Spoken Word in the UK

Lucy English, Jack McGowan, Lucy English, Jack McGowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000373998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Spoken Word in the UK is a comprehensive and in-depth introduction to spoken word performance in the UK – its origins and development, its performers and audiences, and the vast array of different styles and characteristics that make it unique.

Drawing together a wide range of authors including scholars, critics, and practitioners, each chapter gives a new perspective on performance poetics. The six sections of the book cover the essential elements of understanding the form and discuss how this key aspect of contemporary performance can be analysed stylistically, how its development fits into the context of performance in the UK, the ways in which its performers reach and engage with their audiences, and its place in the education system. Each chapter is a case study of one key aspect, example, or context of spoken word performance, combining to make the most wide-ranging account of this form of performance currently available.

This is a crucial and ground-breaking companion for those studying or teaching spoken word performance, as well as scholars and researchers across the fields of theatre and performance studies, literary studies, and cultural studies.

Section 1

Background to spoken word in the UK

1

Biting back against the Fascist Octopus

The story of Apples and Snakes

Russell Thompson

Although later recognised as England’s biggest professional organisation dealing specifically with live poetry – and for a while the only one with truly national reach – Apples and Snakes¹ started life as just another night above a London pub. The organisation’s immediate roots lay in the activities of Worthless Words, a poets’ collective that staged performances in squats and pubs around south London in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Worthless Words had itself evolved from an earlier group called BAC Poets, which used to meet at Battersea Arts Centre. Whilst these performances focused on the work of the group’s members – a shifting personnel that nonetheless retained a fairly constant core – it was felt that their appeal could be extended by adopting a wider-ranging and more considered approach to programming.

A breakaway contingent, consisting of one poet and two members of the group’s inner circle – Pete Murry, Mandy Williams, and Jane Addison – elected to do just that. Worthless Words had recently lighted upon the Adams Arms, a Fitzrovia pub that seemed (partly due to its centrality) to be the ideal venue. Murry, whose presence in the ranks was to lend a layer of surreal humour to early proceedings, riffed on the pub’s name and coined a title for the new project.²

To a degree, this was part of a zeitgeist: a wave of independent theatre companies and cabaret nights – left-wing almost by definition – springing up in pubs and community spaces. Whilst these enterprises were undoubtedly mobilised and given focus by the rise of the political right, and by the final advent of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, they were in many respects simply a continuation of the jazz, folk, and am-dram clubs that had existed for decades as an alternative to the mainstream entertainment circuit of variety, rep, and concert halls. Despite being under the radar, these new ventures were proving to be viable and, it appeared, eligible for public funding: in 1982, many ears pricked up when CAST New Variety, a famously radical cabaret night, obtained funding from the Greater London Council (GLC).

A&S differed from similar ventures in that it was primarily a poetry night. Other programmed evenings of grassroots entertainment, if they included poetry at all, had tended to do so in a peripheral, slightly apologetic way. On the occasions when poetry was central to an event, it seemed either to be polite, establishment-approved fare or the fossilised remnants of a previous decade’s innovation. Where was poetry’s equivalent to the revolution that had recently shaken the music scene?

What we wanted was dynamic performance poetry that had a political undercurrent: left-wing, very accessible, reaching new audiences, going to new places – having the New Variety approach, but with spoken word (Williams).

A key part of A&S’s policy lay in empowering the poets themselves: it aimed to break with standard practice by offering artists a predetermined fee rather than a door-split. Another tenet was that, in an attempt to foster new talent, it would feature emerging artists alongside established names. Adverts for new poets were placed in the press some months before the launch, eliciting an unexpectedly keen response that saw Mandy Williams’s phone ringing deep into the night.

The first show, on Saturday 2 October 1982, was headlined by Attila the Stockbroker – then arguably the biggest figure in UK performance poetry – with support from some of the Worthless Words regulars and the funk-pop band Outbar Squeek. A week later, it was Benjamin Zephaniah. The first few shows easily sold out the 150-capacity room, prompting a move to the more spacious Roebuck pub in Tottenham Court Road from January. Thus began a peripatetic existence that would nonetheless include lengthy stays at certain ‘home’ venues.

Whilst reviews were encouraging and the full houses boded well, the organisers always had one eye on the growth and development of their operation. As a non-performer herself, Williams was able to focus her attention on fundraising and administration, supported by a committee that included Murry and three other Worthless Words alumni (Addison had dropped out of the picture early on). Monthly planning meetings were held in Williams’s flat, in order to listen to tapes sent in by prospective performers and to discuss marketing, programming, and finances.

Despite various grants and short-term arrangements – £25 per week from the London Poetry Secretariat, the loan of lighting and public address system (PA) from Camden Borough Council – the bulk of the running costs fell to the committee members and to whatever could be clawed back from ticket sales. For some of the committee, this meant dipping into the leftovers of their fortnightly giro. On top of everything else, they now had a van to maintain. Things were eased considerably when Williams secured core funding from the GLC in October 1983. This became an ongoing arrangement, dependent on various stipulations.

During the year 1984–1985, for example, A&S was required to stage at least 60 events; the next year it was 80. This meant that the organisation might concurrently be running regular shows at two or more venues on different nights of the week. Attempts were also made to counter the perception of Apples and Snakes as wholly Londoncentric, and from an early date the organisation was proactive in touting bills of entertainment to arts centres and literary festivals around the country. In June 1984, John Hegley headed an A&S slot at Glastonbury Festival, whilst Murry and fellow committee member Chris Cardale took a line-up to the Elephant Fayre the following month. By the following summer there had also been shows in Cambridge, Lancaster, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Programming was initially based around a cabaret model, and the earliest flyers used the term ‘poetic cabaret’ to describe the A&S experience. This ensured that some of the excitement generated by the shows would come from the juxtaposition of wildly differing acts. Alongside poets, the line-up would generally include a musical act, or a comedian with no pretensions towards poetry, or both. To an extent, this simply reflected audience expectations in an era before grassroots entertainment became over-compartmentalised – a phenomenon attributed by some to the success of models such as The Comedy Store. But there was also a practical side to the structure: it was often the non-poetry acts that brought the audiences in. Thus it was that performers as various as Billy Bragg, Mike Myers, Vi Subversa, and Kevin Coyne came to tread the A&S boards in the early and mid 1980s, alongside the spate of comedians-in-waiting who were still ostensibly poetry acts: Jenny Éclair, Craig Charles, Phill Jupitus, and others.

Diversity, in all its forms, was always at the heart of A&S’s programming. It was widely accepted that the poetry establishment did not represent the broad demographic of poetry’s potential audience or even recognise those aspects of the artform that risked making it popular – and that it was therefore down to the grassroots organisations to provide a platform for disenfranchised voices. For A&S, this included championing genres such as dub poetry (a major force in the years before hip-hop made any significant inroads into the domestic poetry scene) and what was then termed choreopoetry – a mash-up of verse, music, and drama practised by such acts as the band African Dawn and the theatre company Munirah. A&S underlined this approach by filling its mission statement and other official documents with language that emphasised expansiveness rather than limitation:

It wasn’t ‘we won’t do this, we won’t do that’ … It was ‘we will celebrate this, we will include this, because this is part of what we’re doing’.

(Cardale)

An organisation with similar aims and objectives to A&S, Angels of Fire, had come into being around the same time, though tending more towards the ‘serious’ end of the spectrum. A&S was itself not averse to seriousness, and always found room on the bill for the likes of Michèle Roberts, Michelene Wandor, and Alison Fell, not to mention the more avant-garde experimentation of sound poets and concrete poets; Bob Cobbing was a regular headliner. In other words, it was opting to tread a fine line between encouraging artistic inclusivity and maintaining its own brand identity in the face of possible competition. In 1984, proving it could do page as well as stage, A&S published its first anthology, Raw and Biting Cabaret Poetry, which received positive notices in the press (including, bizarrely, Vogue) and gained extra kudos from the design work of Neville Brody, at that time the hippest name in British graphics.

A&S was very much at home in the agitprop world of the mid 1980s. It joined a picket at Neasden Power Station; it held an anti-apartheid benefit at London’s Southbank Centre. And, with funding assured and with a shared political stance, it was natural that the organisation would contribute to some of the GLC’s own live events. Their Miner Poets show in support of the National Union of Miners’ strike (1984), and the Jobs Year Roadshow (1985) both drew on A&S’s programming skills. The GLC, however, had become a thorn in the government’s side and was on the verge of being abolished. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, A&S secured charitable status, thus qualifying itself for funding from other bodies: the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the London Boroughs Grants scheme (LBG) duly stepped into the breach, leaving funding levels relatively unchanged. It remained the case, however, that around half of the organisation’s income derived from ticket sales.

Williams moved on in June 1986. Her role, which had carried a small weekly salary since the inception of the GLC grant, was filled by Paul Beasley, the one-time editor of the poetry magazine Label and a committee member since the previous year. One of his first acts as administrator was to acquire formal office space in disused council premises at Ladywell, near Lewisham. Around the same time, the last of the former Worthless Words members moved on to other projects³ and Beasley rebuilt the committee with a new constitution and new members: several poets, among them Linda King, Netifa Akousa, and Pitika Ntuli, were recruited. As well as rubber-stamping the administrator’s decisions, the committee had a number of roles on show nights, which included ferrying the PA around (sometimes the performers too) and manning the door and bar as required. In 1988, Beasley took on a part-time assistant, Ruth Harrison, initially as publicist, although her remit rapidly grew to encompass fundraising and programme development. Thus began the steady upward curve in the number of A&S’s paid staff.

In 1987, Beasley had established A&S’s first Jazz-Poetry Festival, which harnessed some of the disparate elements of the earlier bills, bringing together jobbing jazz musicians, dub poets, and experimental sound artists. Through this process, figures such as the improvisational saxophonist Lol Coxhill, the American lyricist Fran Landesman, and the blues singer Carol Grimes became A&S regulars. The space initially used for the festival, Covent Garden Community Centre, became A&S’s new home venue at the start of the following year. The weekly programme of shows had had several homes since leaving the Roebuck in December 1984, but would remain at Covent Garden for the next six years. It was felt at the time that a non-pub venue might attract a more diverse audience, and this did indeed prove to be the case (Golant, 16).

A&S now had a reputation, for better or for worse, of being able to do a lot with relatively little money, and arts centres and literature festivals were increasingly approaching it to help them fill gaps in their programme. Beasley saw potential for the organisation to assume a fully developed role as an agency, but a bid for funding to support this move was unsuccessful and A&S’s activity in this area was to remain somewhat ambiguous. It continued to fulfil an agency-like role when called upon to do so, and was often regarded (erroneously) as representing a particular stable of artists. But its cut of any fees changing hands, when it took one at all, was never more than nominal. When Beasley left in 1989 – passing on the baton to Harrison – he did indeed establish a poetry agency, 57 Productions, which ran successfully for a number of years.

Harrison’s tenure saw the founding of A&S’s Poets in Education Scheme (PIES), which tied in with the national curriculum and was therefore more attractive to the funders than the agency proposals. A strand of educative outreach work had been initiated several years beforehand in the form of weekly writing workshops at the Clockhouse Community Centre in Woolwich – but the emphasis of PIES, in the first instance, was on secondary schools. The workshop fees were initially subsidised by the funders, thereby providin...