March 30, 2008
“It’s hard work being a poet… Daytime TV doesn’t watch itself”
There was certainly no rest for these wicked performers. Due to staff shortages at the Burton Taylor, Luke Wright, Dockers MC (Laura Dockrill) and Tom Sutton had to serve the audience their interval drinks. Extra loveliness! Fan-struck poet groupies must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
Luke Wright has been a stand-up poet for 9 years. It must have been an interesting journey. This Alternative Laureate is really getting somewhere in his spoken word search for truth. As someone once told him: “ ‘If you try to write about the meaning of life you might as well be staring at a brick wall. Write about the brick wall and you might just learn something about the meaning of life.’ Truth is in the detail.”
This show was Luke’s quest to make sense of what it means to be a man. It was enlightening for this older woman. Adolescent males have to walk a tightrope between convention and originality – they’ve got to fit in with their mates, but stand out enough to attract girls. Now, 26 years old, and just married, Luke is settling down, with an admirable absence of angst. Introducing a lovely poem to his wife, “I bet you look good on the… sofa”, he raged against the Arctic Monkey’s song Fluorescent Adolescent Tab about a woman in her thirties looking back sadly at the glory days - “What’s wrong with sex in your nightdress?” - and he’s quite happy to admit that now “a night on the tiles usually involves grout”. Will he still feel like that when he’s 30? I hope he’ll let us know in verse!
Poems about his Essex boyhood were glorious and revealing. Holidays with Camping Dad! A paean to the service station on the M25 on the way to Granddad’s: “Come withdraw your cash from our machine; We’ll charge you £1.85! Doesn’t it feel great to be alive?” A spot-on if cruel poem about his first girlfriend, still ashamed about the reason he went out with her and the reason he dumped her. The mate whose life went off the rails - nasal Darryl with “teenage rage brewing beneath the ginger tuft”. Colchester culture.
With all these and more poignant / ironic / vitriolic and energetically delivered poems, this is a show really worth catching. He’s now touring the country – for dates see www.lukewright.co.uk.
Look out too for supporting acts Tom Sutton and Dockers MC. Tom Sutton’s elaborate tale of consumer ennui was about the difficulty of judging what’s creepy and what’s friendly in these days of viral marketing and Google-stalking. He needed to cut a couple of stumbling links, but his good-natured irony was funny and adorable.
Dockers MC is brilliant, enthusiastic and cool (how do you do that?!), vital, lyrical, articulate, with spectacular rhthym and rhyme. Listen to her love poem Mazes on myspace: “…You are….soft seats, late night TV, walks on cliffs and trampolines, drunkness and fruit and good smelling shampoo, pomegranate seeds and crap tattoos, a team, strong tea, I’m proud of us…to see you is like the relief of seeing the night bus….”
But to get the full effect you need to see it live!
There was certainly no rest for these wicked performers. Due to staff shortages at the Burton Taylor, Luke Wright, Dockers MC (Laura Dockrill) and Tom Sutton had to serve the audience their interval drinks. Extra loveliness! Fan-struck poet groupies must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven.
Luke Wright has been a stand-up poet for 9 years. It must have been an interesting journey. This Alternative Laureate is really getting somewhere in his spoken word search for truth. As someone once told him: “ ‘If you try to write about the meaning of life you might as well be staring at a brick wall. Write about the brick wall and you might just learn something about the meaning of life.’ Truth is in the detail.”
This show was Luke’s quest to make sense of what it means to be a man. It was enlightening for this older woman. Adolescent males have to walk a tightrope between convention and originality – they’ve got to fit in with their mates, but stand out enough to attract girls. Now, 26 years old, and just married, Luke is settling down, with an admirable absence of angst. Introducing a lovely poem to his wife, “I bet you look good on the… sofa”, he raged against the Arctic Monkey’s song Fluorescent Adolescent Tab about a woman in her thirties looking back sadly at the glory days - “What’s wrong with sex in your nightdress?” - and he’s quite happy to admit that now “a night on the tiles usually involves grout”. Will he still feel like that when he’s 30? I hope he’ll let us know in verse!
Poems about his Essex boyhood were glorious and revealing. Holidays with Camping Dad! A paean to the service station on the M25 on the way to Granddad’s: “Come withdraw your cash from our machine; We’ll charge you £1.85! Doesn’t it feel great to be alive?” A spot-on if cruel poem about his first girlfriend, still ashamed about the reason he went out with her and the reason he dumped her. The mate whose life went off the rails - nasal Darryl with “teenage rage brewing beneath the ginger tuft”. Colchester culture.
With all these and more poignant / ironic / vitriolic and energetically delivered poems, this is a show really worth catching. He’s now touring the country – for dates see www.lukewright.co.uk.
Look out too for supporting acts Tom Sutton and Dockers MC. Tom Sutton’s elaborate tale of consumer ennui was about the difficulty of judging what’s creepy and what’s friendly in these days of viral marketing and Google-stalking. He needed to cut a couple of stumbling links, but his good-natured irony was funny and adorable.
Dockers MC is brilliant, enthusiastic and cool (how do you do that?!), vital, lyrical, articulate, with spectacular rhthym and rhyme. Listen to her love poem Mazes on myspace: “…You are….soft seats, late night TV, walks on cliffs and trampolines, drunkness and fruit and good smelling shampoo, pomegranate seeds and crap tattoos, a team, strong tea, I’m proud of us…to see you is like the relief of seeing the night bus….”
But to get the full effect you need to see it live!