On Friday we headed to the very exotic Nottingham to celebrate the tenth birthday of the amazing Speech Therapy spoken word event. Lathered in suntan cream, we dusted off our Hawaiian shirts, donned our shades, and headed towards the sound of steel drums. Usually this would be a joke, because we called Nottingham exotic, but anyone that has ever been to Nottingham city centre will know the probability of someone actually playing steel drums is quite high, and we were not disappointed!
Unfortunately - city centres have this habit of making one way systems that mean once you are there you can never leave, this is especially true if your only means of navigation is following the sound of steel drums. By the time we had found somewhere to park - that didn’t involve trying to disguise the little VW Polo as a bus - the flowers in our lei’s had died, our grass skirts had turned to hay, and our coconut bras were starting to smell worse for wear.
We lugged our mandolin, cajon, kick pedal, cajon stand, 12 string, 6 string, stomp tambourine, guitar stands, cables, hand sanitiser, limes, coconuts, mix it all up, through the city centre and headed our way down to Bunkers Hill.
The stage was set beautifully in the upstairs room - and while the room was full, it was also well spaced enough that you didn’t feel like you had to pepper spray anyone that got too close with hand sanitiser. COVID times are weird times, man.
We set down our 6 string, 12 string, mandolin, cajon, cables, kick pedal, kitchen sink, cursed pirate doubloons, and some shredded Banksy art - or was it a bank statement? And relaxed into the night.
Miggy Angel regaled to us what Speech Therapy meant to a lot of people. This weird place for lost souls to be lost together - from poet laureates to poems scribbled on cig packets, it all happened here, and each poem and story welcomed just as much as the last. This was a place for expression and as Miggy said (and we are about to terribly paraphrase) ‘poetry is all around us, poems are the cage we put it in. Poems are the glass and poetry is the nectar within.’ Or perhaps Sheryl Crow said it better ‘it’s a smile on a dog’.
This is what these nights are all about - and Friday was no different. This was a place for creatives to just be creative. Whether the poem is in a song or a dance, freeform or structured, half rhymes or full rhymes - it all starts here.
From small chats with everyone and some deeper chats with Jamie Thrasivoulou and Cullan Marshall - this was our take away: Creativity is a journey. Some are at the beginning, learning to crawl and walk, slowly trying to understand the goings on around them. Others are in the middle, displaced and confused, understanding they perhaps set off on the wrong foot and struggling to rectify or find balance. Others are near the end, looking back over the journey and unravelling the threads of trauma that lead them back to home. Wherever you are in your journey, Speech Therapy is for you, you’ll be welcomed with open arms as your threads weave with others to make a beautiful tapestry.
Below is a little video of I Once Loved a Lass. A song that no one is quite sure where it came from, who wrote it, whether it started as a poem, a love letter, a song. And yet, it remains. The person in the song, the person who wrote it, long gone, but the poetry remains. The nectar in the glass, still as sweet and as sour as the day it was poured.