Manchester is shit

It may be unheard of, it may be socially unacceptable and somewhat self-indulgent, but nevertheless I thought I'd take a moment or two to review a night I co-organized. I'll try to be fair, I'll try to be objective. Though, you know how it goes. When you toil and sweat over an event, you tend to either big it up or launch a preemptive strike of self-slamming.

Right, so Verberate 9, Chloe Poems headlining. I better give you some background. Last month we threw a refugee benefit featuring almost exclusively asylum seeker performers. This left us with an enormous backlog of performers who've been dogging us for a slot. Next month, we've put together the best of the best of Chorlton and Whalley Range for the Chorlton Art Festival. Month after that, we're teaming up with London's Pulp.net for a night of short fiction. Basically we had to get these performers crammed in last night, or else put up with their whinging until July. The result: a first third comprised of performers we were unsure about. In the past we've been surprised, particular with Tony Curry, though, last night it was fairly mediocre. Classical composer-cum-poet Anwen Lewis kicked it off clever, but then she was followed by Max Dunbar, a sweet guy who attends every lit event in Manchester. He's a decent writer, but he'd never read before and he rushed through his prose and it was nearly unintelligible. Barry Gibbons, who once pulled me aside and likened me to Ginsburg, which was both flattering and confusing, read some prose poetry that's no doubt impressive on paper, but didn't quite have the umph it needed to grab the audience by the throat. A Nigerian poet named Abiodun Walker also recited some stirring poetry ... so I guess it wasn't that bad, looking back. There just wasn't anything that surprised me and made me bang hands my hands on the table until my knuckles hurt.

The Wild Women Poets from Cumbria were talented, sure, mixing high brow and low brow. The first performer talked a lot about suicide by female poets. The second read innuendo-laden poetry about Beatrix Potter characters, which was a bit beyond me. I read Rats of Nimh, and that's pretty much the extent of my anthropomorphic childhood reading list.

But Chloe Poems. Holy fucking shit on dipstick. In honor of the queen's birthday, she did in fact recite "The Queen Sucks Nazi Cock" and two other poems about the royal family: a brilliants tasteless celebration of Princess Di's death (paraphrased line: "It's not just the tabloids she's splatted over") and something about Prince Charles and a tampon. Didn't get that one. She's a rockstar though, an absolute star and I was lucky enough to be sitting up front where you could see the sweat dripping down from her wig.

Finally, let me just say something about our dj. The Hoodlum Tribe guys were out of town, so we were hard up for music. ManchesterisShit's own Germaine stepped in at the last minute and she was absolutely perfect. The best of the 60s, and occasionally the obscurist, and even planning it so Jimmy Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" preceded Chloe's ascension to the stage. The amazing thing was that she was out of the habit. Germaine hadn't djed in more than a year. So, in summary, if you've got a gig coming up, drop her a line. I'm not just kissing ass here. She rocked.