CITY PSALMS
After a tour during which I performed all over the world, in countries including Argentina, Colombia, Kenya, South Korea and Australia, I embarked on a British tour. After one of my last performances of that tour, I came off stage in Newcastle and a strange-looking guy approached me. He had a round, chubby face with windswept hair (well, it had been a wild gig) and he looked a little out of place. I was convinced he was going to ask me for a lift home or for spare change – after all, by now my audiences were dressing up to come to my gigs.
He introduced himself as Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books, and he said he would be interested in publishing me. He was really honest with me, saying he’d been aware of my name for a long time but hadn’t really been that interested in performance poetry. He didn’t think performance poets were able to get their words to work on a page, but he said he had listened to me and thought I could deliver material worthy of publication. And I was really honest with him too. I told him I’d got away with Pen Rhythm because it was released at the right time, when I was young and new, but I wasn’t happy with The Dread Affair. I also told him being published was not a major priority for me.
I was already reaching millions of people with my performances on stage, on radio and on TV, so I was happy to carry on doing what I was doing. My mission was to take poetry to people who didn’t read books. But I also told him I was ready to do another book if we could work together to bridge the gap, or make the connection, between the page and the stage. Neil was pleased, and said he knew exactly where I was coming from. So that was it. We parted and I started work on City Psalms, which was published in 1992.
Once again, many of the poems and even the title came from one of the prototype books I’d made years earlier. Since then I’d met hundreds of people but one significant contact was a guy called Bob Mole. I’d met this fellow lover of poetry a few years earlier. Not only was he a lover of the arts, he was also a cricket enthusiast and a great gardener. It was he who first turned me on to Shakespeare by sitting me down to watch a filmed version of Macbeth, and putting it all in context for me. He loved reading great poetry but he also had a good understanding of performance poetry, so I asked him to write an introduction to the book.
For the cover I used a colourful piece by an artist I had always admired called Michael Hawthorne. He created really powerful images of people exploding or experiencing pain. He was a white man who seemed able to capture perfectly the pain of the black man. His work exploded and danced and cried. Although on the surface the piece I chose for my book simply depicts a man and a woman walking down the street, the artist’s graphic style and the sense of place he captures speaks volumes about the urban experience.