"Live literature works best if you can combine it with other things," says Cathi Unsworth. "If you have three writers rea ding in a row,people tend to nod off."

Such was the thinking behind the Hammett Story Agency, a writer/musician duo who have been running regular nights at the Permanent Gallery since summer 2005.

Often combining guest writers witha musical performance, the Tight Lip events have featured such readers as The Sucide Kit author David L Hayles and former Bad Seed Barry Adamson performing a story set to one of his own soundtracks.

Now Hammett are seeking to explore the shared territory between live literature and film, and on Sunday the first in a planned series inspired by cult British flicks will see Unsworth introduce Beat Girl, a classic of teen exploitica.

Set among the jazz clubs and strip joints of Fifties London, it's the story of Jenny, a pouty art school student whose unhappiness with her father's remarriage to a young French woman leads her to fall in with a beatnik crowd.

Featuring Adam Faith as a guitar-playing delinquent, Oliver Reed as a teetotal teddy boy and Christopher Lee as a seedy strip-club owner, it offsets Americanised teen clichés with a certain edgy grit and boasts a fantastic soundtrack by the John Barry Seven.

A former journalist and magazine editor who began her career on Melody Maker, Unsworth has written two novels based in countercultural London, and is currently researching her third, set in the era of Beat Girl.

"It's a time when things were changing very rapidly and music was so fertile," she says. "Skiffle had come along, which was a democratic kind of music, like punk later on - it just required a washboard and a dustbin and one of you to play a guitar.

"My boyfriend's dad can tell you exactly what year a record was made just by listening to it, because sound changed so quickly.

"It's also a time when, in reaction to the post-War rationing, the kids were all dressing up and making their own glamour. Here the Adam Faith mob are sort of looking French existentialist - Christopher Lee looks like he's in The Crave and Beat Girl has long blonde hair, slacks and a turtleneck sweater.

"It's one of the many layers of irony in this film that she slags off her stepmother for being French while looking like Brigitte Bardot!"

Steering clear of dry introductions, Hammett have commissioned Unsworth to write a short story, inspired by the film, which she will read before the screening.

Featuring the legendary producer Joe Meek, it's set in the Offbeat Café - the meeting place favoured by Jenny and her beatnik pals.

"In the film it's a sort of crossroads between the straight and criminal worlds," says Unsworth. "Soho in the late-Fifties was this time of amazing coffee bars. Now kids would hang out in pubs, but then they didn't meet to get lashed up, it was to have these profound intellectual discussions.

"But because it's in Soho, the underbelly of criminality is never far away."

  • 1pm, £6.50/£5.50, 01273 626261