It was a different time.

Do you remember Spoken Word? It used to be a thing. Maybe it still is? People everywhere would go to clubs to watch strangers with personality disorders over-gesticulate while speaking with odd formulaic intonation. It was an amazing time to be alive if you were a fan of political and social tragedy being co-opted by middle-class people and then regurgitated in a forced rhyme scheme. For a spell in the late two-thousands, I would stagger from gig to gig in a drunken stupor, committing crimes against language to implausibly lovely audiences. All of which were way more generous than I deserved. I’m currently engaged in the grotesquely laborious process of de-cluttering my iTunes library. I’ve stumbled across legions of untitled audio files of gigs and other peculiar performance bits. Maybe it’s masochism or perhaps even misty-eyed nostalgia, but despite the excruciating cringiness of it, I’ve decided to post some of these old files here for posterity. I’m unlikely to ever step on a stage as a performer again, so they can now be viewed as anachronistic snapshots into a bygone era rather than some terrifyingly inappropriate CV. This one must be from around 2008 (MySpace is referenced, as is a new-fangled thing called online shopping). I'm pretty sure it’s at Halo on Gloucester Road in Bristol. That’s Julian Ramsey Wade comparing. They were a lovely lot at Halo. I performed in character back then (though with little skill or nuance). I was (and still am) preoccupied with our darkness and cruelty and how emerging technologies might exploit and exacerbate those things. Referencing so much violence would be frowned upon these days, and that’s probably no bad thing. So be warned, content-wise, I rapidly skip from blasphemy to stalking to murder with the naive social nonchalance of a pissed-up, pre-culture war gen Xer in a consequence-free environment.