No Designated Venue: An Oral History of London’s Music and Poetry Scenes

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If you frequent venues like the George Tavern, Cafe OTO, SET Social or even the Windmill Brixton, you might get the strange sense that everyone knows each other, or is one degree removed in some way. The lead singer of that band you saw last week is now hosting a poetry event, and the poetry reading you’ve gone to features a guitarist from that same band. These collisions are not a coincidence – for a long time London has served as a threshold for the worlds of music and literature, and today is no different. We spoke individually to writers, poets, musicians and event organisers based in London about the connections between the two art forms and the spaces that host them. What follows is an account of those interviews aggregated into one extended conversation.

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Nicko Mroczkowski (writer and musician): Live music and poetry are definitely having a moment right now, at least in London.

Phoenix Yemi (poet, artist, founder Black Geographies): What I love about London is that there’s always something out there for you.

Angus Rogers (poet, musician Opus Kink, founder Blue Shout Poetry): These days most venues will let you try whatever you want if you’re persuasive enough and don’t give them the full sordid details of what it might entail.

Roland Fischer-Vousden (writer, co-founder SET): There’s loads of different things happening in different places. I personally quite like events that mash together different disciplines. Especially if it’s done in a way that’s kind of hazy and you can walk into a room and there’s some poetry, and then you go somewhere else, and there’s someone playing something else. I think if it’s done in the right way, it can be really weird and nice and strange.

Emmeline Armitage (musician, writer The Line of Best Fit): Cafe OTO, SET Social, The Haggertson and Matchstick Piehouse. Those are exciting spaces to be in.

Lloyd Bolton (poet, musician as Frank Lloyd Wleft, editor Hard of Hearing Magazine): The Avalon Café, Piehouse Co-op and The George Tavern spring to mind. All London venues that put on music and poetry, and all sorts of other kinds of artforms, and make it feel perfectly natural.

Nicko Mroczkowski: Reference Point, Cafe OTO, MAP Studio Cafe, Avalon Cafe.

Arcadia Molinas (writer, editor Worms Magazine): Reference Point is so chameleonic. I’ve seen it become a million different things. Cafe OTO as well, of course.

Angus Rogers: Places like the George Tavern, The Windmill, Venue MOT, Dash The Henge, Paper Dress Vintage, pubs, cafes, galleries, warehouses…

Ned Green (writer, publisher Toothgrinder Press, musician Legss): I think one of the most important things about these sorts of venues is that they’re architecturally non-traditional. Every sort of venue where it’s above 400 capacity can start to feel like it could be any other city.

Nicko Mroczkowski: I’ve also just realised that they all present themselves as ‘cafés’, and this is definitely not a coincidence. What makes them work is how they’re designed – like the old-school Parisian café-salons.

Angus Rogers: And, actually, good attention to lighting is the secret weapon. No bright whites.

Lloyd Bolton: But it’s the clientele at both that make housing music and poetry possible, crowds that are generally willing to try and appreciate both forms on similar terms.

Jamie Cameron (editor, The London Magazine): It’s also a specific type of crowd at these sort of interdisciplinary nights. It’s different to the crowd of people you’d get at like a ‘reading series’ event. But it’s also different to the crowd you’d get at a spoken word open mic. It sits somewhere between them all. A good example is something like Out-Spoken.

Anthony Anaxagorou (poet, founder Out-Spoken): Out-Spoken started as a live music and poetry night in 2012. I wanted to try and get audiences in front of poets, like professional poets – published poets, known poets who people read and follow. I wanted to have more of a premium night, I guess, that was always the vision: bridge the gap between page poetry, performance poetry and music, and try and bring all of those three things into one space without making it feel overly gimmicky, and just calling it poetry and music, rather than spoken word or page poetry and singer songwriter.

Ned Green: Spoken word can be transformative, and it’s been transformative for me. I think when it’s done well, it can be an incredible, productive performance. But when it’s done badly, it’s just fucking boring. Sometimes I want to turn up and for it to be more curated.

Poetry’s so versatile – it can work at the Royal Albert Hall, and it can work on the top deck of a bus.

Scarlett Woolfe (musician, singer Weaving in Purgatory, founder A Woman Becomes a Wolf): Like, you can’t just go and get poets up on stage just to read something and then go, ‘yeah, there’s poetry… and then they’ve got bands on!’ You have to be able to create an atmosphere.

Anthony Anaxagorou: The [Out-Spoken] concept was pretty straightforward – I wanted to have a night that didn’t have an open mic, and that just featured three poets and two musicians.

Lloyd Bolton: What makes the staging of music and poetry together possible is organisers who don’t necessarily insist on tried and tested formulas for selling tickets and getting people in the door.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: We opened SET Social, which is a kind of affordable arts and social club – twelve pounds a year – where we run our arts programme. What is quite central to our programming is that we do a lot of multidisciplinary stuff. We do a lot with performance, performance art and text and music and visual arts all together.

Vera Leppänen (musician, singer & bassist Man/Woman/Chainsaw): The thing about poetry and music is that it very much can be played and performed anywhere, poetry even more so because there’s less equipment. Most art can take place anywhere, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t. I think it should happen everywhere.

Jack Underwood (poet, writer, lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths): You can read poetry in a phone box with one person, and it’s fine, you don’t need to be amplified. I’ve always been a fan, as a musician, of grotty little subterranean basement spaces where you feel a little bit hidden and outside of the world. I think there’s an intimacy that can happen with that. DIY music often doesn’t have crowds of more than 30 to 50 people. In a basement, that can feel like the whole world is there, and that’s a really lovely place to read poems to a crowd.

Anthony Anaxagorou: Poetry’s so versatile – it can work at the Royal Albert Hall, and it can work on the top deck of a bus.

Angus Rogers: A ‘designated venue’ is just something we’ve made up about a room. Using something for other than its ascribed purpose is one of the most enjoyable things about art. Usually the most stultifying place for a poetry reading is a bookshop or library. Everyone loves a rock show in an annoyingly unsuitable location.

Jack Underwood: When I was reading alongside bands, I just had to go on stage and introduce myself. I found it really terrifying, or weird, to just walk on stage and say, ‘Hi, I’m Jack. I’m going to read some poems.’ I think there has to be some sort of sensitivity to that.

Phoenix Yemi: I’ve done events like that before [when you read poetry before a music gig]. Sometimes your presence there feels a bit redundant, or almost like an afterthought. I think it’s great if it’s a gig where the person who’s asked you to perform understands and respects your practice and sees it as important.

Scarlett Woolfe: It’s the scariest thing to read poetry. You’ve not got a band behind you, you’ve just got you.

Vera Leppänen: I even felt this when I broke my finger and I couldn’t play bass. I was only singing, and I felt like this is the most horrifying, exposing thing in the world, but I’ve got six other people on the stage with me. I can imagine how intense that is when you’re literally just speaking.

Jack Underwood: One of the most successful poetry and music nights was the Clinic nights, ‘Clinic Presents’. It was created by Goldsmiths students. It was Rachael Allen, she’s now a brilliant poet and editor at Fitzcarraldo, and Andrew Parkes who works for the Poetry School, and Sam Buchan Watts, who’s another poet and an academic. Sean Roy Parker, who was an art student. They would have an exhibition space in the upstairs of the Amersham Arms and the whole floor would be filled with people sitting cross-legged listening. Then there’d be an exodus of people downstairs, to go and watch a band, and then they’d file upstairs again.

Ned Green: In my experience, there was always quite a strong crossover between people who went to music nights and poets who went to those same nights. The universities that are in the south-east: you’ve got UAL, LCC, you’ve got Goldsmiths, you’ve got Ravensbourne in Greenwich. You have a strong cohort of young people interested in learning and exploring different practices.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: We are centered around the south, I think, because it’s cheaper and there’s more access to space than there is in the rest of London. That’s always kind of how it works, that artists follow where there’s places to be able to make work and go to events, and therefore, the venues also follow in that way, because they’re also looking for cheap places to be able to do events.

Ned Green: I got into it through open mic nights and being at Goldsmiths and having friends who were writers, and I felt as though there was a lot of good work being produced, and not a lot of avenues to get their name in print. With a friend of mine called Elinor Potts, we started an anthology called Away with Words. We did a night to launch the book with contributions from the readers. We asked Jack Underwood to sort of headline the event.

Jack Underwood: It felt very exciting to bring a band crowd to poetry, but also to bring a poetry crowd into music. Maybe it encourages poets to write into a space which is more varied than just a literary one, and maybe, God forbid, it might even encourage musicians to write for a poetry audience.

Lloyd Bolton: Performing poetry live always creates a shift in the energy of a show, but not always for the better. Unsurprisingly, a loud and busy venue isn’t always the best place to show off your poetry.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: When we had the Greenwich Pensioner, our aim was to run interdisciplinary events there all of the time – I say this because it’s about the challenge of building DIY venues where there’s so much pressure on space – but we also had single-glazed windows, and the noise was going out onto a lot of houses all around us. And while it had always been a pub, I don’t think it’d always been a pub where you had, like, incredibly loud music coming out of it. I remember one particular night where I was just standing outside with the sound behind me, and it was just like a metal band inside with two drummers playing at about 11pm on a Sunday, really fucking loud. I was standing outside, just waiting for the police to come. It was awful.

Vera Leppänen: I mean, I understand some spaces are better suited to certain things than others. Like, the same way I don’t think that you should necessarily have a fucking hardcore band perform in a cathedral purely because of the acoustics.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: Finding the right space for music and performance is always tough. We work hard to be good neighbours and keep sound issues to a minimum, because it’s the only way to keep affordable, accessible arts spaces alive in London.

Jack Underwood: I was once asked to read for Tim Burgess, from the Charlatans. He produced a record, a little seven inch. I went and recorded some poems at their studio. Then when he toured, he had a reading at that space on Upper Street, Union Chapel. There was a huge audience of people, and with enough amplification that they could all sort of mutter and go out and decide to get a beer or have a cigarette or whatever during the reading, and that kind of worked.

Once you involve music, everything changes. The stakes are higher.

Scarlett Woolfe: We don’t particularly, as a society, have the capacity to sustain our attention. I think having this mixture of art forms is really invigorating and captivating. It keeps people’s attention, and at the same time ensures the space is one where people are really listening, actually listening.

Jack Underwood: Poetry requires this kind of empathetic participation. It can excite an imaginative aspect to listening that then obviously would serve anyone playing music, following a poet.

Anthony Anaxagorou: I think, for me, music has always been a way of offsetting the tension, the intensity, of poetry. Poetry is so intense in its concentration, its focus. The interesting thing is, you listen to both of them with your ears, but you process one with your mind, and you process the other with your body.

Phoenix Yemi: I think it allows for a kind of ‘breath’ in a way. Especially if it’s your first time performing, or you’re a bit nervous or anxious, I find that music kind of allows you to almost take a deep breath and just settle on stage.

Anthony Anaxagorou: [Music] acts as a release valve.

Jack Underwood: I think what I like about Out-Spoken is that it brings more literary orientated forms of poetics in, alongside more spoken word poetics as well, in that sort of performance space. And somehow, whatever alchemy or chemistry those curators are using, there’s also music.

Anthony Anaxagorou: Initially, we wanted to try and strike a balance between spoken word and page poetry. We still try and do that – the problem is less and less people actually do spoken word now. Because of the way that publishing culture over the last ten years has changed, more poets are bypassing the performance and going straight into page poetry.

Arcadia Molinas: In my experience, what I’ve done more is blend those two [music gigs and poetry readings] together. I have a very close friend and collaborator called Nicko Mroczkowski. He is a very talented musician, and he plays gigs and he has different bands, but he’s also very well-versed in accompanying poetry and incorporating the element of improvisation. It’s a mutual listening process where he listens to you, the tone, so that he knows what chord to play and what scale to play in, what progression, what tempo. But you, as the poet, also listen to him so that the rhythm and the tone is all delivered in one packed punch.

Nicko Mroczkowski: Most of my output for the last few years has in fact been musical collaborations with poets. The first occasion was Phoenix Yemi’s black-history-focused event, Black Geographies. We decided last minute that I’d improvise some spacey guitar lines over her poetry, and it worked so well that we ended up having this for all of the performers – with no prior preparation.

Phoenix Yemi: I feel like that for me was really when music started becoming important.

Arcadia Molinas: Once you involve music, everything changes. The stakes are higher. It’s not just about you reading it; it’s about how you marry it with the music. Everything about your writing changes when you perform it. If you have a microphone, you have the distance from where the microphone is to your voice. You can whisper something if you have a microphone, and people will hear it. You can scream something, you can move your body, you can walk around the stage. You can make eye contact with people. I find it so exciting. I think there is a possibility for theatrics. You can bring something on stage. You can take off clothes. You can change, you can morph.

Angus Rogers: Some of my favourite shows have been improvised readings over improvised music – at its best it elevates all players to some third level and brings out the best in each part.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: The Oral Rinse nights and the East Anglia Records night and others in the first SET building in Alscot Road were formative experiences for me, and I think both effectively brought together text, performance and sound in a way I haven’t seen since. I think the point is that, in performance which involves text and sound, you are looking at exploiting how those two things complement and clash.

Jack Underwood: There’s definitely some sort of relationship between music, musicality, poetry and language. I’m really into the idea of hearing sentences and how they move, and the song of sentences and the intonation and syntax, and those kinds of things.

Arcadia Molinas: I really enjoyed being able to play with the sound of the words, and the cadence of how they were coming out when I read it out loud, in a way that isn’t exactly the same as when you read something or when you write it on a piece of paper.

Ned Green: I feel like speaking over melodies and rhythms is often easier than coming up with vocal melodies and lines, because you don’t have to think about the phonetics. You don’t have to think about the syllabic elements of how one word lands on a note from the guitar, for example.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: But it’s really difficult, because either you go for, like, the total Sprechgesang thing, where you’re not doing anything that relates to the rhythm, or the opposite where you’re verging ever so slowly into a form of rapping.

Emmeline Armitage: I do think there’s a wave of artists harnessing speech in their music in a novel way. And I’m sure it’s for a few reasons – rhythmic and political, for example – but I also think it’s emotive. With singing you can sometimes mask yourself with a melody, but in speech you are hearing the raw form of someone’s voice. And it’s piercing in that way, because it gets straight to the heart of what needs to be conveyed.

With poetry, you get in your head, and music allows you to get back into your body.

Arcadia Molinas: In the world of punk or post-punk, the overlap is a lot more present between poetry and lyric.

Lloyd Bolton: Post-punk music certainly seems to have a distinct appeal to budding poets, I suppose because of the freedom of the form. More disjointed than traditional punk, it leaves room to ramble over the top, and the jagged music works quite well with the fragmentation of blank verse poetry.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: Well, I mean, specifically, I think with music, you’re kind of aided by the fact that you’ve got sound and rhythm behind you, and you can essentially say more cheesy or direct things and get away with it, and if you looked at that written down, you’d be like: that’s pretty bad.

Vera Leppänen: There was a kind of trend a few years ago with bands like Shame, Black Country, New Road, Fontaines DC. Shame is a good example. You know, this kind of talking over your guitars, and I think I would call it slam poetry, essentially, over music, which is something that’s been done forever, like with the Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth.

Jack Underwood: If you’re listening to a band like Slint, or something like that, like Steve Albini, his lyrics, he’s not exactly singing. Or The Fall you know, like talking, saying cool things, or Black Country, New Road. Their early work in particular felt like it had to do with poetry. There’s always been talky musicians.

Lloyd Bolton: There’s a really great crop of bands at the moment who either incorporate poetic elements into their music or put out poetry as well as songs. Legss were a big influence on me, they fuse music and poetry together really well. Angus Rogers from Opus Kink has a parallel life as a fantastic poet and runs Blue Shout, one of my favourite poetry open mics in London.

Angus Rogers: All this post-punk bellowing or post-rock mumbling over cellos and oboes that’s happening now gets hailed as some kind of new-age street-poetry, but don’t be fooled. They’ve been arm in arm since we were fishes.

Emmeline Armitage: Bands like English Teacher, or Black Midi, who have this monologue-style of lyrical delivery, and use domestic language in quite an absurd way to achieve a bigger message about the state of the music industry, the country, are doing something that’s not a far cry from what’s happening within the literary world too.

Vera Leppänen: It was a lot of men talking because they weren’t very good singers and wanted to be in a band, which is fine.

Jack Underwood: I think it’s about poetic sensibility. I think some singers, or musicians, have a poetic sensibility to what they’re doing. That can be without music, without words. There’s something about a poetic sensibility and that comes first in poetry too. You don’t write poems because you want to show off how good your line breaks are, or you might – that comes later. Initially, you sort of start thinking about poems because you’re inclined towards a problem or a question, or you feel a question, you feel a problem. Nick Drake, for example, like this sort of quandary, the predicament, the melancholia of Nick Drake.

Vera Leppänen: I was reading Songwriters on Songwriting, which is this massive book of different interviews. There’s a bit where [Paul Zollo] talks to Leonard Cohen about lyric writing and how the most specific imagery is often the most universal and the most interesting. Leonard Cohen says that saying ‘the sycamore’ is more interesting than saying ‘the tree’.

Jack Underwood: Leonard Cohen, ‘I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me’. Or, ‘I took the dust of a long sleepless night and I put it in your little shoe’. It’s a brilliant, poetic thing. I can’t think of anyone really better at that than Leonard Cohen. He’s so good. There are some people whose lines are, to me, just good poetic lines.

Anthony Anaxagorou: They’ve always walked shoulder to shoulder, if you think about it – the Bob Dylans and the Leonard Cohens and the Janis Joplins – they were always in and among the poets.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: Personally, I can’t think of any bit of lyricism in general, that I think written down looks particularly good. I mean, like, there’s good lyrics. In the context of that Radiohead song, when he says, ‘If I could be who you wanted all the time’, you’re like, ‘oh my god, that’s so amazing’ – especially as a teenager. But if you just saw that written down, ‘If I could be who you wanted all the time’, you’d be like: ‘Oh.’

Jack Underwood: You can feel ‘poemy’ from listening to music. But maybe what people don’t realise is that they can access that same feeling or response to feeling ‘poemy’ in actual poems.

Anthony Anaxagorou: With poetry, you get in your head, and music allows you to get back into your body, and you can write through the body, which is the only way I can really articulate it. You feel something, but it’s not over-sentimentality or this outpouring of ‘woe is me’ – it feels like a very spiritual experience in that it’s an impulse. You catalyse feelings by stimulating yourself through certain sounds, and those sounds will give birth to a word or phrase that you then interrogate.

Jack Underwood: I suppose what most people would think about will be singer-songwriters, where you listen out for the songwriting and the lyrics, and that’s part of the way in which the listener can sort of embody the song or be part of it.

Jamie Cameron: Sometimes I think that maybe musicians are just fundamentally cooler than poets. If I think about my musical idols growing up, and then I think about my favourite poets now – the ones I really love and admire – it’s not exactly like I’d want to hang out with them or that I reckon they’d be a great laugh.

I’d love to go around the world wearing an Emily Berry t-shirt. That would be my dream.

Jack Underwood: David Berman would have been a poet that people thought was cool. But then he also played guitar with Pavement and had the Silver Jews as a band. And there are poets a bit like that. Alt-Lit kind of tried to do that, but unfortunately, the poetry was not very good.

Angus Rogers: [David Berman] mastered the art of melding song and poetry, that precision of terrible emotion, humour and cadence that’s so unbelievably difficult to distill.

Vera Leppänen: [There is] an interview with Kathleen Hannah saying how she was telling someone that she wanted to do poetry, to speak to people about injustices she was facing as a woman. Then somebody said to her, you need to start a band, otherwise nobody’s gonna listen to you.

Jack Underwood: Music, I think, is consumed with this idea that it’s almost part of the semiotics of yourself. Maybe that’s what it is, that anyone can get into music. But poetry is cool. To know who the cool poets are, that’s cool… If you go to, like, a White Review party or something, it’s full of fucking hipsters. They’re people who are a way cooler crowd than you’d ever get in like the New Cross Inn.

Anthony Anaxagorou: What’s good is that when you go backstage, the musicians are enamoured with the poets. They’re like, ‘That was amazing. I don’t even know how you can write like that or think like that, or see those things.’

Roland Fischer-Vousden: I think there are probably a lot of people who are involved in music who think they could be really good poets and there are a lot of poets who think they could be really good musicians, who aren’t. But because no one really gives that much kudos to poets anyway, it doesn’t really matter if they’re also labouring under the delusions that they could be a good musician. Whereas it’s slightly more annoying when famous musicians labour under the delusions that they could be a good poet, like Pete Doherty or whoever.

Jamie Cameron: There was actually a guy in my school who always used to repeat that Pete Doherty had got an A in his English A-level, and that was supposed to be proof that he was a really good poet.

Jack Underwood: The problem is that nobody knows who so many of these poets are. I’d love more merch, to be honest. I’d love to go around the world wearing an Emily Berry t-shirt. That would be my dream.

Anthony Anaxagorou: [Do I think there’s anything missing from the poetry and live music scene?] Yes – money.

Scarlett Woolfe: We’re skint as fuck, yeah, we’ve got no money, but we do it. We survive. We do our jobs. We do our things. We try to make the best out of it.

Anthony Anaxagorou: It’s literally impossible to keep going with so many cuts, and I talk about the political climate, but arts and culture is just really, really difficult right now. All the money, all the grants available, are oversubscribed. Out-Spoken is, as far as I’m aware, the biggest regular poetry live night in the whole of Europe. So, because we’ve got that status, it makes it… It’s difficult, and I don’t know whether we’ll continue being funded, and there’s no other real way to do it, unless you were to find private investment, but then they’ll be like, ‘what do we get out of it?’

Nicko Mroczkowski: I’ve been broke for a decade! I don’t know anyone who is getting paid enough. I don’t mean to sound edgy here – this is the honest reality of the art scene in London. It’s dark and inhumane. We’re being made to compete with each other for opportunities, but the winners don’t even get the prize money.

Anthony Anaxagorou: None of the sector would exist if it wasn’t for Arts Council England and things like that. Everyone’s relying on them, and the more the government cuts and cuts and cuts from grants, the more impossible it is – and not just for poetry, but for music as well.

Roland Fischer-Vousden: Running a venue, it is really difficult to generate enough money to cover the cost of booze plus paying staff. At SET Social we don’t pay any rent on that building and our only costs are maintenance and artist fees for like DJs or whatever. That’s our main outgoings, and electricity and stuff like that. And SET Social only breaks even. It actually almost loses money slightly, and that’s without having to pay rent. In the context of a person trying to set up a venue, if they have to pay rent and business rates on a building, it’s a really difficult situation to try and generate any income from. The economics of it are just fucked. Basically, yeah, the economics are really shit.

Nicko Mroczkowski: In my experience it’s all too often the case that people who work at hybrid venues are spread too thin. It’s hard enough to, say, perform sound tech duties for a musical performance, but these small teams are also asked to oversee visuals, screenings, set design, lighting, installation, interviews, etc., given that an independent venue is unlikely to have the budget for dedicated music, design, visual art or dance staff.

Anthony Anaxagorou: Music is difficult because with musicians, there’s a lot more people involved. There’s agents, there’s managers. They want money. They want money on top of money. They’ve loads of clauses. They don’t want to do this. They want that. It’s just a bit of a ball ache. And also, a lot of the musicians that we’ve encountered are a little bit over hyped. There’s a hype that comes with being a musician. They say, ‘I want my entourage,’ twelve, thirteen people on a guest list. And it’s like, no [laughs].

Roland Fischer-Vousden: I would also say that poetry is obviously way less popular than just saying you’re going to have some people playing like funk and soul on vinyl, and there’ll be drinks and you can play pool. That brings in a way bigger crowd than experimental music or poetry. It’s really difficult to judge when people will come and when people won’t. I’ve run events where about three people turned up, and I’d invited, like, really good poets to come and read and speak, and well-known poets too, and I just couldn’t understand why no one turned up if I’d done all the same stuff I’d done before for an event two weeks earlier and people were queuing around the block. There just seems to be no rhyme or reason.

Jamie Cameron: To some extent I think poetry is just a marginal art form. Of course, it’s like anything in that it has varying levels of accessibility or points of entry. But people always make reference to this period in the past when there was, like, ‘a common reader’ of poetry who walked around reciting John Donne to themselves or something, but I think that’s overstated. The more people who like and read poetry the better, but poetry doesn’t need to have mass appeal. Maybe these kinds of events are necessarily marginal.

Arcadia Molinas: I’ve actually seen a lot of events [at Reference Point] that use music and poetry as ways of disrupting systems. Nicko hosts this event called Contra Facts, and his idea for the event is that where language fails to dismantle systems, music can do that instead. The notion of improvisation is responsive – it’s very community based, and it’s very present minded. I’ve seen events that use these kinds of tools as ways to challenge the powers that be.

Nicko Mroczkowski: The boundaries between forms of art are historical and cultural, not natural or essential, and it’s often necessary to transgress or renegotiate them to produce something genuinely radical.

Phoenix Yemi: I will say, when I first started reading poetry, the landscape felt a lot different than it does now. I think I had an idea in my head of what a poet looked like, or what I expected them to be, and it was kind of a white male.

Arcadia Molinas: I think Worms’ audience is very female, or a female presenting audience in general. It’s definitely something I’ve noticed when we host events. Even the magazine itself, a lot of the articles, a lot of the contributions, are written by femme people. I feel like it’s definitely something that is palpable.

Scarlett Woolfe: The amount of women that I meet who write poetry and feel really embarrassed about it – it’s about trying to get rid of that feeling. We might make a mistake, and might be wrong, but that’s good – you learn from it. It’s not about being right or wrong. It’s a space to take risks, to be intuitive and to feel part of something altogether, not isolated or on your own. From the beginning, we spoke a lot about how difficult it is to navigate the music industry as a woman. It’s very male dominated.

Vera Leppänen: There are loads of events that are specifically curated for women for instance. We just were really lucky and we got to record at Abbey Road, and that was for their programme Equalise, which is for getting women and non-binary people into sound engineering, which is dope. I think spaces do exist, but I think there’s a long way to go for sure.

Ned Green: Honestly, the majority of the demographics that I see at poetry events in south-east London is quite white. Spoken word music as a tradition is very rooted in African music, in Caribbean diaspora cultures, people like Benjamin Zephaniah. Storytelling and rapping and those methods of artistic expression have been a much more prominent and prescient theme in Black music.

Anthony Anaxagorou: [At Out-Spoken] the process is trying to strike a balance – you know, we’ve got to balance out the gender, the race, the class, the poetics, all that kind of stuff, to make it feel like an experience. We also look at who’s got a book out. We never used to do that before, and we’re still not entirely sure if it’s the best way to do it. Just because someone hasn’t got a book out, or they’ve been quiet for like, four or five years, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider them.

Scarlett Woolfe: I’m very adamant about choosing people who haven’t done anything before. But they need a safe listening environment, where it’s not just a load of drunk people, but people who are fully absorbed into their work, which is sort of a catalyst that gives them confidence.

Arcadia Molinas: I love being with people. And writing is so lonely. Sure, if you publish a book and then go on a tour you get to meet people, but until then, you’ve been in your room, like talking to yourself for fucking months, you know? So I think what reading something out loud or performing something does is just connect you with people and in a way that I think is important for life force.

Jack Underwood: I like the way that music can create a space, a meditative space, into which something like a poem can then speak, with its atmosphere of attentiveness and care and communality.

Jamie Cameron: It’s inserting a communal aspect into a process that is, for the most part, quite inward looking. You publish a book, or some poems, or whatever, and that signals the end of a sustained effort. Finally it’s out in the world. But the feedback loops just don’t exist – you wait for the response and most of the time there is no response whatsoever. Performing it to a crowd gives you a sense of your work existing to other people. I am sometimes very jealous of the closeness musicians have to their audiences. But I don’t know, there’s a new reading event in London cropping up every week so maybe that will change?

Ned Green: It’s hard to stop and think, because it is all so flash in the pan. I think London, by nature, doesn’t really allow you much time for reminiscence.

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Yasmina Snyder is a Franco-Cuban writer from Los Angeles. She is currently studying for her BA in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is particularly interested in life-writing, short fiction and music journalism.

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