Mark Miwurdz – Part 3

The decline in ranting poetry
I eventually started to move more into straight stand up, as my poetry intros got longer and the poetry less. For a brief period, I had about three or four poems left in my set and would simply segue into them whilst in the middle of a stand up routine, without any introduction. It was quite an original style, I haven’t seen anyone else doing that. Swells went off to write for the NME, Attila was always in his own bubble, off supporting the Newtown Neurotics in Albania or wherever, Joolz was off with New Model Army, and Little Brother seemed to be performing less.
During the miner’s strike, me and Little Bro did a lot of benefit gigs around Yorkshire and there was one miner, called Bill, from Maltby colliery, who became taken with the cabaret going on and got a set together, of anecdotes, a couple of miner’s songs and some poetry he’d written. I got him on at a Cast weekend. The audience loved it, a real life striking miner, regaling them with poetry. Right on!
Even when stand up began to colonise the cabaret circuit, you’d still see quite a few comics doing a bit of poetry. People like Owen O’Neil, and Felix I believe, and quite a few others who I can’t think of atm. I think the poetry was used as a, first base, vehicle for comedy, for quite a few fledgling comics, who hadn’t the confidence of doing a whole set of straight stand up yet or were still trying to find their own comedy voice. But there was also an attitude emerging that poetry was a bit like stand up’s wimpy younger brother, and there were a few people doing poetry as a characters, like Andy Greenhalgh, who did a rock n roll poet, I think. Sort of poetry sending up poetry if you like.
I think there was a growing feeling then, amongst comedy audiences that poetry was a bit naff I remember hearing a few groans when a stand ups said, ‘ok, I’m going to do a poem now’. John Hegley seemed to be the only person still doing pure poetry on the circuit, he could even win over the notoriously tough Tunnel Club crowd, with poems. The only actual poetry gig aligned with the London comedy circuit I think, was Apples and Snakes. They knew there was a crossover and were never snotty in those days about booking people like me who were combining stand up and poetry.
Once I’d gotten over the self-consciousness of being constantly compared to JCC, I was able to acknowledge his influence more, and I wrote a homage to him, in his style, called ‘He’s not John Cooper Clarke, I am!’ claiming that he was an imposter and that I was in fact, the real JCC, which I used to do in this longer one man shows at Edinburgh. It was important to me to acknowledge the poetry roots. It was originally written years before, for a gig at the Limit Club in Sheffield when I supported JCC. The local papers had made a War of the Roses, Lancs Vs Yorks thing of it so it was sending that up. He was happy for me to go on during his set and perform it. “Aye, come on after Salome, keep it snappy.”
Interesting that you can see the performance poetry family tree going from Music Hall monologists, through to a few TV monologists (Cyril Fletcher/Pam Ayres), the folk circuit, Billy Connolly/ Mike Harding etc always used to do a few poems, the punk/new wave and pub rock scene had JCC, and us lot, and then the alternative cabaret/variety circuit. The two exceptions were the 70s Working Men’s Club circuit, and again in the post-cabaret Comedy circuit, Jongleurs era. In both those arenas you saw virtually no poetry. I see there are more poetry nights/clubs going now, so it will be interesting to see where it goes next.

Highs and Lows of poetry
Apart from the actual stupendous fact that performing poetry took me out of a factory job and into full time employ on stage, there were many highlights, inc some of the things I’ve already mentioned. But one stand out gig was Sheffield Top Rank, early 80s, (where I used to go, dancing to Prince Buster’s Al Capone, at the under 18s discos, in the early 70s). I was on with The Redskins and Gil Scott-Heron, at the height of his powers. It doesn’t get much better than that. I’d seen the gig advertised already and went to the promoters and said I HAVE to be put on the bill. I already had a good relationship with them anyway, but I think they saw the blazing intent in my eyes and just said, no problem. And I was even paid for the privilege.
My biggest regret of the poetry days was one midweek afternoon, I got a call from the then social secretary at Leeds Uni, Andy Kershaw. He needed a last minute support for a band that night. The fee was £30. But I was recovering from a really bad throat infection and was still ill. I said I’d try and organize a lift, because I wasn’t up to sitting on a train and hanging around. Anyway, I couldn’t get a lift and called back to say I’d have to pass. The band was The Clash. And I never did them live. I may even have the notes of the call on an old phone pad that had sat by the phone in the hall at my mum’s.

When I think back to those early days, where you would wander on to a load of people standing up, in a refectory, or a dank dark club who didn’t know who you were and could have just walked off to the bar, or shouted you down, and how we quite fearlessly stood there and won them over most times, with a lone voice, when they had come to see a band, it felt like we were doing something new, it did definitely take guts or just naivety and bravado. Heady times…

And there was this one guy who used to turn up regularly at Cast New Variety gigs, sometimes with fresh bruises from his latest Red Action exploits. I remember having the ‘shouldn’t use the word cunt’ debate with him. The same one that I had had a couple of years before, when I first started doing Cast gigs. I heard later he had started doing poetry under the name Teething Wells, though I never saw him live. Often wonder what happened to that boy…