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The Fool Miles |
4.12.03 - The White Swan Deptford
Kerouac's Poetic Cabaret
Diary by the Fool Miles
Thursday's gig in Deptford went okay I think. It was a bit odd playing to a room of people who had gone to see poetry. I felt a bit of an interloper. The audience sat quietly through everyone's performances and clapped politely at the end. It was therefore quite hard to judge whether they were enjoying it or not. With music gigs, if people aren't enjoying it, they usually start talking. I'm not used to people paying attention!
What was quite fun was that I bumped into Gob Dylan on the way to the gig. Turned out he happened to be in London that evening and had decided to pop along to see Project Adorno. As the evening was a kind of open mike with four main acts already plotted in, Gob decided to take a floor spot himself. He made up a couple of poems whilst everybody else was performing and then read them out. Now, I freely admit that I don't know much about poetry but I feel fairly confident that I'd know a steaming pile of horse manure if I heard it (noisy stuff horse manure). I thought Gob's poems were rather good, my favourite being one about agnostic church services. And the other really good thing was it meant I had some company for the train journey home.
As for the four main acts, the first was Laura King, who beat me in the effort stakes by travelling all the way from Oxford. She read some of her poetry which all went down very well with the crowd there and was even asked for an encore, so not a bad start to the proceedings by any means. Unfortunately, I can't really remember any of her poems very well but I think that's because I was so busy getting terrified about performing myself, that it drove them all out of my head. Which is rather a shame.
The second slot was mine and I regaled everybody with In This Bucket, Another Song (a new song getting only its third airing), Oh Tragic Pig and Arterial Thrombosis (a song I've written for Anal Beard about the dangers of smoking). As I say, I'm not sure what people made of it. Somebody, (either Laura King or Gob) told me afterwards that they liked In This Bucket and Praveen from Project Adorno said that he had meant to ask me to play No Blues Blues. Ho well. I found the whole thing strangely terrifying and in my efforts to disguise this probably came over as a bit of a cock, banging on about how I didn't normally do poetry type things and how strange it all felt. Never mind.
Third main act was a guy from Woolwich who was probably my favourite turn of the evening. I wish I could remember his name. He was another funny guy (most of the poetry that evening seemed to be humorous) and I liked his style of delivery. He had quite a soft and quiet voice and seemed slightly on edge in a way that somehow reminded me of Patrick Troughton. But then I was starting to get a bit drunk by this time and so nobody else might remember it that way.
Finally we were treated to a peformance by the evening's hosts - the one and only Project Adorno. Now, as I've made clear before, I'm a bit of a fan of Project Adorno so what more can I say? They're great and their performance that night was no exception. I even got to see them do a cover of There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards by Ian Dury. The day I see them cover Fucking Ada though, now that will be strange.