IF YOU WANNA READ SPOKEN WORD OR PERFORM LIVE (IN WHATEVER CONTEXT) BUT YOU ARE TOO NERVOUS OR DON'T THINK YOU'RE GOOD ENOUGH....

believe me, you are probably better than at least 50% of the ones that do, and by virtue of the fact that you have even SOME level of self-reflective criticism/self doubt, you prove yourself to have a quality filter unavailable to many of the dicks that get up onstage. Just go to a performance/spoken word night anywhere and then you'll see. I went to Glam Slam last night and it was a decidedly mixed bag. I guess that's a good thing in a lot of ways cos you want to foster an atmosphere where everyone feels comfortable performing and no one feels intimidated by having to be a pro or whatever (plenty of terrible pros out there too).

Me and my friends were given the task of being judges and generally every time I held up a number I got booed for being too harsh. It was like being Simon Cowell or something and it was amazingly fun. To be honest I thought we were too generous in a lot of cases, if 10 is the best poem you ever heard then really few people should score above a 6. Oh well, maybe it is too harsh for what's meant to be a supportive environment I don't know. On principle I think competitive poetry might be a bit wrong but actually it's loads of fun to judge people and I should never be put in a position of significant power in real life. Fortunately that's not likely to happen.

One guy delivered a monotone rhyming couplet poem he had obviously written on the tube about a 'whore' but I thankfully didn't fully get the jist cos he mumbled so much. We gave him four which was quite generous.

I'm def going to enter next year even though I don't really do poetry but I figured I could do better than that. Some of the poems were good though. The winner was a drama teacher who did performance poetry, which obviously doesn't sound very promising, but then she did a poem about Clapham which was hilarious. It rhymed 'Clapham' with 'slap 'em' for obvious reasons.

And on Sunday night I saw Momus. A guy who also sometimes makes you go 'hmmm, this is possibly sexist/dubious' but mostly just 'this is WEIRD'. He's a very strange looking guy and he stumbles around the stage like a geriatric imitating monkeys and picking his nose. He's also a weird old perv and that comes across in his music and sometimes you like him for it and sometimes not. At times it gets tedious, but at other times he's great. I'm loving 'A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy Parts 17 - 24', you gotta love the new ordery dance beat. Once you get a certain way through the song if you're feeling all poly and earnest and responsible, you're like 'dude, take responsibility for your own shit', but I love it anyways, and then the best bit when he starts singing, 'if you really love me take lovers...love the others', etc. There's something actually quite poignant about it but then I'm an emo get. And you don't know what's ironic and you don't care.

My mate Heena first got me into Momus by putting this awesome song on a mixtape for me:



Another must-listen poly song in my humble opinion. I don't think that's the official video. Just the karaoke version. I don't think there is one. The ever talented and hot Amanda Palmer covers it too, kinda losing the subtlety of the original (especially with the screaming girls). It's still good.