Today, I’m back home and putting my feet up after a weekend driving half the length of the country with fellow pandemonialist Emma Purshouse so we could do a couple of gigs. It’s time to reflect on two very different – but equally wonderful – nights, and I’m inviting you along for the ride, you lucky lucky thing.
On Friday, we were in Morecambe’s West End Playhouse, each performing shows we’re pulling together with an eye on Fringe festivals this summer. Emma’s is a brilliant piece about being Wolverhampton’s first poet laureate, and weaves together the challenges of earning a living as a freelance artist in a pandemic (more on those challenges later) with several pieces of her poetry. Mine is a 50-minute piece about how I fell into life in the music industry and never quite got it together to fall back out again, and Friday was its first ever run out in front of a live audience. I’m delighted to say it was a success, and application of a few judicious tweaks will make future performances even tighter.
Next day in Hexham we were back to something more standard: 20-minute sets of poetry as guest poets at Words on the Wall. This was the latest in a series of PAYF events organised by Leeds-based poet Joe Williams, and it was an absolute belter! A packed room in a friendly pub on a Saturday afternoon, run with consummate skill by Joe and his Box of Mystery, and with a really high standard of open mic poetry. You can read more about Words on the Wall in this review, posted on the Write Out Loud website by Greg Freeman. If you’re in the area, I suggest you keep your eyes peeled for the next one – you won’t regret it.
We had a blast. We sold lots of books. And we’re hugely grateful to the two local promoters – Matt Panesh in Morecambe; Joe Williams in Hexham – for organising these events. Without their hard work and dedication, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to share the work we’ve crafted with audiences in Lancashire and Northumberland. Nor would we have got to hear the beautiful poems from open-mic poets in Hexham. All our lives are richer for that exchange.
At the same time, it strikes me that the vibrancy of a live literature and arts scene in a town should not be reliant on the drive, goodwill, determination, and obstinacy of individuals who do what they do for the love of it, and – because they must – manage it all on a shoestring, taking no payment themselves. We live in one of the richest countries in the world: why are we not funding grassroots arts properly? Why isn’t there a network of venues in every town across the country?
Imagine a world where such a network existed. A web of local venues and organsations, country-wide, offering people a platform, an outlet for their creativity, a place where they can get up behind the mic themselves, where they can see what touring artists have to offer. Where they are part of a healthy, dynamic arts ecosytem, playing its part in regenerating town centres, boosting the well-being of its participants, and changing lives.
Right now, that isn’t happening. That’s not intended as a criticism of Arts Council England – they’re underfunded and overwhelmed, and (depending who you talk to) in a position to fund as little as 10-18% of the applications they receive. That’s a ridiculously small percentage, and it inevitably means that there are excellent and worthy projects which won’t get funded, and that people who are running excellent and worthy events will decide that the time and effort they’d spend on drafting and submitting a funding application which has only a very slim chance of success is time and effort they’d rather spend on actually putting their events on.
Funding grassroots arts should not be a flight of fancy. Yes, the usual suspects will bray their predictable nonsense about hard-working taxpayers being compelled to support luvvies and poets, but so what? Let them stew in their own bile. Touring artists stop in hotels, they eat in cafes and restaurants, they – and the audience – buy drinks in the local pub or bar, and the local economy benefits. People realise that art is made by people just like them, who live in their town, or come to their town. That art isn’t something they can only consume passively via the TV screen, but that it’s something all of us can do, and that the money invested in it will pay us back many times over. Pay us back in lives changed, in works created, in increased happiness.
I reckon that’s worth it. Don’t you?