Mark Fry performs Dreaming with Alice

This event will take place in EartH Theatre.

**Mark Fry and guests perform his 1972 cult album Dreaming with Alice, live in full for the first time ever.**

Now-Again Reserve: “9/10: A masterpiece of psychedelic whimsy… Lovingly packaged with extra material from highly listenable mid-70s sessions.” — Uncut, August 2021

“The lithe, spindrift guitar work of Dreaming With Alice achieves a sense of quintessence.” — The Wire, July 2007

After leaving school in 1970 I set off for Italy to study painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Italy in the 1970s was a turbulent place. I was lucky to find the art school open more than two or three days a week. Either it was on strike or closed for the celebration of a saint’s day. It was very chaotic. I began to feel restless and as though I was missing out on Italy. I left the Accademia after one year.

Laura Papi, a family friend, encouraged me to do more with the songs I had been writing in Florence and to think about putting together an album. One day she gave me a present of a little Grundig tape recorder. I couldn’t double-track, but it inspired me to keep writing songs.

In the autumn of 1971 we went down to Rome where Laura, together with her friend the actor Franco Leo, had managed to arrange an audition for me at RCA. I remember sitting on the edge of a big office chair in front of some very austere-looking men in suits, playing my songs.

When I had finished they asked me to go outside and wait. I thought, “Oh well, that’s that.” A few minutes later, the door opened and I was presented with a ten-year contract with IT Dischi, a subsidiary of RCA. It felt like a life sentence, but I signed on the dotted line.

IT Dischi put me into some small studios in Rome to start laying down the songs. Every week for a month I set off from Florence on my 250cc Ducati motorbike. I had a kind of Easy Rider chromed hoop welded on to the back in order to strap my guitar on for the journey. But when I arrived at the studios after many hours on the autostrada, the guitar was almost impossible to tune and my hands were terribly cramped.

The sound engineer was an angling enthusiast and he seemed more interested in fly-fishing than in recording. I remember watching him through the control room window. When the red light came on and I started to play, he would put his legs up on the mixing desk and disappear behind a fishing manual. I became despondent; it wasn’t working.

But IT Dischi came to my rescue and introduced me to some Scottish musicians who, like me, had signed a chunk of their lives away. They had made a little home studio in their basement flat in Rome, and it was there, with their help, that Dreaming With Alice eventually came to life on two 4-track Revox tape recorders over the space of a couple of weeks.