Thursday, April 14, 2005

No Man is an Island...except the Isle of Man

Here are my notes on the performers tonight at The Big Word. NB all the performers were a lot funnier than described below!

Robin Cairns – tells what are brilliantly funny stories in a broad accent. One was about people from Glasgow ripping everyone off and another about a young lad misunderstanding all the double entendres used by his parents, aunts and men on the bus…

Viv Gee – Short observational pieces about relationships – one superb piece highlighting the different way we speak, from baby talk thru to geriatric baby talk…

Richard Allen – a scouser with a wicked tongue – great poem asking for peace by, basically, calling for us to fuck everything – and maybe once all the things stopping us from having peace have been well and truly fucked, we’ll be able to achieve Peace on Earth…

Mark Thomson – intensely proud of his Dundee accent and dialect..

Alasdair Finlay – Sex, death and football…

Steven Barnaby – a man who’s every “poem” has no rhymes and is exactly 50 words long. Thanks to him for the title of this entry. John Donne – great poet – rubbish at Geography says Steven!

Tracy Patrick – from my erstwhile home, Paisley. Her poems were of a more social realist nature but enjoyable nonetheless

Milton Balgoni – A disturbing, menacing poem called “See Me? I’m Elvis” which scared the young ladies in the first row, and a hilarious impersonation of Robert Burns in “Ode to My First Vindaloo”…

Michael McGill – Like a star from “Cabaret”, Michael lit up the stage with his stream of consciousness, half sung, half spoken, full of action performance. Excellent!

Ash Dickinson – performed a quite moving yet still funny piece about a girl taking The Moon to a party as her boyfriend…

Jem Rolls – performed a piece that went down well in Scotland – about how the English turn everything into “We Won”. He even managed to work out that the English actually won the American War of Independence – because George III and the majority of his troops were German and the settlers were, in the main, English. A victory over Germany made it twice as good for the stupid English. Jem is English btw.

Jenny Lindsay – two standouts were “The Nasties” about the threatening people you might meet as a young girl walking home along Glasgow’s Sauchiehall St instead of getting a taxi. And one about how lazy music journalism turns people who are obviously in need of help into icons – but only after they’re dead.

So that as a good night but, man, the SMOKE in there.

I felt like I’d smoked a hundred fags – roll on the ban – it can’t come quickly enough for me.

Met up with Anne and Lynn and brought them home – both pished – whole bottle of wine each.

Listened back to around a third of the recording from tonight and it sounds OK despite the inevitable popping which will occur if you give a mike to a performing poet…

I recorded it for Ian Sclater’s magazine “Instant”, a coffee house publication full of reviews of and ads for lovely looking places you’d really want to go and have a coffee in. Plus travel, music, art, household etc. A great read – and free too. Once a sponsor for the project is found, my recordings will appear on a covermounted CD.

Now I need to edit it all down to an 80 minute disc.

Ian and I invented an expanding CD storage system tonight for people with too many CDs who, when they buy a CD by an artist who’s name begins with “M” have to spend two hours moving all their other CDs to get it in the right place.

I have a bad cold now and the smoke didn’t help….

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