A book festival session on protest poetry on Saturday took a nostalgic Phill Jupitus on a canter through a career that started in the early 1980s when he was a civil servant by day and fought Thatcher by night, “like a kind of ideological Batman”. Clutching an armful of period fanzines, he recited the first poem he ever performed as Porky the Poet: “They’ve all Grown up in the Beano/ Dennis the Menace has got pubic hair/ Biffo is well into anarchy now/ He’s more of a punk than a bear…”
Some things change and some don’t – among them, Jupitus’s penchant for protest poetry compiled from ‘found’ material
Part of his show in the last couple of years has been the “ten-line fringe”, for which he assembles the titles of fringe shows into poems. Last year he collected 210 titles into 21 poems, with targets including Nigel Farage (“The Racist/Nobody’s boy/ Lives in a Meaningless Shed/ On the Wrong Side of the Door”). This year he is working his way through the titles of 2,173 shows. Poem 7 featured Boris Johnson: “The boy in blue/Not as nice as he looks/Lie back and think of England/ Is that what you want?..”).
Admirable though Porky continues to be, this is familiar stuff. Three years ago, we played a similar game on the books website, with book titles instead of shows, inspiring this ingenious lampoon from site regular, Kushti drawn from a week of reviews in the Guardian: “Here Comes Trouble/ Just Boris/ The English Ghost/ A Force to be Reckoned With/The Price of Civilization”
As a short set by a second performer at the event, Elvis McGonagall, confirmed, it’s not only composition techniques and the targets that are familiar but the style and pace of delivery. Does this matter? Not if you’re out for entertainment alone, but one of the biggest coups of the British political establishment over the 30 years is to clone itself so successfully that there’s nothing new to to protest about. There are only so many things to be said about Nigel Farage, and many of them were said before about Thatcher.
It took the session’s two female poets to show that there are other ways: Hollie McNish bounced her own experience off that of her two grandmothers to explore the things that have and haven’t changed for women. Breast-feeding in public is still taboo, but sexual fantasy isn’t (Bricks turn me on sometimes”). The politics lies in the juxtaposition.
Hannah Silva brings a new texture and musicality to the Party party by using a loop pedal to layer up words and sound into scats. One poem is crafted from Ed Miliband’s repeated reply to a series of questions about the public service strikes. It consists of just two sentences - “Strikes are wrong at a time when negotiations are still underway. The government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner but it is time for both sides to get around the negotiating table set aside the rhetoric and stop this happening again”. When this statement is fed through the loop it becomes simultaneously trite, anxious and interminable, which seems a pretty shrewd critique of the current political scene.
