hot and plain. " (IAIN SINCLAIR)
Kirsten Norrie writes poetry under her matrilineal name, MacGillivray. She is the author of three poetry collections; The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless, 2016 and The Gaelic Garden of the Dead published by Bloodaxe in 2019 and The Last Wolf of Scotland published by Red Hen in the US, 2013. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction and The Verb and her first non-fiction book Scottish Lost Boys, Seven Renegade Essays is published by Strange Attractor/ MIT in Summer, 2019.
Greta Bellamacina: Poetry is a sacred space — you can be a child again.
Greta Bellamacina is a poet, filmmaker, and actress who co-founded New River Press. Andy Warhol's Interview magazine says Greta, “is garnering critical acclaim for her way with words and her ability to translate the classic poetic form into the contemporary creative landscape.” She edited the collection Smear: Poems For Girls. Her Selected Poems 2015-17 has been published in English by New River Press and in Spanish by Valparaíso Ediciones.
Robert Montgomery: The city is wilder and kinder than you think.
Robert Montgomery is a Scottish visual artist and poet who co-founded New River Press. He creates billboard poems, light pieces, fire poems, woodcuts and watercolors. Dane Weatherman in Black & Blue Journal wrote that “to encounter his work is to have your body filled with a sad thunder and your head filled with a sad light. He is a complete artist and works in language, light, paper, space. He engages completely with the urban world with a translucent poetry.”
Ana Seferovic: Fascinated by the outcast in each and every one of us
Ana Seferovic is a Belgrade born poet and writer. She is interested in the relationship between a system and an individual, especially fascinated by outcasts, but also an outcast in each and every of us, because an outcast is where either system or an individual (or both) are breaking. She was a co-author of radio show and art platform PornoPop, examining sex and body as a battlefield of politics, art, literature and culture in general. She has published 4 poetry collections, she is a co-author of 2 plays and 2 poetry books.
Niall McDevitt: "A luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries." (JEREMY REED)
Niall McDevitt is an Irish poet resident in London, author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He leads psychogeographic ‘wandering lectures’ around London for New River Press exploring the paths of Shakespeare, Blake, Rimbaud, and Yeats. Heathcote Williams described his work as "savagely witty". Babylon (a neoliberal theodicy), which adapts Akkadian-Sumerian texts to critique western globalism, is forthcoming with New River Press.
Zia Ahmed: Musical melancholy from former London Poet Laureate
Zia Ahmed is from North-West London. He is part of the London Laureates, having been shortlisted for London’s Young Poet Laureate 2015/16. He is a former Roundhouse Slam Champion and Writer in Residence at Paines Plough as part of Channel 4’s Playwright Scheme. He is currently part of the Bush Theatre's Emerging Writers Group
Golnoosh Nour: exploring queerness through a postcolonial lens
Golnoosh Nour is a Tehran-born poet and academic born in 1988. Her 2017 debut poetry collection Sorrows of the Sun was published under the pseudonym, Sogol Sur by Skyscraper. She’s performed work at numerous literary events across the UK, including The Shuffle at the Poetry Café, Queer Art for Queer Refugees at SOAS, Birkbeck Poetry Live for Arts Week, Poets Against Oppression, and Tate South Lambeth Library for LGBTQ History Month. Golnoosh has recently completed a practice-based PhD in Literature and Creative Writing, exploring queerness through a postcolonial lens. She teaches both prose and poetry at Birkbeck and The University of East London.
Kostya Tsolákis: the joys and anxieties of Cavafy fantasies
Kostya Tsolákis is a London-based Greek poet, translator and journalist. His poems have appeared in Magma, perverse, Strix, Brittle Star, The Fenland Reed and The New River Press 2019 Anthology. In 2018, his translations of the Greek gay poet Andreas Aggelákis were included in the LGBTQ+ issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘The House of Thirst’. He founded and co-edits harana poetry, an online magazine for poets writing in English as a second or parallel language. He lives locally, on Petherton Road, which marks part of the course of the New River.
Sophie Naufal: dead living never dies
Sophie Naufal is a London based British-Lebanese composer and performer. As a singer-songwriter and guitarist she writes wry, dark, and sharply observed narratives of modern life. She has performed around the U.K. as well as in Portugal, Lebanon, Australia, America and Thailand, where she spent time as the resident musician in a jazz bar. As a composer and producer she has written for theatre, film, and performance pieces.
Jamie Lee: in a McSweeney trance and learning to love
Jamie Lee is a poet based in south London. He is one half of independent publisher Pariah Press which is based between Manchester and London. Poets of interest include Antonin Artaud, Barry McSweeney, Adrienne Rich, Ian Hamilton, John Berryman, Elaine Feinstein and would also recommend Lanark by Alaisdair Gray.
Magdalene Forès: the intricacies of the awkwardness of intimacy
Magdalene Forés is a painter, writer, and singer. Her work explores awkwardness of intimacy and the intricacies of that experience. Her work appears in the 2019 New River Press Yearbook: When They Start To Love You As A Machine You Should Run.
Suggested donation: £10 (pay only what you can afford).
Free Entry to the bar as usual
Friday 7th June 2019 - 8pm
World Class Poetry at the Mascara Bar
Unearthing the story of ‘Body 115’, poet Jan Noble presents a first draft reading of a new monologue commissioned by Professor Maggie Rose of Università degli Studi di Milano. A Dantesque investigation into the identification of the unnamed victim of the Kings Cross fire and the third in a trilogy of journey works launched at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.
Followed by:
New River Press Presents…
From 9pm
Suggested donation: £10 (pay only what you can afford).
Free Entry to the bar as usual
Thursday 6th June 2019 - 8pm - 10pm
London's newest, zaniest comedy night!
A plethora of funny folks, accompanied by a buffet, washed down by bargain beverages that you'll probably laugh out your nose.
With games, prizes, and other types of fun, it's the great time you're looking for and you'll want to be there!
FREE ENTRY
Wednesday 5th June 2019 - From 11pm
Dave's Meat and Eat - From 11pm
FREE ENTRY
Tuesday 4th June 2019 - 8pm - 11pm
Mascara Jazz jam, every Tuesday from 8 pm to 11 pm.
Each week consists of rotating guest musicians backed by host and resident drummer, Livio Polisano. Come and join us to check out and play with some of the best jazz players in the London scene.
This venue is a great place to hang and to meet new and old friends! It has a full bar with very reasonable prices.
Hope to see (and hear) you every Tuesday!
FREE ENTRY
Saturday 1st June 2019 - From 8pm
Champion League Cup Final 2019
Spurs v Liverpool
8pm Kick Off
£3 a pint when game is on
Big Screen
FREE ENTRY
Friday 31st May 2019 - 9pm - 3am
FREE JUKEBOX NIGHT.
All Night Till 3am
FREE ENTRY
Thursday 30th May 2019 - 7pm - 11pm
Poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" according to Percy Byshee Shelley. But it's not just as legislators, so much as in general that they're unacknowledged.
Come along to the fantastic Mascara Bar to help redress that at An Obscurity of Poets, the night that puts poetry and poetics first. Hosted by poet, storyteller and self-proclaimed public intellectual, Andrew James Brown.
Come along and enjoy the wit and wisdom of our fabulous feature acts, or share some words of your own on the open mic, with sign up from 19:00.
Features:
Cheryl McLennan:
Cheryl McLennan is a writer and an amusing muddle of musings. Her subject matterranges from annoying tea drinkers to her mother's muff and beyond. All this whist sucking on a sticky lemon sherbert. Be warned.
Adelaide Banks:
Fantastic poetry from the wonderful Adelaide Banks.
There'll also be a fantastic quiz with even more fantastic prizes to be won!
And best of all, it's all free and in a fabulous location.
FREE ENTRY
Wednesday 29th May 2019 - From 8pm
Europa Cup League Final 2019
Arsenal v Chelsea
8pm Kick Off
£3 a pint while game is on
Big Screen
FREE ENTRY
Tuesday 28th May 2019 - 8pm - 11pm
Mascara Jazz jam, every Tuesday from 8 pm to 11 pm.
Each week consists of rotating guest musicians backed by host and resident drummer, Livio Polisano. Come and join us to check out and play with some of the best jazz players in the London scene.
This venue is a great place to hang and to meet new and old friends! It has a full bar with very reasonable prices.
Hope to see (and hear) you every Tuesday!
FREE ENTRY