BM does not only review music, she occasionally dips her high heel into other artforms, including spoken word, and this was a great event, organised by Falkirk’s mighty Razur Cuts magazine.
For eight quid there were 5, maybe six acts (BM was never very good at counting…) at the Duck, on a wee stage.
First up was Dickson Telfer, who BM knows better as the bass player from amazing dreampop act L-Space. His musings from the LNFG-released publication centred mainly on the social effects and after-effects of social media, and the stories were very witty, also prompting paranoid thoughts and BM wondering WTF are we all doing, is this just a metaphorical rabbithole which will be regarded with derision in a few years time, well time well tell, it always does – worth reading about anyway…
Stephen Watt held the stage next, with some football related poems and some not… ‘Dad’s Not A Football Fan’ is already a modern classic, and his intros and segues were also very funny indeed – he is great onstage.
David Ross gave us some contexts and some excerpts from his current novel ‘Welcome To The Heady Heights’ which BM is going to have to borrow or steal – the account of the proto-boyband travelling to London in an ill-advised van is both hilarious and claustrophobic, and DR is also developing really well as a storyteller (without being patronising, as BM said, she does not usually do book reviews!)
Jim Higo gave us a side-splitting set of poems and rants covering how rubbish it is to be onstage on Goole (Yorkshire) and some impromptu references to this current night… he is naturally funny, doesn’t have to do much to make BM dissolve anyway, and he went down a storm here.
Chris McQueer has been a rising star in Scotland for a wee while now and was reading from both his published works, the show-off! The stories however were genuinely weird, quirky and original and he can only develop this better into fully-fledged fiction – a real talent and very witty onstage as well.
Headliner JP Barringon has been honing his act for some time now – he told BM during a wee chat that his biggest break north of the border was opening for Sleaford Mods at the ABC (RIP) in maybe 2016 or so (defo not the time BM saw them at ABC1 in 2016 though) – anyway, his ranting lines do at times recall Dr JCC but they have their own meter (ooh, a poetry word, poetry wanker!) and delivery – hard to track down on social media, nonetheless he is an original talent and was a real pleasure to experience at the Duck tonight.