Dave Haslam book tour

To mark the publication of his latest short format book, Adventure Everywhere: Pablo Picasso’s Paris Nightlife, former Haçienda DJ Dave Haslam is going on tour.

Starting in Nottingham, spinning down to London and up to Glasgow, and culminating in Birmingham (his home turf), in between in our manor, you can catch Dave in close succession in Manchester, Blackpool and Liverpool. Out with Manchester’s Confingo Publishing, Adventure Everywhere is the seventh book in the acclaimed Art Decades series, which has seen Dave Haslam write about subjects including poet Sylvia Plath’s spell in Paris and the influence of clubbing on visual artist Keith Haring, musician Courtney Love’s lost summer in Liverpool and his own record collection. His 2018 memoir Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor was proclaimed Book of the Year by Gilles Peterson and his DJ-ing has taken him to the likes of Berlin, Lima, New York and Paris – and the influence of the night-time culture that formed him is never far from his mind.

Dave Haslam will read extracts from the new book before discussing its themes with a different guest interviewer in each venue.

On the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, Adventure Everywhere: Pablo Picasso’s Paris Nightlife details the artist’s move from his home country of Spain to 1900s Paris – a vibrant city alive with hedonism and creativity. Haslam says: ‘In the early pages you get a sense of the adventures to be had in Montmartre and Pigalle by a young man like Picasso in amongst gypsy troupes singing of wild nights and lost love, vagabonds, anarchists, absinthe, opium dens, dives alive with ideas. But as the book develops, the idea of “adventure” becomes much more to do with attitude, a radical mindset.’

Dave Haslam will read extracts from the new book before discussing its themes with a different guest interviewer in each venue: for Blackpool, it’s Beth Barker, host of the Up North Books podcast and judge of the 2022 Portico Prize, which honours the strong literary heritage of the North of England. She is also a contributor to online arts and culture magazine Blackpool Social Club (BSC), presenting tonight’s Art After Dark event. The pair will discuss the link between art and life after dark, the cultural value of late night venues, big nights out and Blackpool’s significance in British nightlife – a town also associated with hedonism and, increasingly, creativity.

Haslam will take questions from the audience and will sign books before (we’re told) ‘heading out into the Blackpool night to find his next adventure’. His next adventure, as it happens, is a trip to Liverpool’s Leaf on 2 May, when he’ll be talking to the author Jeff Young, whose book Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Prize. His next book Wild Twin explores hitch-hiking to Paris in the 1970s, so he should have plenty to bring to the conversation.

Dave Haslam will also be reading from Adventure Everywhere: Pablo Picasso’s Paris Nightlife at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester on 27 April, chatting with Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, whose works have included the film Everybody In The Place, situating rave and acid house at the centre of social changes in 1980s Britain. At this event, poet Oliver James Lomax will be reading a Picasso-related poem from his new collection and – for one night only – the gallery will be unmothballing and displaying two rarely seen works by Pablo Picasso.