erin farley

👋 I've been lurking here for a while (when I'm not lurking around bridges), and it's probably time for a wee intro and a new picture, taken by the amazing Lydia Smith @misslydiaphoto So, hello - I'm Erin, I'm a traditional storyteller, local historian and writer in Dundee. I'm most at home in the messy places where folklore and oral history and literature and belief all start fighting for who gets the remote - local legends, urban myths, ghosts, saints, Jack tales and stories of "stupid men and the devil" are all favourites. I'm an organiser and regular at Blether Taygither in Dundee and Orkney Storytelling Festival, and have been forging new ground and connections recently with The Space Between, a quarterly night of storytelling and folklore with @sweetvenues in Dundee. I have a few exciting new projects and collaborations emerging throughout this year... more soon 👀 #dundee #orkney #storytelling #folklore #scottishhistory #askmeaboutgiantworms

🌊 Welcome to the world Lighthouse Lives, out today from John Donald @birlinnbooks !!! 🌊 This book has been a journey for me and part of my life for a long time, but that's nothing to the time and change represented in its pages. Between 2012 and 2015 I was a fieldworker for the @nlb_uk Heritage Trust’s oral history project, recording the last generation to work on manned lighthouses in Scotland. Former light keepers, engineers, ship’s crews, other NLB workers and their families shared their life stories and unique perspectives on technology, community and change on Scotland’s coast. It’s been a huge honour to hear and record these stories and to have had the chance to edit this book, which is LARGE but still only a very small portion of the interviews. Working with oral history is one of my enduring loves - the patterns our memories and the words we share them in become, and how these move from mind to voice to recording to page - and working on this book let me live in that world in such a detailed way. I really, truly hope that comes across. There are a LOT of thank yous due for this, first, foremost and always to every person who trusted me with their stories. The Northern Lighthouse Board Heritage Trust - especially Karen Charleson and Alistair Beveridge - have supported the oral history project and book the whole way through. Mark Mulhern of the EERC is an unbelievably wise and patient series editor, Martine Robertson is a total powerhouse of a fellow interviewer, film maker and doer, and Caroline Milligan has been an inspiration and guiding voice in all my oral history work since before I knew how to switch on a recorder. Link where links live... stay tuned for more lighthouse news soon ⚓️ #lighthouses #oralhistory #scottishlighthouses #lighthousekeeper

JENNY GEDDES Versus THE MAN #billdrummond #stephenclarke1980 #erinfarley #penkilnburn #podcast

Here are my upcoming gigs for spring 1995 🫠 Graphic design is (clearly) not my passion but getting in a room with folk and telling them stories to explore the weird corners of the world together is. I am doing this in many different ways and places soon so here is a rundown of the next few weeks’ adventures! Friday 17 - me and @stephenclarke1980 are back for some live rave storytelling/ whatever-it-is-we-do with the @manifesto_of_bliss DJs at Futtle in St Monans! This is gonny be a really fun night 🌊 Thursday 23 - Shoreline of Infinity rides to Dundee! A great line up of speculative sci fi, poetry and folklore in various forms, hosted by @mkhardywrites and feat. @middaydolomite , @rafotron and many more… 🪐 Saturday 25 - another live outing for me and @stephenclarke1980 - we will be through in the west for @particksailingclub 's maiden voyage in their home town!! This is a club night fundraiser for the Sameer Project so please come along for a dance and what is turning into further speculative folklore/early May Day themes from me… 🍌 Thursday 30 - It’s May Day eve and we are celebrating the work of Mary Brooksbank and more of Dundee’s working class women writers with the excellent @tayemilylisa , Siobhan Tolland and @lynnedotcampbell at the National Library of Scotland! ✊🌸 Friday 8 May - back in Fife with the legends Scott Gardiner and @fuzzyhaggis42 for tales, songs and tunes in Aberdour! 🎻 Linques are in the usual place for more information and bookings… see you at a venue near you soon! As long as you live on the mid-lower east coast of Scotland, or in Partick. #storytelling #fife #Dundee #edinburgh

STORYTELLING GIANTS #erinfarley #stephenclarke1980 #livemusic #stmonans #glasgow

Finally made it onto a tour of the Craigiebarns bunker this weekend and it has not helped my ongoing cold war era information technology / collective memory obsession one single bit - there is SO MUCH going on in here. Dundee was a regional HQ for the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation - the parallel phone networks and regional chains of communication mirroring familiar everyday ones, plans for reporting bombs and measuring and mapping fallout, all designed to still function if the only power or lighting left was candlelight. It is all absolutely fascinating - the plans for nuclear strike evoke a terrifying alternative history, but also, Craigiebarns (it wasn’t all underground! there was a big building on top of it!) was part of everyday life in Dundee for decades, there is a lot of real history here and it’s interesting how hidden it’s become since its closure in 1991. Massively impressed by @twentyeightgroup team’s knowledge and commitment to recreating the interior - including working technology! - pretty much from scratch 👏 #coldwar #dundee

throwing a party at the @the.poetry.club.glasgow for the release of the compilation. Pay what you can starting at £5. Proceeds going to the @thesameerproject . Link in bio for tickets. 1 / @pigeon_steve - Minimim (Maximum Mix) 2 / @tecwaa - Opal Forest 3 / @aliasmacalias aka Erin Farley and @stephenclarke1980 - False Tongue 4 / Astronomo - Beautiful Flowers Release out now - available at BandCamp. ✌️❤️🇵🇸

Can I say anything about today that means anything, in the context of what women are being subjected to in the name of war and empire in Palestine and Iran and Sudan and … of course not, yet here I am saying it on the internet anyway. IWD can become a bit of a mandatory festival of posting, sliding away from its collective revolutionary roots into girlbossery and individualism. But the roots are still important. I visited Caroline Martyn’s grave in Balgay Cemetery today. Caroline, from Lincoln, died aged only 29 in 1896, when she was in Dundee organising for the Independent Labour Party. Her memorial was funded by subscription by the Dundee Textile Workers’ Union and the ILP, and calls her ‘a devoted worker in the cause of humanity.’ Thanks to Mike Arnott, and others from the STUC, for restoring her memorial and her memory in recent years. How do we build a truly collective way of doing history - find a way of living in time that honours not only the ‘shining moments’ of the past where it felt like change was possible and reanimates them, but the quiet, tireless, boring and anonymous work that leads us to them and stitches them together? Unfinished thoughts, unfinished work. Always thankful to know so many doing this historical work so well in Dundee, Glasgow and beyond (forgive the lack of tagging spree today 💚) Today’s mental collage featuring: 1 - Caroline Martyn’s memorial, Balgay Cemetery 2 - Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century 3 - Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch 4- Mary Brooksbank, always and of course - To The Reactionaries #internationalwomensday

Erin Farley and Stephen Clarke 1980 are two humans with malfunctioning brains. One of their releases can be found in graveyards, periodically. The other is sold out. Stephen once read that Andy Warhol only ever wore green underwear. He wonders why he can remember this information, but not the name of the Derry girl he kissed on a wall in Bundoran in the late 90s. Erin decided she wanted to be a punk at the age of seven after seeing one in a museum. She has since failed to achieve this and most of the other things she has tried to do on purpose. For fun she likes to put dresses on fish. Their work fuses folklore and dance music, following connections into unexpected new places. It has been described as 'transcendent,' 'utterly transporting,' and 'insane.' Erin and Stephen feature on the label's debut release, 'The Beautiful Flowers Wait for Peace', out 6 March on BandCamp. Check out Stephen's set for this week's radio show - an eclectic mix of leftfield electronica and spoken word. You can catch them performing live at the @the.poetry.club.glasgow on 25 April. Link in bio for all of the release, tickets and the radio show. Proceeds from the release and night will be directed to @thesameerproject - a mutual aid organisation run by Palestinians in Gaza, supplying food, water, medical aid, and essential supplies to those in need.

🚨!! Venue change alert !!🚨 Oor Party, Your Party, Abody’s Party will now take place with @sweetvenues at the Liar Bar at DUSA on Airlie Place! Still Saturday, still 7.30pm doors, original tickets still valid 💫 Still the excellent @tamdeanburn hosting a brilliant line up of poets, dramatists and musicians, and we even have @jeremycorbyn coming along to give us some poyums!! We guarantee it will be the best agit-prop radical cabaret you’ve been to all year so far. 🌳 #dundee #poetry #theatre #jeremycorbyn #yourparty

Here, you, Wullie, stargazing opposite Keiller’s Turn your neck this way; Never mind your Jeemie in heaven, he is comfortable enough; It is we who are vexed, we who are troubled… On the occasion of the first YP conference in Dundee, we bring you… OOR PARTY - YOUR PARTY - ABODY’S PARTY! An agit-prop post-punk radical cabaret hosted by Tam Dean Burn Featuring special guest performances in drama, poetry, spoken word, music and visuals, bringing new forms to workers’ theatre and local radical histories. Sweet Venues @ Keiller Centre, 7.30pm, Saturday 7 February This will be an excellent night (and not all Wullie themed, promise) - GET TAE IT 🌳

A wee scrapbook of things from the corners of 2025, since I cannot resist a temporal threshold and this autumn marked my ten years of living in Dundee - though when I made the move, my auntie Moira said ‘I knew you were a Dundonian all along’ and she might have been onto something... 🌉 Everything I know how to do is the slow stuff. Telling a story or recording a memory or uncovering a historical resonance once is great but really you need to just keep doing it, and let go of the idea of seeing big results in your lifetime or with your name on them. But sometimes these do not feel like useful skills in our current multiple states of emergency. In some ways, it feels like things are shifting, things that have been slowly building over years are beginning to bubble up to the surface and emerge in new shapes. I know that the more life falls into place for me, this brings with it responsibility back to the world. This is mostly a source of joy in itself but christ this world is really, really broken as well as beautiful and I’ve spent a good bit of this year feeling like I don’t know what to do to help. Ending 2025 feeling just a liiiiittle bit more like the car in the 3rd pic than the giddy storm of ideas I came into it as, but more rooted and hopefully more determined for it too, and above all deeply, deeply grateful for the friends, community and comrades who have inspired, supported and taught me about life, the world and how to show up for it this year, this decade and this lifetime. And Scott even though he very sensibly likes to pretend not to exist when it comes to social media (so don’t tell him I said that). a very happy hogmanay to you all ✨❄️🌅🥃🐟💫 mon then 2026, we have plans x