About

I fell, or rather staggered into performance poetry. It was a dark, post party apocalyptic Sunday afternoon in The Foundry in Shoreditch. A friend picked up my notebook and saw that I’d been writing some poetry. It happened to coincide with the Foundry’s weekly poetry night and while I was in the toilet they put my name down to read – confident that I would embarrass myself. As it happened, my stuff went down rather well and the compere Jock Scott encouraged me to come down again. I began to write more and to sample some other spoken word events as the scene was beginning to take off. I quickly learned that my forte lay in traditionally structured comic verse.

I never actually wanted to be a performer but the later Foundry compere Viz the Spoon scoffed at paper and encouraged me to learn my stuff. I have an awful memory and found every time I tried I froze. It was at a Music Hall event at the Foundry where I performed The Lion and Albert and The Return of Albert where my revelation came. I could remember 6 or 7 minutes of someone else’s verse, why not my own?

Since then I have performed at spoken word evenings, comedy cabarets, festivals, night clubs, bars and galleries all over London and across the country. I have had work commissioned by Radio 3, had my poetry aired on Radio 4 and been published in several magazines.

Cutting Tongues is my first collection and is available from this website.