Getting down with the Southend Cru
In another off-the-cuff last-minute decision, I went to Poetry Unplugged at the Poetry Café last night to try out some new material. PU has never been one of my favourite nights - the Poetry Café is a small, cramped and stuffy space right next door to Dave Stewart’s “Hospital”. More to the point, the sheer volume of writers wishing to air their work means that some evenings can become a three and a half hour poetry marathon, much of which one might spend in one’s seat waiting for a chance to read.
The work that unravels during that time can be of first-timers as well as established acts, so some nights the length of the occasion and the cramped conditions in hard plastic chairs can really be a chore, even if you’re of a supportive frame of mind. I still shudder at the memory of one night I attended where the vast majority of the acts of the Woman’s Own/ Daily Mail twee rhymed variety. On that occasion, I was called up to the mic last of all. Three hours of that would try the patience of a Buddhist monk, and it’s not as if the vast majority of the exponents of this sort of thing particularly want to listen to other styles and ideas, either. Pam Ayers, for example, was never particularly known for her passionate love of the work of concrete poet Bob Cobbing, or her positive reviews of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. In fact, I doubt she even owned any Sylvia Plath.
Last night, however, was bizarrely good. Niall O’Sullivan was MCing, meaning that there was an energy and warm enthusiasm to the proceedings that it sometimes lacks. Combined with that, there was a good mix of folk from the comic to the hip-hop influenced to the angry to the thoughtful to the downright perverse. It’s rare that such variety will be had at an open mic, and the standard rarely flagged throughout the evening.
People were so good, in fact, that I was quite nervous by the time I had to take the mic. I’m out of practice, a fact I freely admit, and I have new material to throw in people’s faces and check they don’t recoil. However, everything went fine. Even a new poem of mine, which is a parody of badly translated poetry, went down well. That said, it’s hard to get any sort of realistic gauge since I think they were a kind, decent, forgiving sort of open mic audience. I noticed uproarious laughter at quite a few things during the night which frankly were barely worth even a titter. Maybe that’s just me being hypercritical, though.
The evening ended with me accidentally spilling a glass of water all over an American schoolteacher who was sat next to me. I hope it wasn’t cloggedthought. I think I thoroughly doused one of his books.
Today has been rather less eventful. I had to take a train into Southend to buy Amanda a new mobile phone. She won’t thank me for mentioning it, but she lost two mobiles in the space of six months recently, so I sauntered up and down the High Street desperately trying to find the cheapest phone money could buy.
I came to the right place, as it turns out. Southend High Street may not have much of any use at all - their music, DVD, book and computer stores are all distinctly below par, pale shadows of their out-of-town shopping mall competitors - but it has something in the region of ten mobile phone shops, all competing wildly with each other. This figures. One look at the precinct outside and the wannabe gangsters stood around trying their hardest to look mean tells you that this is the kind of place where you are only as good as your latest phone. What crew could possibly respect a member who only had a Nokia 1100? Still, never mind, that’s what I buy for Amanda, a snip at £25.
Southend itself is like Rayleigh to the power of ten - full of abrupt, miserable, slouching people who probably wouldn’t know why they were fed up if you asked them. The sky was grey, the pigeons were picking at rubbish in the precinct, and the whole atmosphere was energy destroying. Years ago, as a teenager, I probably would have been afraid of the little gangs in the side streets and shop doorways, but now they just seem rather skinny and pathetic - white suburban middle class kids desperately trying to affect some sort of urban status. Of course, you’d still stand no chance if six of them set on you at once after dark, but in the sober light of day with grey clouds hanging in the air there’s not much of an aggressive, drunken atmosphere, just a general mood of sulky boredom.
I leave the precinct to get to the railway station via an unpainted grey concrete ramp, through some perfectly squared, grey, wind tunnel corridors, through a shopping alley with tannoys that seems to be perpetually playing the mid-tempo blandness of Coldplay’s “Yellow” (It was all yellow? It was all grey, more like. Get it right, lads) and down some more stairs. The train out feels like a sweet release, I can tell you. I won’t be coming back here for another few years at least.
The work that unravels during that time can be of first-timers as well as established acts, so some nights the length of the occasion and the cramped conditions in hard plastic chairs can really be a chore, even if you’re of a supportive frame of mind. I still shudder at the memory of one night I attended where the vast majority of the acts of the Woman’s Own/ Daily Mail twee rhymed variety. On that occasion, I was called up to the mic last of all. Three hours of that would try the patience of a Buddhist monk, and it’s not as if the vast majority of the exponents of this sort of thing particularly want to listen to other styles and ideas, either. Pam Ayers, for example, was never particularly known for her passionate love of the work of concrete poet Bob Cobbing, or her positive reviews of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. In fact, I doubt she even owned any Sylvia Plath.
Last night, however, was bizarrely good. Niall O’Sullivan was MCing, meaning that there was an energy and warm enthusiasm to the proceedings that it sometimes lacks. Combined with that, there was a good mix of folk from the comic to the hip-hop influenced to the angry to the thoughtful to the downright perverse. It’s rare that such variety will be had at an open mic, and the standard rarely flagged throughout the evening.
People were so good, in fact, that I was quite nervous by the time I had to take the mic. I’m out of practice, a fact I freely admit, and I have new material to throw in people’s faces and check they don’t recoil. However, everything went fine. Even a new poem of mine, which is a parody of badly translated poetry, went down well. That said, it’s hard to get any sort of realistic gauge since I think they were a kind, decent, forgiving sort of open mic audience. I noticed uproarious laughter at quite a few things during the night which frankly were barely worth even a titter. Maybe that’s just me being hypercritical, though.
The evening ended with me accidentally spilling a glass of water all over an American schoolteacher who was sat next to me. I hope it wasn’t cloggedthought. I think I thoroughly doused one of his books.
Today has been rather less eventful. I had to take a train into Southend to buy Amanda a new mobile phone. She won’t thank me for mentioning it, but she lost two mobiles in the space of six months recently, so I sauntered up and down the High Street desperately trying to find the cheapest phone money could buy.
I came to the right place, as it turns out. Southend High Street may not have much of any use at all - their music, DVD, book and computer stores are all distinctly below par, pale shadows of their out-of-town shopping mall competitors - but it has something in the region of ten mobile phone shops, all competing wildly with each other. This figures. One look at the precinct outside and the wannabe gangsters stood around trying their hardest to look mean tells you that this is the kind of place where you are only as good as your latest phone. What crew could possibly respect a member who only had a Nokia 1100? Still, never mind, that’s what I buy for Amanda, a snip at £25.
Southend itself is like Rayleigh to the power of ten - full of abrupt, miserable, slouching people who probably wouldn’t know why they were fed up if you asked them. The sky was grey, the pigeons were picking at rubbish in the precinct, and the whole atmosphere was energy destroying. Years ago, as a teenager, I probably would have been afraid of the little gangs in the side streets and shop doorways, but now they just seem rather skinny and pathetic - white suburban middle class kids desperately trying to affect some sort of urban status. Of course, you’d still stand no chance if six of them set on you at once after dark, but in the sober light of day with grey clouds hanging in the air there’s not much of an aggressive, drunken atmosphere, just a general mood of sulky boredom.
I leave the precinct to get to the railway station via an unpainted grey concrete ramp, through some perfectly squared, grey, wind tunnel corridors, through a shopping alley with tannoys that seems to be perpetually playing the mid-tempo blandness of Coldplay’s “Yellow” (It was all yellow? It was all grey, more like. Get it right, lads) and down some more stairs. The train out feels like a sweet release, I can tell you. I won’t be coming back here for another few years at least.