Last week I made my debut as a garage MC. Don’t panic, this was not a conscious career move. This was Homework. Homework is the club I run with Joe Dunthorne, Ross Sutherland, Tim Clare and John Osborne (our 6th resident Chris Hicks ran away to Japan). We do six events a year at The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, and each month we have to produce new work to a theme. The theme this month was music and I hit upon the idea of us all writing a song. To mix it up Ross suggested we draw genres from a hat. We got our cruel audience to suggest genres. One man suggested Garage, and I just knew …
To say I’m not a fan would be putting it mildly. However, I do know a bit about garage. It was at its most popular when I was 17 and starting to go to clubs. Making the song was a bit of trip down memory lane and I realised that when I first started writing poems I was basically just writing to a garage beat. So whether I like it or not garage is in my artistic DNA. Brap. Ahem.
I thoroughly enjoyed making this and performing it for the Homework faithful. It was scary and difficult and made me think about how I go about creating, which is exactly what we want Homework to do. That said, I might find a way of doing a poem next month.
“Props” to Lora Stimson who did the vocal on the chorus bits. Lora and I were in a indie band called Dorian Grey when we were at college, during this period that I’ve written about. If you’d told us then…
If you want to come to Homework then all the events are on my ‘gigs‘ page. Or more info can be found here.
Below is the video of me performing the piece at Homework, below that is a recording in which I get the words right.