Misc Stuff, like the Poejazzi app and some gigs and that

Hello

It's a Monday and I'm reflecting. Last week was a good week, so I'm going to do a little roundup.

Poejazzi App

Those nice people over at Poejazzi have produced this sweet little poetry app, which has recorded audio, text, illustration and a whole host of banging poets. They are featuring one in each week and it was my turn last, (well actually it was the week before..). The piece I did is called Highland Blues, which I wrote probably about 2 years ago and is about growing up and seeing my father in myself, and that kind of thing. So far to feature has been Gareth Lewis, Molly Naylor, James Massiah, Rachel Rose Reid, Hollie McNish, Alex Gwyther, Catherine Martindale, Sean Mahoney, Anna Lee with more to come. You can download it for free from Itunes Google Play Samsung Apps

Gigs

I'm pretty fortunate to be on a really good run of gigs at the moment, the best one I've had in a long time, possibly ever. Over the last month I've featured at BoxedIn, Hector Hears, Streetfest, Come Rhyme With Me Crawley, but this Thursday I'm going to be heading up to Birmingham for the first time to feature at Hit The Ode  a night which is run by a great poet called Bohdan Piasecki  and Apples &Snakes. Then the friday after is the Brighton leg of Come Rhyme With Me.

Other Stuff

Last Thursday I was invited down to Christ's Hospital school in West Sussex to run a workshop. This came off the back of a Poetry From The Heart completion, where I met 2 of their students, Kobby Adi (who won the competition that night) and Leeza Awojobi. They told me about a Spoken Word club they run at their School and after a few emails from Leeza, I eventually went down there and met the group, who are all aged between 13 and 18 and have around 25 people that turn up each week to thier sessions. It's hard not be impressed by the school itself, which is a collection of huge old buildings set in the Sussex countryside, where they still preserve the old traditions of the school, like the tudor uniforms, however, what impressed me most was the group themselves. They run it all off their own backs and host their own events within the school.  There was a lot of talented people within the group, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them start appearing on the spoken word radar in the near future.  I had a very nice time!

March 2014 (nuts!)

Greetings...

So, March was a pretty busy Month. I've been enjoying spending some time at home of late, working on some new bits and having a bit of a rest after all the activities of the last month...

A Tale From The Bedsit

It all worked out well. I really enjoyed the run at BAC, had some great audiences in and lots of new faces which was really nice, managed to pick up a couple more reviews as well, got another one from EVERYTHING THEATRE and POEJAZZI which I was chuffed about. The British Library came and filmed it for their archives, which is nuts! The show they came for, was probably the best one as well, it never works that way!.. I'm waiting to see what happens next with the show, hopefully more..err shows! In the meantime, here's some pictures Stef took from the rehearsals..

No Milk For The Foxes

So straight after I finished the Bedsit show, I went straight into rehearsals the next day, with Conrad Murray, for the Foxes show. We were performing a work-in-progress, kind of like a first draft really, at the Camden people's Theatre. We had no idea what to expect, I think what Conrad and I are doing is quite different, in the way we perform and how we've developed it but it went really well. So much so, were hopefully going into full development..fingers crossed

This was pretty much our set for the show

Play Festival

The Young Producer program at Battersea Arts Centre I have been working with as artist, since the beginning of the year had their 3 day festival in March and it all went off pretty damn well! they had programmed several artists and installations and fun rooms, all around the theme of childhood and play. It went off a treat, really proud of the team!

The team, minus Charlie

Forthcoming EP and wee up date!

Hello!

It's Monday and I've just got back from Latitude festival yesterday, had a great time. I was performing as part of the 90's BPM show and apart from a 7 hour journey to get there from London, due to a man on the roof of Ipswich station with pants on his head (if you don't believe me read HERE) it was a whole heap of fun.

There's been a quite a few gigs of late, Purely festival, Brockley Jack Scratch to name a few, most with Conrad Murray who I work with regularly, we both had a lot fun. But on the 7th July I was invited to perfrom at the Cabaret Lounge, which is a night run by a singer and artist called Airlie Scott. I took Conrad with me and we did a full 25 minute set so I was able to mix it up with straight spoken word and music, which I don't get to do very often, I even played the snare drum for one of Conrad's solo tracks. It was a wicked night and we were well looked after. It was a different sort of gig to what I'm used to but I really enjoyed it. It's set in a restaurant called Toulouse Lautrec and is very well set up for small gigs, there's even a camera over the piano keys so the audience can see what the pianist is doing! Anyway, I was able to perfrom 2 tracks from the EP myself and Conrad are working on called The Dice That Rolled A 3, and luckily we had it filmed and recorded, so below is a one of those tracks, called No Frills. 

From next week, I go into the final development phase for my first solo show A Tale From The Bedsit so I'll keep you all posted. 

Enjoy

Paul

Paul, where have you been and what are you doing?

Well, I hear you (don't) ask...

I've been a bit slack with updating this, but I guess that means that in-between watching reruns of Peep Show and Don't Flop rap battles I have actually been doing some stuff. So before I mention what’s coming up, I think it only nice I mention a few things that I've been up too.

Since February gigs wise I've been lucky enough to feature at The Patchwork Club, Platform @ The Ritzy, Come Rhyme With Me in both Brighton and London, and also at Look Mum No Hands as a fund-raiser for the charity CALM. I also did a weeks run, for the third time, of The Great Escape (A Borrowers Tale) as part of the Imagine Children s Festival at The Southbank Centre, which of course was a lot of fun.

I've also been working on some more workshop projects with Battersea Arts Centre as part of their Homegrown young people's program for 18-25 year olds, for the Brave New World festival. I also worked with Farnham Maltings Art Centre in a spoken word project working with some Traveller children from Cranleigh Primary school which was ace, working in part of Surrey that I'd never been to before, and quite different form Horley where I grew up in.

And so to the future! It's been a very long time in my head, and in carious forms and drafts on my PC, but since January my first ever solo project A Tale From The Bedsit is now currently being made and is in it's second stage of development, which I'm very excited about. It's essentially me telling a story about a bedsit I actually lived in Brighton a few years ago, and some of the things that went on. I say it's a solo project, but in reality, it isn’t, as it firstly took the Roundhouse to commission me to do it, and produce it, and for them to bring in a director, which is Stef O'Driscoll who's quite frankly breathed a whole new lease of life into it as a project and really helped me to shape the writing. Were currently rehearsing all this week at Battersea Arts Centre, and have bought in a sound designer, Phil Davies who's a don! There's going to be 2 scratches coming up at the Roundhouse on 22^nd April.

I'm also working on a show that will be heading to the Lattitude festival with Poejazzi, called 1990BPM, so, along with, Joshua Iduhen, Chimene Sullymen and Bridget Minamore, were all busy working on pieces to do with the 90's...and to top it all off, in conjuction with the bedsit show, I'm working on a EP with Conrad Murray called The Dice That Rolled A 3.

Hopefully it won't be so long until I update this again

Until next time

Paul

Better Late Than Never

This is a blog I wrote for the super cool people at Poejazzi http://poejazzi.wordpress.com/. They put on very very good events and back in may I was lucky enough to perform at one of them....

Better Late Than Never

My Mum often reminds me that Buster Merryfield, who played Uncle Albert in Only Fools And Horses, didn’t become an actor until he was in his fifties (my Mum knows everything!) I recently turned 28. Though I don't consider myself old, I do think that I was a bit of a latecomer into Poetry and Spoken Word, compared too some of the ever increasing list of brilliant performers I've seen that are under the age of 20. I have vague recollections of covering the subject of poetry back when I was at school, though most of those were of reading Roald Dahl poems when I was very young. I remember my GCSE NEAB Anthology was covered in graffiti about football and insults towards people's Mums (not mine though yea!). Other than a picture of Shamus Heaney, that is about all I can recollect. No poems, just rubbish graffiti. It pretty much sums up my formal education.

I must have picked something up though, because I had a basic understanding of poems that used rhyming couplets and I was independently able to string some very simple pieces together the day that I decided I was going to have a go at writing poems, though I was no stranger to rhyming, at that stage I'd already spent a few years penning rap bars which certainly helped.

I came into Poetry fully aware that I knew next to nothing. Effectively uneducated, I'm quite sure this has reflected in my work. I remember one of the first poetry events I ever went to, Poetry Unplugged at the Poetry Cafe, watching a young guy step up to the microphone and explain in his pre-amble that he was highly influenced by Keats, receiving a few nods of approval amongst the many people sat in the crampt basement of the Poetry Cafe. Not only did I have no idea who Keats was, but I also had no idea, not for want of trying, what the poet was talking about when he read his piece. I certainly did not feel the bliss of ignorance at that moment, put simply, I felt stupid. If it wasn’t for hearing Nial O Sullivan speak and then perform, and thinking to myself that he was both a genius and a bit of a geezer, I probably never would have gone back.

The interesting thing about my complete lack of poetical knowledge when I started out, is that my parents are very well read (I told you, my Mum knows everything, and cooks a mean Sunday roast!) despite both coming from working class backgrounds they believe education holds the key to betterment and would often tell me this. Of course I probably rubbished this, like I had done with most things at School. Unsurprisingly I spent the next 10 years after leaving school at 16 in all manor of mundane low paid jobs, constantly battling to keep the creative part of my brain active.

When I first started going to Poetry nights, I quickly developed an enthusiasm for it. Knowing where my negative attitude had got me in the past, I was able to easily dismiss any pre-conceptions that I held and absorb as much as I possibly could without prejudice. I carried this attitude into a creative writing course I soon took up at Birckbeck College and then into theatre, when I got involved at BAC.

As embarrassing as it was, and still is, being that I've just exposed myself in this blog (as if you didn’t know!) it has been far outweighed by my enthusiasm, satisfaction and the enjoyment I've gained from the journey so far. I guess what I'm trying to say is, like the dearly departed Buster Merryfield ,and my Mum, who knows everything (except about the graffiti on my NEAB Anthology book), you're never too old to give poetry a go, or most things for that matter!

Don't be shy now....