It sounds like a show for arty buffs only--but you might just kick yourself if you miss it. John Parish (guitarist with in-yer-face blues feminist PJ Harvey) is staging the only live UK performance of the soundtrack to Rosie.

The film is Belgian but could well scoop the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and the band reads like a who's who of west country musos.

Alison Goldfrapp (Tricky), Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Rob Ellis, Eric Drew Feldman and Jeremy Hogg (PJ Harvey) will assist Parish in the daunting task of reproducing a movie soundtrack to a live audience.

Natural fears and technical doubts have plagued Parish for the past few weeks, but he's confident the live project will work.

The whole thing started when he was approached by director Patrice Toye.

"She asked me to write the score", he says simply. She liked the music I had written for Dance Hall At Louse Point (a collaboration with Polly Harvey).

I had actually written some music that I thought would be really good for a film. It seemed to fit. She really liked what I had done, and the rest of the score I wrote for the picture."

Parish had had bits and pieces used in movies and for TV, and thought Rosie would be a bigger and nicer addition to his collection.

"After I had done the score I didn't have any plans to play it live but the film is doing pretty well out in Belgium and Holland, it will be Belgium's entry for the Oscars.

When I was touring with PJ Harvey in the second half of '98 at one of the festivals in Belgium, I met a guy who promotes an event called Denachten in Amsterdam and Antwerp--it's for music, spoken aword and film and video. He talked me into performing the score live and having the film projected at the same time."

Technical worries, like trying to keep in time with the film and quietening down for the dialogue, held him back. But he says: "I thought the best way round it would be to play the music live and just project images from the film in the background. I got some friends of mine to rework the images and make a specific short film for each piece of music."

Tonight's show at the Wedgewood Rooms is the only one in the UK and likely to remain so, although Parish says: "I never like to say that was definitely the end, but there are no definite plans to put it on."

He says he will be working on some more new ideas after the show and before he returns to work with Polly Harvey later in the year. Expect more unusual sounds because he's got a taste for it now.

"I like writing non-song based things", he says." Before the film I wrote several pieces for dance and theatre productions. They could be instrumental pieces of indetermined length rather than pop song format. I found it incredibly liberating and thoroughly enjoyed not having to write in that bracketed way I had become accustomed to. I am not saying the three-minute pop song is dead, but there are other things. I feel like writing something quite rocky and hard having written something as atmospheric and melodic (well, I say melodic) as the soundtrack."