Taking the Mic – Exeter Phoenix
This week I performed my poetry to a crowd of poets. Having previously only performed to general open mic audiences this event was my first poetry specific open mic. I am pleased to say I really enjoyed the other performers and they really enjoyed me. I read The Adventure a poem about having a night out and avoiding the crap to create an enjoyable evening, and my first and only love poem, Junk Food Date. I will definitely be heading back to the Pheonix on September 15th for the next "Taking the Mic" where I'm gonna crack out my controversial crowd pleaser, Pinnochiophile.
The event is hosted by Liv Torc who also happened to be plugging her new book, a professionally printed book with glossy cover and illustrations. Lately I've seen a lot of poets plugging their books at open mics which is interesting as I am currently thinking about self-publishing my poems. Most advertise prices of £2 or £3 for books and don't seem to be selling them. Does poetry simply not sell?
But looking closely, most of the self published 'books' were just basic vehicles for the words. Black and white photocopies stapled together and badly folded. Most people would rather read from a computer screen than another sheet of A4 copy paper. They had all the charm and beauty of a school newsletter. In contrast, my book is going to be a work of art. A tactile and sculptural binding of leaves printed in traditional mediums. A hard cover and spine will firmly hug a neat stack of high quality archive paper. Each book will smell of fresh plywood and ink, be numbered as a limited edition and will have been handmade by myself. All this and it will still retail for about a fiver!
Cover of Class Actions
Earlier today Aslan Ak posted his latest political rap piece on my Facebook wall. The anti-conservative parody is typical content for the extreme leftist act Click here to view David Cameron by Class Actions. Spouting hatred for thatcherism and set to a 90s synthpop house instrumental it was familier territory for the group.
Which lead me to thinking... your typical tory-boy is not going to listen to a thumping house beat with aggressive vocals. If Aslan's goal is to convert beliefs, then using a style established in an already lefty society is ineffective. A more subversive way to sway votes would be to present your leftist reasoning in a form that is familier to a rightist voter. Of course this is all speculation - I don't know if Aslan is wanting to sway votes - and actually digresses from the topic of this post.
I started considering how many styles one set of lyrics could be presented in. Regular open mic'ers Andy and Chris did an acoustic cover of Do You Feel Safe, the original of which is quite different.
- Click here to view Do You Feel Safe original by Class Actions
- Click here to view Do You Feel Safe cover by Andy and Chris
With the instrumental stripped down to a minimalist acoustic riff, Andy's added in his own lyrics and used his Glaswegian dontgivafuck style vocal to make the song his own. It went down very well at open mic amongst those who got the reference. Andy writes his own poems and his usual reading style has a relaxed but confident drive behind it. Click here to view Andy reading in his own style. However, on this cover he sounds a little unsettled, a result that I put down to the fact that he's mimicking Aslan's shoutrap style.
So what if the lyrics were hardly modified at all but the rhythm and reading style was altered. I visited the band's website at www.classactionsuk.com/, got hold of the lyrics and decided to have a go at doing my own interpretation in the style I would read my own poetry...
(embedded video may not be visible if reading this post via Facebook. Click here to view original post.)
I make a fair few cock ups and the recording is technically not that great but I enjoyed doing it. I found it refreshing to hear Aslan's words outside the context of a shouty rap song and it was a good opportunity to get my acting skills out. I tried to visualise the image behind each lyric and feel the emotion. It took me 6 attempts before I recorded the version that eventually made it's way to YouTube.
Comment and let me know what you think (Facebook users click "View original post" before commenting)
Chat roulette open mic and the events cultural foundations
Last night was a Chat Roulette themed Open Mic. Quite a simple concept I thought. Inspired by Merton's Piano Improv videos I decided to recreate the situation on a live stage.
This idea appealed to a lot of people and out of all the themed open mic nights I have done so far this one drew the most pre-event interest. I received several messages during the day checking that it was still happening. Performers like Lawrance and Paul both worked with the images on the screen to entertain our randomly selected chat partner and as they expressed delight with smiles and raised thumbs on the screen, the live audience in the venue responded. The intertwining relationships between the stage, the remote webcam connection and the punters in the room was a lot of fun and I received a lot of compliments for making it happen. But for one person in particular this was a highly offensive and inappropriate thing for me to do. And although you may now be expecting me to talk about nudity in fact it was something else entirely that angered this performer.
Before I talk specifically about him let me lay down some background. Open Mics are unplanned environments where everyone in the room can posses a different set of expectations. Therefore performers are tested on their skills to improvise more than anything else. I believe the ability to adapt and work with the crowd you get given is way more important than technical ability. At most open mic events the challenge comes from natural things, like predictable audience types (large and noisy or quiet and respectful). Then there's planned tests of creativity thrown in by the host like my addition of the Chat Roulette screen or Simon (Monday nights @ Oddfellows, Exeter) organising his poe-offs where he gets 2 previously unacquainted poets to take turns reading verses.
Whatever new things get thrown at a performer they have three choices:
- They think on their feet and adapt to the situation or challenge as best they can.
- They accept they cannot adapt and gamble by doing a pre-planned performance hoping it will be a hit.
- They get themselves all hot and bothered and attempt to change the situation to match their preconceived image of how the night should be and when they are met with failure, blame everything but themselves.
The first two options are legitimate approaches to performing, both with equal chance of success but the third is an attitude doomed to failiure and it was exhibited last night by Sideways Dave.
Above is a picture that I took showing the laptop, the camcorder and Sideways Dave just before he stormed off stage mid-song announcing "I've had enough of this". Dave's interpretation of the situation was that more people were paying attention to the screen than him. My interpretation is that Dave had completely failed to grasp the concept that he was ON that screen and had the ability to interact with it however he wished.
Ironically the final nail in the coffin was when the battery on the laptop died causing the screen to go blank. This resulted in a collective roar of disappointment from the audience similar to when England miss a penalty shot in the World Cup. Dave could have used this as an oportunity to get one back at technology, he could have made a witty remark and regained the attention. But no! He was just stuck in this miopic attempt to bash out a generic performance and as such left the stage. His rebellious protest actually earned him the biggest round of applause I have ever seen him receive which has me confused. I genuinely do not know whether the rapturous applause was in support of his protest against a noisey audience (technically not possible), whether it was in support of him leaving the stage (a bit too nasty of the audience to be so), or whether is was the product of a confused audience hearing one person clapping enthusiastically and following suit (the most likely reason).
Apologies if I sound harsh and unfair. Dave is a talented player who has studied Bob Dylan intimately but he's a serial offended when it comes to moaning and it's simply pushed me to my limit. He has previous for this kind of behaviour and is always very vocal and critical of my ideas in contrast to several others who give me words of support for ingenuity. I see him as a bizarre kind of workman turning up to a job with only one screwdriver and then blaming the client for having different sized screws. He has a repertoire that ranges from slow sombre to moody melancholic and a preoccupation with this idea that all open mic events should be quiet straight-edge affairs where the entire audience sit in perfect silence watching the stage for the entire night. And when he turns up at The Perfect 5th on a Sunday to find an energetic audience, intoxicated and demanding, guess who gets an earfull... me, the host! Now I don't mind people disagreeing with me. It's perfectly natural for my ideas to be incompatible with other people's plans, but he expects me to change the unchangeable. You can't outsource an impossible task to me and then blame me for failing. Dave has been to the event on previous Sundays when it's quiet and he's had a completely attentive and sober audience hanging on his every word. He knows it's unpredictable but does he change his act at all... no!
So my words to any performer is this. If you are not prepared to have a large repertoire and adapt your style of delivery and set content in the 10 minutes before you walk on stage, get used to failing to entertain and accepting that failure.
There is of course ways that I could change my night to provide performers like Dave with what they want. I could charge a fee on the door which would discourage those there only for the drink. I could verbally tirade the audience demanding complete silence before a performer begins and ask anyone talking during songs to leave. I could pre-book acts and advertise them in advance so audiences know what to expect and can choose not to attend. But I don't want to introduce any of these because I don't think Taunton can handle that kind of specific event. The population of pro-culture punters is so small that when you divide it into subgroups you are left with unsustainable audience sizes. The only option is to combine mis-matched genres and let he who shouts the loudest win. It's a horrible situation for any venue owner or individual music lover to be in but why do you think I spend hundreds of pounds in transport costs each month taking my poetry to places like Bristol and Exeter. Because they are the locations who have enough cultured people that you can drill down to very niche groups and still be able to fill a modest venue.
Please do comment on this post:
- Is Taunton cultured enough to play host to specific sub genres like Poetry/Flamenco/Grime/Folke?
- Should I introduce measures to my open mic to discourage non-musos at the risk of killing it's popularity?
- Is Dave representative of performers and should I stop expecting acts to be creative?
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Open Tales (open mic) at The Junction, Bristol
Last night I headed up to Stokes Croft in Bristol to a quirky little venue called the Junction. Still open for business through it's ongoing renovation the ex-metal bar is now under the same ownership as city centre trendy-magnet, Mr Wolfs. It's obvious the building is still in the early stages of a facelift but so far the new ownerships have brought with them box fresh air-conditioning, replacement plaster-boarding, tabletop candles, ambient down-lighting and I think the bar and furniture are new too. Work is happening daily and with plans for a pizzeria upstairs I have a feeling this will soon be a key venue for this part of Bristol. I can imagine the footfall that Invisible Circus pull down this end of the graffiti clad area of the city will do well for them too.
So on to the live performance aspect of the night. The Northern Irish folke act who host the event are Annie and Jimmy, a young duo with captivating sincerity and talent. The name of the event is open tales and every performer is made equipped with a Wolf's tale before taking to the stage. The night drew an excellent crowd of attentive listeners just perfect for a relaxed Monday evening. The acts alternated between folke music and contemporary poetry all evening with a bit of acoustic rockpop thrown in. I really enjoyed my evening and it was a pleasure to perform there. I will definitely be heading that way again on a Monday night in the future.
Video from Capitalist Pig Night 2010
It was a fantastic open mic night on the theme of Capitalism! Every performer had to sell something.
2 Very Different Devon Open Mics
For some unknown reason creative block had shifted earlier in the day and I finished two poems including my first super-positive (yet not soppy) love poem. It was the product of a 4 month drive to write something that just makes people smile without a negative twist or gritty analysis of contemporary Britian. It's called Junk Food Date and is about the intertwining relationships between me, a girl and junk food.
On Monday night I attended Oddfellows open mic. The night, which has recently been taken over by new host, Simon, is gaining momentum and frequently fills the tiny Exeter venue with quality performers and a polite audience. When Simon requested silence for the poetry everybody in the room happily obliged and as such I was able to produce a crisp and focussed performance of my new works, resulting in a fantastic response. A member of the audience who was there scouting for talent invited me to read on his forthcoming Phonic FM show and I even had someone at the back yell "Read the one about Russia" which put a smile on my face. It's nice to be remembered.
The benefits of warming up my face muscles and voice prior to reading is becoming very evident. I have started reciting tongue-twisters before going on stage. As well as a few of my own difficult combinations of sounds I have been using the ones Ron Burgundy does in the intro of Anchorman. To write your own tongue twister simply find two words that use the same sounds but in a different order and pronounce them in rapid concession. The Paedophile's Feeder Pile or Scooter racers' re-route skaters through suitcases.
The following day, Tuesday (last night) I attended Ride Cafe's open mic in Plymouth. I found a tough crowd consisting mainly of young university students. A lot of ambient noise and a lack of audience etiquette. Very different to the previous evening. But by exaggerating my performance and really throwing my voice around the room I was able to overcome the ignorant mass and gain the support of a hardcore niche of people who were paying attention to the performers on stage. I think my humiliation of a heckler earned me some respect too. The host, Joe, seemed embarrassed of the audience and congratulated and apologised in equal measure, actually taking the defensive move to call the audience a "bunch of pussies" on the mic immediately after my set, which I found highly flattering and amusing.
It was a unique, adrenaline pumped experience for me which resulted in more post-performance hand-shakes than any previous reading. I would recommend every performer try playing to a crowd like this at least once, even as a conditioning exercise. It's the straight-out-of-college-uni-student mentality and is probably one of the hardest social barriers anyone could attempt to battle.
So with a sore throat flagging up the first signs of a cold virus and two new business cards to add to my address book I can look back on these past 72 hours and smile at the memories of two very different open mic experiences.
Thanks to Steph Howe, Josh Enright, Greg Brookes and Chris Good for their support.
My first experience of chat roulette
Well I plugged in my camera, loaded chatroulette.com and started freestyling songs for all the lovely cam'ers out there. After about 45 minutes of this I received an error message explaining how 3 people in the last 5 minutes didn't like what I broadcast and I am therefore banned for 90 minutes! Now considering how many dirty old men wanking on camera there were that's a pretty slating review of my musical ability!
If you'd like to see people with webcams from all over the world delivered to you at random visit http://chatroulette.com but for god sake you'd better be more interesting than me!
(Afterthought: Maybe this was racism against my moustache)
Capitalist Pig Night 2010 Coming Soon
Next Sunday (4th April) is a themed open mic night at The Perfect 5th. It's Capitalist Pig Night where every performer has to include a sales pitch. You can take it seriously and sell your CD, book or artwork, or you can make a joke and sell something weird. Fixed price or auction style. It's entirely up to you and how creative you want to get with it.
Feel free to take it even further and theme your performance around the subject of money taking either a serious or a humorous stance. Remember it's car boot season so a guaranteed way to have fun is to find the strangest instrument, children's book or percussive instrument you can and use it in your performance and then sell it off afterwards. Of course you don't have to sell something physical, you can sell a concept or a promise/dedication. The only limit is your imagination.
Please note, this night is not for charity, it is proper hardcore genuine capitalism and performers can use this to make real cash. Last year prices ranged from 20 pence to £11.
This theme was very successful last year and I'm expecting lots more creative interpretations this time round. Check out this video of last years Capitalist Pig Night...
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I’m not a DJ I’m a Selector
A few weeks ago I got Tauntonian D-list celebrity La Luka up on stage at my open mic night and held a live debate with him on the value of DJing. La Luka (real name Lukus Chitty) is a dubstep DJ who plays with his partner (in the non biblical sense) Krausey at many events including their own Rubadubdub. Both Rubadubdub and my Open Mic night are held in pro-live music venue, The Perfect 5th so it seemed highly appropriate to discuss what I perceive to be a disproportionate amount of worshipping that DJs get compared to other performers such as guitarists.
Yesterday in the hungover sunny back garden aftermath of Stub Footed Pigeon I learnt from Felix the definition of the word "selector" and boy was I excited. He explained that back in his home town of Camden many of the people who enjoy playing records for large groups of people prefer to describe themselves as "selectors" because it describes what they do better: they select tunes. Not make or create them but just choose them. It's a more humbling moniker that doesn't over exaggerate the process involved and because of that I love it and am going to start using it to describe what I do once a year at a booze fuelled party in a sunny back garden in Taunton.
Afterall DJs are essentially playing other peoples music and as such are selectively and unapologetically drawing on a massive pool of time, effort and talent that would be completely unacheivable by a single group of musicians/producers making original material. So although I do believe that the person playing the recorded music at an event has an important role in choosing the right songs for the moment and guiding the vibe with their knowlege of music they should not be hailed as more skilled than live musicians.
Making me even less sympathetic to the DJ's individual cases of ego-cirrhosis is the highly predictable defence that they ALL come up with. They claim that it is as skilled as playing an instrument because you have to beat match. Whoop-de-doo! All hail the geniuses who can adjust a variable motor on two spinning discs until the simple pop rhythms align and allow them to slide a cross fader over without their intoxicated audience noticing. It's not a massive skill! They are essentially librarians for vinyl who can tap their foot. And this is a fact they hate to be reminded of by the constant stream of computer software that can do their job better. It makes one look a bit lost and silly having a computer take away your only defining quality. Like a bitter old factory working from the 1980s sabotaging the new machine brought into the office. How unimaginative of them to have an angry reaction rather than deciding to push on to the next level and introduce more skills to the performance of DJing. They don't think WOW! with the computer doing the beat matching bit I am now free to concentrate on piling in more tunes, more samples, visuals, live drums, vocal performance or anything from the massive plethora of interesting and wonderful things that people love to see done live. No. They just cross their arms and put on a grumpy face.
Actually I lie. Because these DJs do put in extra elements to their performances. And the elements they put in are absolutely appropriate to current culture. Lukus's party trick is taking his shirt off while behind the decks to reveal his wiry physique covered in numerous latin-American-gangland style tat's and pointing his fingers enthusiastically. For which the females in the audience go wild, causing them to get drunk and dance around, which in turn earns the night a reputation for not only having good tunes but sexy girls and that completes the auto-marketing process by attracting boys. It's a perfect concept that is consistently proving financially successful and I see no sign of it not working in the foreseeable future. Subject of course to Lukus not gaining weight or losing the enthusiasm to point his fingers. Both of which seem unlikely considering his weekly carb-starved 48 hour diet of nil-by-mouth save for the poultry 8 cans of redbull consumed between Friday night and Sunday morning.
P.S. To cast doubt over my own argument even further may I consider the fact that I am comparing the audience reactions of DJs and live musicians that I have seen, and it's highly likely that the small-town musicians I have seen were just not that good and certainly not good enough to compare to the studio produced recordings which any small-town DJ can purchase and play. If I take into account the front row of an audience at a Michael Jackson concert it makes me think that yes, live music does still stand superior in the public's opinion. The common man can still distinguish true talent from charlatanarianism. Except for the fact that Michael Jackson is dead now and a combination of manufactured pop domination and MP3 piracy means the industry probably can't support the natural organic growth of talent that we saw in MJ over his 40 year domination as King of Pop. Natural talent will now either be so corrupted by the industry that it will die or kept pure but never exposed on a large scale. Ironic how the bi-product of the massive interconnectivity of the web will be that true pure musical ability will be kept tucked away in local little pockets, only to be heard by a few lucky people.
Class Actions
I first met Class Actions through an email asking me if it was alright for them to perform at my Open Mic night. I don't require artists to pre-book but these guys were travelling from Manchester and wanted to double check their trip would not be wasted. Their performance was like nothing I had ever seen at Open Mic before. Shouty, loud, aggressive, hard, difficult to understand but most foreign of all was the fact that they were genuinely political. My reaction was amazement and joy. I couldn't help but smile and laugh. The audience were equally thrown off by this occurrence. Some sat, stoney-faced and unimpressed. Others raised a pint in the air and hollar'd words of support in drunken celebration.
They continued to perform every few weeks, occasionally bringing out new material but mostly doing their core set of songs. I begun hearing lots of audience feedback and as the weeks went by, got to know them by talking about their music and reading their blogs. Consequently I started to understand the political reasoning behind their music. The subject matter that is at the fore of their mind when they perform are genuine and serious global issues. So no wonder they have the confidence to act so outrageous. The opinions of a few hundred people in a county town in England pale into insignificance when compared to the racial hatred and corporate corruption that they care about.
So having concluded how Aslan feels when he performs I began to think of how the audience react. Many people take them as a joke, laughing AT them and for a moment I felt sorry for them, thinking their political message was being lost. But then I realised that they do always get the full attention of the crowd and they regularly get girls up dancing with them while they perform. This is a massively important achievement for any performer. Dancing (or indeed any type of body movement including clapping, fist shaking, head-bopping) is so expressive that to make people do it means you've succeeded in intoxicating them with your energy. So although the words in the lyrics may not be getting interpreted and remembered, I think there is a deeper kind of communication going on. The girls (and most of the guys) instinctively pick up on the energy and sense of faith that oozes from Aslan's performance. Although that energy does come across as anger and aggression, which are things most people would choose to leave out of their life, it seems to push all the right buttons to make people want to follow their movements. They literally demand attention with their performance and they get it! Look at all the other examples of performers who are often (but not always) angry and aggressive but still get lavished with attention: Eminem, Bill Hicks, Scroobius Pip.
So as disseminaters for a cause they are half-way towards functional success. They have the pied piper's magic and that is for most performers the bit that comes last (or sometimes not at all). I don't see Class Actions as being a complete package but I admire elements of them. If I was producing them I would make bridging the gap of understanding a priority. I would introduce calm, pensive moments to the performances, maybe by bringing in extra writers or producers. And whether it be with imagery, quotations from published writers, well scripted between-song skits or any other kind of on-stage communication the next step would be to help the audience understand what I came to know through reading their blogs and chatting to them. If they can cause that switch of consciousness from thinking locally to thinking globally to happen on the night then they are onto a winner and like the 3 I mentioned earlier, strike a balance of being listened to and loved by people who though they were just going to be entertained.
P.S. Aslan assures me that his performances go down very differently in the working men's clubs of Manchester and the North. He freely admits to loving observing how the audiences react in the South compared to back home. And maybe this backs up my theories. Audiences in the North are generally already thinking on those bigger issues because the Thatcherite changes to industry affected them much more deeply. They don't need the knowledge gap bridging. I think I am going to have to travel up to Manchester and attend an Open Mic in Salford to listen to normal people and see Class Actions perform there.