Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Word starts to spread for poetry show
“AN EVENING of poems to be enjoyed not endured,” is how Brian Bilston and Henry Normal have announced their joint headline tour of poetry reading.
And while saying that knowingly mocks their own medium, it’s hard to think of many other poets for whom several hundred people might cram into venues up and down the country.
Simon Armitage, perhaps? “Kae Tempest and John Cooper Clarke,” says Normal, who was a published poet at the age of 15 in 1975, then co-creator of the television series The Mrs Merton Show and The Royle Family, and owner with Steve Coogan of the production company Baby Cow (Gavin And Stacey, Philomena) until his retirement in 2016.
“Hollie McNish?” wonders Bilston, who’s taken Twitter by storm with his work over the last decade.
A true poet for the social media age, he’s published three collections, a novel and two kids’ poetry collections (the second is out this year) since 2016.
Both write work which is humorous and poignant.
They bill it as “the greatest poetry in the history of the world or their names aren’t Brian Bilston and Henry Normal,” which is an in-joke, because their non-stage names are, in fact, Paul and Peter.
“It’s been amazing to go out and read poems in front of so many people,” says Bilston, who is newest at this game.
“Who’d have thought there’d be so many people prepared to go out on a Monday or Tuesday night to listen to people like us read poems?”
“It is unusual,” says Normal, who also founded poetry festivals in Manchester and his native Nottingham.
“I mean, the idea of poetry is usually quite an intimate thing.
“The audiences have been fantastic, really, and I know from doing Scotland before that the audiences there are always
very up for it and very appreciative and not shy.
“They let you know they’re enjoying it.” “We’d like our show to be dignified, but it never quite works out like that,” says Bilston.
“The show itself has a whole gamut of human emotions, it’s a rollercoaster.
“Humour is the unifying thread through both of our sets, but we mix it up, we’ve got quieter, more reflective poems.
“Hopefully they resonate emotionally with the audience. It’s not like a
po-faced poetry reading, we put on a show and people respond to that.”
Do they have poems people know and are expecting to hear?
“Yes, Freebird,” says Normal. “Stairway To Heaven! We have our equivalent, but I’m not going to tell you what they are.
“We do a little bit of that, a little bit of new, and we change it every night to keep ourselves interested.”
Brian Bilston and Henry Normal are at the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, tomorrow and Dundee’s Gardyne Theatre on Sunday.