Nightingale Alley is a musical performance based largely on the lyrics of anonymous 19th century underground poets and minstrels - not the poetry of the refined and delicate, but the slashing and humorous words from the streets and alleys, distant echoes found in subversive broadsheets and pamphlets hawked in every London market place.

These lyrics are over 200 hundred years old, at the dawn of capitalism, yet they speak with a curiously modern voice and from a disarmingly compassionate female perspective. They stare deep into the erotic. They evoke the pleasures and delight of human sexual appetite, but also its perils. The songs gaze - eyes wide open - on the clash of social values, of heartache and despair, and the darker, more disquieting aspects of an emerging and rather brutal sexual economy