WORD OF MOUTH
Jubal, ancestor of lyre players, lived in the Land of Nod, east of Eden, according to Genesis. We’ve been trying to track him down since last Autumn and look like doing so for the foreseeable future .. as we humans spend 25 years of our lives asleep we don’t have much time to find Jubal, extract his secrets, and spread by word of mouth the good news about LiTTLe MACHiNe. But we are doing our best.
From Crystal Palace to York, Covent Garden to Dartmoor, Cambridge to Ledbury, we speed to the next concert: in mid March to the Chagword Festival in the tiny town of Chagford on the edge of Dartmoor, under fire from weather Gods all the way, thunder, hail, deluge, to a terrific response in the packed-out Jubilee Hall, where we saw our audience clearly – who they are – young, older, old; lovers of poetry, bad jokes and jumping music. (Apparently Chagford has the most radioactive toilet in the world, due to the vast amount of Radon seeping up from the granite. Perhaps that explains the radiant response). We have so far avoided the sort of crowd blues poet Son House encountered when playing juke joints with Robert Johnson, “Guys would fight all the time, kill up each other”, but one thing we knew in advance about Chagford residents was that they sometimes shoot poets.
The Royalist poet and MP, Sir Sydney Godolphin, was shot in the porch of the Three Crowns during the Civil War. He haunts the pub but maybe we laid his ghost with our settings of poems designed to resurrect the dead. (There is an Italian saying, about the tree from which a violin is made, ‘When I am alive I am silent, when I am dead I sing’. This is what we do for those long-gone poets whose work we try to enliven with music).
In York for the Literary Festival, crossing the snow-buried steppes of the Midlands to get to the Theatre Royal by 2pm to set-up for a performance with Carol Ann Duffy. As we were completing our preparations Ms D appeared silently from the wings, and we took up our conversation with her as if the months since Keele last year had been a few hours. She directed us to, “Play the new one” and so, in an empty auditorium, we sang the love poem ‘Valentine’ to its author, and it was the best live performance of it we had given. Later the Laureate (who never wears Olympic laurel) gave her usual relaxed, powerful and enjoyable reading and then introduced us, “I am the warm-up act for LiTTLe MACHiNe”, and we laid 55 minutes of music and poetry on the 500 strong crowd.
Afterwards much interesting planning and ideas for future work with Carol Ann. Several of the crowd eagerly buying CD’s were from York University. One, Mr Nicholas Moody, wrote this review of the show for the Yorker magazine, another remarked that she wished she’d learnt about poetry “That way” at school .. once again the limitations of confining poetry to rarely read books and fear-inducing exam syllabuses were apparent. We want to make poetry sing as it did when the poet was writing it and chanting the lines to their four walls. Not a ‘Lament for the Makars’, (in which the poet Dunbar mourns long forgotten, dead poets of his time, ROWLL, STOBO, WINTOUN, BLIND HARRY, MERSEUR, TRAILL) but a celebration of poems, enabling them to sing for themselves anew, (though I doubt even LiTTLe MACHiNe could make these formidable names live again!)
At Chagford we were seen by Chris Mullin, MP and author, two enthusiastic ladies from the Arvon Foundation, and we have recently been seen by and chatted with Mimi Khalvati and Julia Bird of the Poetry School too. We realise our most effective strategy for getting gigs is to do gigs: WORD OF MOUTH does the rest, which is appropriate considering WORD OF MOUTH is what we do. When Festival organisers consider booking us they wonder, ‘Is it a band? Is it a bunch of poets? Is it music? Is it poetry?’ But when people actually hear and see us they immediately ‘get it’, and spread the good news – the gospel of LiTTLe MACHiNe – even in this cold Lent and Eastertide.
Chris 28.3.13