I’ve been working on the new show and collection for months now so this poem has been stuck in my head for absolutely ages, and yet the weird thing is, it’s not been out into the big wide world yet. Until now!
Behold! Enjoy this brand new video of my poem Shakka Lakka Boom!, taken from my forthcoming collection Yay!, and my solo show Yay! The Search for Happiness. I hope you like it!
Shakka Lakka Boom!
Shakka lakka boom boom,
Shakka lakka boom.
Gotta get through the day,
Gotta do your thing.
Gotta get through the day,
Feel it deep within.
Gotta get through the day.
People, make some room.
Say into the microphone:
Shakka lakka boom!
Go to bake a cake one day.
Go to bake a cake.
Go to bake a bake one day,
Hope I don’t make a mistake.
Add all the ingredients,
Stir them with a spoon,
A little salt and a pinch
Of shakka lakka boom!
Shakka lakka boom boom,
Shakka lakka boom.
Made my Broadway debut
In a Shakespeare play.
I know all my lines by heart.
I know, just want to say.
‘To be or not to be,’ I said,
And, with a sense of doom,
Forgot what came just after that,
Said, ‘Shakka lakka boom!’
Shakka lakka boom boom,
Shakka lakka boom.
Go out on a hot date,
Small talk and a chat.
Go out on a hot date
And then back to his flat.
Making lots of small talk.
Hope I don’t peak too soon.
All he did was stroke my arm
And shakka lakka boom!
Shakka lakka boom boom,
Shakka lakka boom.
And then I went to the funeral.
My aunt had passed away.
Such a lovely funeral
On such a dismal day.
I went to give the eulogy.
The coffin lid went zoom!
My aunt, she suddenly sat right up,
Said, ‘Shakka lakka boom!’
‘Weren’t you here before?’, the waitress asks.
‘A while ago’.
He’s conscious that his English accent makes him stick out. Outside the diner windows, tall firs capture the early evening darkness, while trucks thunder past on the old highway. Bright neon reflects on the wet tarmac.
‘There’s really nothing special about me’, he insists, as he sits at a table near the plate glass window. He picks up the laminated menu. ‘It must have been over ten years ago. . .’.
Probably longer.
‘But I sure as hell remember you’, she says.
And he feels a strange connection inside. Sadness mixed with nostalgia. A hint of shame. Some jubilation.
‘I was a different man back then’.
‘You were on some tour, right? You and your . . Your uncle, right? Driving around the country. And you’d just come down from Canada’.
‘Yes’.
‘Oh, I sure remember you!’
So much had changed in the previous ten years. He looks around at the other customers in the diner. Truck drivers, a family in one corner, some lone drivers, a young couple. The rain intensifies and it starts to roll down the plate glass window.
‘You were young’, she says. ‘Mind you, so was I. The world was a different place back then, wasn’t it? Weren’t you drunk?’
‘I probably was’.
‘And we’d never had a Brit in here. Do you remember? We danced . . .’.
Oh, no.
‘Oh, I remember you, honey’.
She stands next to him and taps her long, painted nails on his shoulder.
‘You swept me off my feet. We glided across this very floor, the music was just the same but it was the music of the moment. You treated me like a proper lady for the first time in years. The bums at the counter, oh sure, they were laughing like hyenas. I said to the guys, this here is a real gentleman . Remember that? This here is a real gentleman ‘.
‘As I say, I was . . Different back then’.
‘Oh, I can’t forget someone like you. I really can’t, sugar. So, what brings you back? What brings you back here, to this crummy diner in the middle of nowhere?’
He wants to tell her that he’s retracing his steps, finding himself, doing something in memory of his late uncle, doing something in memory of his self, but it all sounds so trite.
‘I just felt like something to eat’, he lies.
And everywhere he’d been so far, nobody had remembered him at all. And it looked so different, everything looked like it had changed. It was quite dispiriting. Nobody had remembered him.
‘You staying here? For the night? In our little town? There’s a motel next door. Yes sir, you really did treat me like a proper lady’.
He and his uncle had adjoining rooms, and whisky. It was probably one of the very first times he’d even had whisky.
‘I don’t think it was me’, he says.
He gets up from his table by the window.
‘Oh, hon. I always remember a face’.
‘It wasn’t me’, he says.
And he walks away, back to the car, runs across the parking lot in the rain, through the puddles and the neon.
Great big belly-man darts-land Leviathan takes a stand.
Meaty meaty clap-hand (nurses darts like baby chicks),
Arrow-flinging darts board-singing double-trimming
Guess who’s winning?
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Trophy-doting low-score-gloating show-boating local scrote
Boozy-wobbling woozy-toppling lazy darts-fling treble twenty
Bar staff aghast, darts stars laugh, fast darts dance, last chance,
Bust.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Last game, the same again, self-same blame game.
In the team lean, seeming so keen, trophy a gleam, he’s a darts machine!
No pain no gain, no gain, no fame, oh, the shame!
Sudden-death shootout, league-topping bullseye-aiming,
Thud, pretty nifty, scores a fifty, more’s the pity,
Geddin my son quivering tentative there the dart itself hanging like a
Swan so graceful in its beauteous flight betwixt chubby
Sweating fingers slow-mo revealing the under belly wobble
Suspended in mid air aerodynamic like the philosophic truth
Writ large straight into the exact centre of the board!
New poem! I performed this a couple of weeks ago at Paignton Palace Theatre and people have been asking to see it online. It’s a love letter to my home town of Paignton. It’s also featured in my new show Yay! The Search for Happiness, and my forthcoming book Yay!, to be published by Burning Eye.
Seaside soul.
This town is not torrid, nor tainted nor brazen, This tornado of flavours, Chip shops and chopsticks and packets of Quavers, Savour its layers and nautical sailors.
Barbers and harbours and car parks and mars bars A beer at the Pier Inn while peering at the pier thing A stride and a stroll But hide from the gulls your hot sausage rolls It’s the way that we roll With our seaside soul.
High tide drip dry nick nack paddywhack Picnic and a packamac Promenade flapjack Sand in your rucksack Sand in your flapjack Sand in your arsecrack Let’s go to the pub.
Cinema chick flicks Candy floss, pick n mix Fish n chips, kiss me quick Think I feel sick!
Ring road surf shack seaweed stink Caravan holiday It’s worse than you think Dodgy dodgy plumbing and a blocked up sink. Big bands and jazz hands, gleaming sands and One night stands You probably will not understand It’s ain’t no hole With your seaside soul.
Amusements, bemusement, Soup of the day The all day breakfast Only served till midday Have you paid and displayed? Grab your bucket and spade! You’ll never be dismayed Memories fade But your heart will always stay.
This frisky town this sea breezy town This cream tea scene of green seas and freezing dips Donkey rides and cheesy chips Ice cream by the bowl We’ve got seaside soul.
Dancing like lovers on the prom in the rain The hot pulse of life adding fire to my brain The legs of the pier stride deep in the brine Let’s dance once more time, say you’ll be mine We laugh and we grin and we howl at the ships The night is afire and it smells just like chips You bend for a kiss like a child with a doll You asked what’s for dinner, I said, seaside soul.
Through the mists of a calamity
In a year we never asked for,
The long arm of our shoreline bay
Offered you anchorage at first only
For commercial reasons.
Yet your streamlined sleek and tower block decks
Formed a fleet of imaginary towns,
Dark horizon Christmas trees with an
Imaginary population, new neighbours.
In a world of sudden restrictions you became
A local secret, an impossibility of the soul,
A solace as onerous as the mournful horns
Adding an extra solemnity for remembrance,
Seeing out this accursed year, or those
Poor fishermen who would never return.
We can sing sweet lullabies, dainty and plaintive
Though none can compare to your industrial symphony,
A blast of the horn as unsubtle as anything!
On foggy mornings you layer the imagination,
Ethereal in the gloom your hulking gross tonnage
A link to a world beyond immediate geography,
Ghost ships, haunting the present with voyages past.
In 2018 I toured the fringes and festivals of the UK with my show ‘In the Glare of the Neon Yak’. It was something of a gamble at the time to write and rehearse an hour long poem which took me away from the comedy and whimsy and into a strange territory of myth, folk-lore, atmosphere and storytelling. The show had taken a few years to write, from around 2015, and almost a whole year to learn. I was hugely pleased with the outcome and I got the chance to perform it everywhere from Edinburgh to London, the GlasDenbury Festival to Surrey, and then with a live jazz band in Totnes. It is the piece of work which I’m proudest.
Performing the show was a weird experience. Over the Edinburgh fringe, I suddenly became aware that the characters were almost friends, and that I would look forward to performing them again when their part of the show arrived. Indeed, it was something of a shame when the run ended and I felt genuinely sad not to perform these characters for a while. Almost immediately I began to think of a possible sequel to the show, yet I knew that it would not be the same because I didn’t want to spoil the mythology that I had built up around the show. ‘
‘In the Glare of the Neon Yak’ took place on a sleeper train heading north, filled with circus performers, and stalked by the mythological entity the Neon Yak, loosely based on the folklore tales of Herne the Hunter. I decided that a follow up show would have a similar structure, (characters telling their tales), but I wanted to go deeper and move the focus of the show to the actual situations in which these characters found themselves. I wrote three new pieces and also ‘borrowed’ the long poem ‘Bulk Carrier’ from my 2018 book Zebra, and then wrote a kind of framing narrative to bind all of these together. I envisaged an LGBT astronaut, flying to Venus, being consoled throughout his long journey by stories which would remind him of the importance of his community, until the final story details his own adventure when he finally gets to the planet.
The individual sections which make up the show could easily stand alone as performance pieces: ‘Bar Code Blues’ takes place in a supermarket in the 1990s with a character who is struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality. ‘Bulk Carrier’ takes place on a container vessel in the middle of the ocean which is haunted, (Why not?), by the ghost of Marcel Proust. ‘Much Ado About Muffins’ is a modern retelling of the Shoemaker and the Elves, taking place in a bakery which refuses to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding. And the final piece, ‘Dancing with the Electric Dragons of Venus’, takes the astronaut to a planet where every desire and hope are granted.
And as a special link to its predecessor, the voice of Ground Control is none other than Tony, previously the Train Manager from ‘In the Glare of the Neon Yak’. A change of career, perhaps, but he’s lost none of his humour.
I’d hoped to perform the show all over the UK during 2020, but world events put paid to that. With a show already written for 2021 and the publication of my new book to tie in with it, I knew that Electric Dragons would probably have to be mothballed for quite some time. So this autumn I set about making it into an audio play, a monologue delivered with musical interludes and sound effects, which I might unleash on the world this Christmas.
It’s been an amazing journey working on this show. Obviously, it’s a shame that it didn’t get to see the light of day in 2020. But without the constraints of having to fit the show into an hour slot, I was able to stretch my legs a little with the audio version. I do hope you will like it, and let me know what you think of it.
‘Dancing with the Electric Dragons of Venus’ will be released on 23rd December.
Performing ‘In the Glare of the Neon Yak’, Edinburgh, 2018
Over the last ten years I have had the privilege of performing all over the UK (and Berlin and New York), at some of the biggest performance poetry nights in the country, as well as fringes, festivals and theatres. And during this time, invariably, I have recorded my set, except for the times when I was too nervous and I forgot to press the on button. (Which usually happens on a night where things have gone amazingly!)
Like every other performer in the country, I have really missed going out and about and standing on stages this year, so I’ve used the time as an opportunity to plough through all of these recordings and find the very best ones. With the help of Bryce Dumont, I’ve crafted these into an album named after my show, Juicy.
While I was putting the album together, I realised not only how much I missed performing, but also how wonderful some of these nights had been, which I probably didn’t recognise at the time due to my usual performance nervousness. Nerves was the reason why I forgot to press play during my gig in New York, but it did go very well indeed. You’ll have to take my word for it!
Featured on the album are a couple of amazing recent gigs. The first was at the Arnolfini in Bristol, supporting Disraeli at Raise the Bar. There was an audience of over two hundred and they seemed to like what I did. Indeed, rock and roll animal that I am, after the gig I went to a 24 hour supermarket to do my shopping and met some audience members in the bread aisle, who were very complementary.
Another cracker of a gig included on the album is Scribal Gathering in Milton Keynes, a big audience who were very reactive and welcoming. However perhaps the most special gig was in my home town of Brixham, at the theatre. It was a rainy night and when I walked out on stage, there were two hundred people. It went amazingly well.
Right now, in the depths of the Covid crisis, performing on a stage in front of people seems a long way off and something that happened in a previous life. I can’t wait for things to get back to normal again so that I can be up there once more.
And just a word on the title. ‘Juicy’ was my solo show from 2017 which I took all round the UK and to the Edinburgh Fringe where it received lots of press and radio attention because one of the lines from it being mentioned in the Guardian as one of the funniest of the fringe. And yes, that line is included on this album.
The album is a tribute to those comedians who I used to listen to when I was growing up, their vinyl albums conjuring a world which I wished I were a part of. Bob Newhart, Steve Martin, Shelley Berman.
Robert Garnham 