Little Metropolis
One of the great joys of this summer was being commissioned to write Little Metropolis, a show to be performed at the newly re-invigorated Stroud Fringe Festival, an hour long invocation of the town I grew up in, set to music by my old friend Joe Reeve. Given that I am a lyric poet for the most part, it felt appropriate to be setting page poems to music with an urgent, performance edge to the lyric, and also to be telling a story of Stroud back to the town.
It's a long tradition, this music and poetry mash-up, deriving from the early days of poets travelling the country with lyres. It faded for a while, after the invention of the printing press and was kickstarted and reinvented in this country the late 1950s - think Christopher Logue's Red Bird sessions, my father's work with Pete Brown, Stan Tracey and Bobby Wellins - and has been going from strength to strength ever since with everything from Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke's late 1970s albums to the latest work by rap-inflected poets like Kate Tempest and Scroobius Pip.
What Joe and I have done a little differently with Little Metropolis is to take our influence from a wide variety of sources - everything from a pinch of Ewan Macoll's Radio Ballads to the ambient effects of Chris Morris's Blue Jam has been thrown into the blender to produce this show, which also features voices from Stroud (Martin Hill, Aine Thomas, Uta Baldauf, Allan and Jackie Peacey) woven into a collage in amongst poems and music which respond to and work up a head of steam from those interviews. Even the title came from a particularly choice phrase from one of the interviews, which I won't spoil here as it still makes me chuckle.
I've worked with musicians before, performing with Patsy Gamble, the Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra, Dave Finch, Gwyneth Herbert and others, but this show came together so fluently and fluidly that we have decided to put out an album of the show, which is underway now. So this just to let you know in advance that there is an album coming and that I am quietly excited about it. And that I will not be quite so quietly excited about it in the coming months...
Here's an extract from the album to be going on with though, a poem about The Pelican, the best sort of rambunctious dodgy dive to spend one's teens and 20s in. A town lives and dies by its pubs, after all.
