Quick! Get some PR!

Straight after returning from Manchester, it dawned on us how soon the London show would be at King’s Place, and there was no time to rest – time to get people to the gig!

Ticket sales were worryingly low, Poet in the City puts on monthly shows at Kings Place and this had to be one of the lowest advance sales in our history there.

The benefit of having a regular venue though, especially such a high profile one with links to the media world, meant that we could exploit a few tricks the average poetry night planner wouldn’t get their hands on. Deliberate PR, one of the top PR companies in the UK, owed the venue a bit of work, so here was a challenge for them – get Spoken Word into the media!

It was a sterling effort, and right at the last minute we had two requests – one poet for an interview on LBC London Talk Radio, and two required for a BBC London Radio slot at 9.30am, both on a Saturday! Then the challenge was get the poets… the trouble with being a self-employed spoken word artist is the number of commitments, and how to balance them. You would surely think if a radio interview comes through you’d drop everything to do it – but sometimes life isn’t that simple…

OneNess was in another part of the country running a workshop, and did a sneaky duck-out to be intereviewed over the phone by LBC. Listening from the peugeot it was an interesting interview, it jumped suddenly from the host being on the subject of student tuition fees, right into “and we have a poet on the line, tell me, what do you write about?” He didn’t really seem to be particularly well briefed, his questions were nebulous, some searching for a political activist, and I could hear this threw OneNess a bit at first, thinking ‘what the hell do I say?’ but she pulled through and did a nice little promo for spoken word. We got a good plug for the show at the end.

BBC London however, that required two poets, plus the CEO of Poet in the City Graham, in the studio. This went completely down to the wire, as almost everyone was no where near London – Kate was in Paris, Chris was in Bristol, and OneNess and Kat were also out of reach. El Crisis managed to save the day by involving a poet friend of his, Josephine aka Realitie. He also proved that he can be on time when he needs to be, and the interview was brilliant.

There was a great discussion on Spoken Word, on how it connects to contemporary life, on how young people can find connection to it, and when asked if it was a response to the popularity of rap, Crisis opened a few eyes by pointing out that ‘Spoken Word is the Godfather of Rap’ – how rap and hip-hop had grown out of the Spoken Word scene of 70′s America.

The interview finale was a performance from both of the poets, and JoAnne Good finished by saying:
“Sometimes we come in to work and it’s like the wardrobe in Narnia, we don’t know who’s going to appear through the door that day, and I have to say that this is one of the best moments I’ve had working on this. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck listening to you, I had no idea this kind of thing existed, that performance was amazing. Thank you so much”

Well Jo, the hairs stood up on my neck too, and it was one of the best moments of the tour so far….