Audi Maserati (Biographic note)

There are few things more certain in this life than, given the opportunity, when adventure is to be had there will always be takers for the proposition. In a small, but I feel, interesting way, I have dipped a toe or two in the pond of the counter culture.

As I write this I am at a stage in my life when dreams are longer and more languid than when I was young and soaking in Kerouac and Ginsberg. And though I never met him, I miss him every day,
stringing daisy chains and barefoot and hair rising from my head uncontrolled and writing poetry because it seemed to go with the pictures in my head.

Sunshine and clothes smelling of the salt sea and ideas and like minds and exchange and growing stronger and spouting poetry and listening and getting excited because it felt like something was happening that had happened before but this was our time and it was happening to us.

When people are passionate about what they do, that passion is a bond between them, and even if they are diametrically opposed in everything else, that passion will unite them. That is the situation that Steven Ericsson-Zenith and myself walked into when we started to trek to Falmouth Poetry group who knows how long ago.

Long time and memory plays tricks to trip me up these days but I don't think it matters about the details just that for a pair of working-class poets it was a planet not often visited and a journey well worth the effort.

I met a lot of poets and painters around Cornwall and made a lot of friends who made my life richer and I hope I added to their experiences too and contributed to some solid happiness here and there because that's what being a poet is about in my view.

It is about making some kind of contribution to the general understanding of "stuff."

I think Steven and I made our joint contribution for a short time as "Cas-et" doing the odd poetry reading/performances which I enjoyed in that unforgettable way that "we were being poets" that is so important, that validation.

I remember going around St. Ives trying to get sponsorship for the pamphlet that Steven was putting together for the gig at the Great Western Hotel, and how good it felt to walk onto a place and say "we are poets and why don't you give us some money because poetry is important" and people being warm and thoughtful and generous and already poetry was having an effect on peoples lives just because it existed and how cool is that.

When Cas-et finished Steven did his thing, which he can tell you about a lot better than I can. I know it was serious and his strong belief fired him up and you could almost see him glowing with it. I glowed too but for different reasons, and I freely admit that I had and still have a passion for frivolity that Steven understood.

What I wanted was simple. I wanted to make people happy. Make them laugh because that opens up their minds and while their minds are open slip in the ideas.

Do not share this idea with any potential world dominators. It can be a perilous route and one only to be taken by the dedicated frivoulusi (made up word).

I made contacts with Apples and Snakes Poetry Collective at some festival and was invited to perform at the Captains cabin in Piccadilly with a friend of Steven's and mine, Bob Devereux, who owned the Salt House Gallery in St Ives.

First London gig and an enjoyable experience. I was still living in Cornwall and messing about playing music with a group of fellow frioulosi. We did a lot of practicing and made a lot of noise and giggled. We actually did two gigs.

One at the Blue Anchor in Helston as Ronnie Goes to Moscow. We went in a transit and the roadie Adrian got so drunk he went to sleep in the gutter outside before the gig had finished. The other was in an after hours pub in Penance where the three of us wore berets and red noses and went out under the name of Les Ches and Des. It went down a storm mainly because the audience had been drinking with us all night and were too drunk to care, but bohemian to my mind and free and what it was all about.

I moved to London and became friends with the people at Apples and Snakes and was asked to join the collective. I did, and spent a few years trucking around London having a wail of a time doing what I loved best.

From the Market porter in London Bridge, The Horseshoe, and The Eagle and The Goldsmiths Tavern, Broadway Studios, Woolwich Tramshed and loads of places too dark and wonderful that stream together in a mash of pure Mmmmness.

There was the odd trip outside London to the far north Bradford where mysterious Yorkshire poets put us up on their couches and fed us tea and melons and ideas and the last year of my time with Apples and Snakes was wonderful and mainly every Friday night at the Seven Dials club Covent Garden.

If there is a centre of cool in this world then the Seven Dials Club is, in my opinion, it.

At the same time as all this was going on I had met through Apples and snakes a bunch of Socialist poets who called themselves The Ragged Trousered Cabaret, I joined them and in tandem with my work with A&S had a cracking time doing labour clubs and conferences up and down the place. Meanwhile one of my friends from Cornwall moved into the house that I shared with some other people in South East London and we started to make music and got a band together which unsurprisingly practiced a lot, giggled a lot and did a few gigs.

It was, as they say, all going on.

The band, and that is a pretty loose description of what we were were called Extreme Case of Art and did about three or four gigs.

One being at the Seven Dials and consisted of the bass player and myself on guitar and vocals and Megan, an American girl with feathers in her hair and Simon who had blonde dreadlocks with the tips dipped in different coloured paint.

We made the music and Simon and Megan danced in boxer shorts in the middle of us. It was strange and zoned.

The Captains Cabin was another gig. This had changed over the years and was very arty.

We did a gig for "Survivors" who are a group of poets who are ex-psychiatric patients who are struggling for identity and a voice and where I met the most powerful poet I have ever heard Frank Bangway.

He spoke haltingly and you had to concentrate to hear what he was saying and what he was saying was so eloquent and made so much sense and his heart was so big and beautiful and
Feranze Attman was also at this gig and we all had a great time and just remembering it to write it down now is getting me a little tearful.

The last gig we did was at Lewisham Labour club and the whole team more or less turned out. Zolan Quabble didn't come but Nadia, the Algerian drummer who hadn't been around for a while did and was on fire. The support band were a five piece rock band from Barcelona. There were also a couple of solo singer songwriters and the whole thing finished off with everybody on stage going crazy.

And we never really played again.

I ran a cabaret at the Black Horse in Catford for a while. Started to do a few gigs for an organisation called SYLVIA which stands for Support Your Local Venues and Independent Artists. A few gigs for Scabaret and Gods Little Joke and The Hard Edge Club in Soho.

By this time I had left A&S because it had become mainstream and I wanted to stay "on the Edge" and Ragged Trousered Cabaret had disintegrated happily.

I was introduced to my wife at Gods Little Joke by the woman who ran it called Tammy Youseloff.
And I fell in love and we made babies and I turned down gigs because I wanted to be with them and then the phone calls dried up and things changed. It is an organic process and a healthy one.

That was a few years ago.

Now I write and play guitar and have grown into a direction that suits me and I still do the rare gig and it still gets me going and I still get exited when I hear young poets thrilling and passionate and using language to further understanding and its so cool to be a part of something that is always changing and now look.

Steven is putting my poems on his web site so I get to read his poems as well all the way from California that I have only ever seen on TV.

And here I am writing this on a computer that I didn't think would ever replace my pencil.

And here we are lost to art and loving the journey.

Love and peace (an old idea and a good one) audi maserati (aka den)