I’ve been
bottling this for a couple of days. It is, however, time to
get this poison out of my system so I can get on with some of the many
awesome things my life contains at the moment. Last Friday (3-May-19), I hosted a
Hammer & Tongue Cambridge as usual. It was
a fine night in many respects – excellent performers, including last-minute
support act the divine Rebecca Cooney; pretty lovely slam;
one of my favourite local performers won; I got to see one of my closest friends after a few months apart; we got decent numbers in the audience; and the
headliner, Jah-Mir Early, did his usual breath-stealing, improvisational spoken word magic. Why am I
needing to vent about it?
Well. Glad you asked. I’ve been running Hammer & Tongue Cambridge as the host
since January 2012. Before that it was run for just over two years by another host, who I won’t name. If you know who it is, you know who it is. I started
“helping out” in April 2010, which meant: doing front of house, scoring the slam, and latterly doing a great deal (if not most) of the publicity work. In that time, HTC has
moved from tiny, dingy pub venues (which I would also have to set up much of the time, and for which I bought lighting, basic sound equipment, etc.), through a
much nicer bar venue, to a
local arts centre which is
wheelchair accessible, clean, and pleasant to be in. Where I no longer have to
set up the box office myself,
hoick the sound and light equipment up two flights of stairs, and
fight my way out with them at the end of the night through lairy drunks (and that was in the nicer venue). Where
forty people in the audience was considered the giddy zenith, that’s our baseline now. Our
regional final sells out. We have a
decent social media following on multiple platforms. We’re proudly
part of a larger spoken word scene in the city which is burgeoning all the time. We
run on time,
break even/ turn a small profit on occasion, and can afford to
pay headliner and support act small but reasonable fees without any external funding. The audience and performers are
as safe as we can make them from insults and threats of violence.
None of those latter sentences should be remarkable, really, but they’re stated in
strong contrast to how things were before I took on the mantle after the
previous host stropped off because virtually no-one was turning up to the events, and no-one offered him the requisite “respect”. The penultimate two events under his aegis were totally paid for by me alone (headliner fees, publicity, etc.), and I had to
absorb a great deal of aggression and posturing from this stale breadstick before we could all move on.
So far so
okay, Fay, what’s your point? At the last event,
one of the Old Guard, one who used to come and slam/ watch on the regular under the previous regime turned up. He
stood out from the rest of the crowd because he got increasingly intoxicated (I use this word carefully) and lairy, having to be
repeatedly asked to shush while other people were talking. Afterwards, having been sought out to be
praised/ thanked by various members of the audience and other performers
for my crowd control skills (which really shouldn’t have to happen!), I made the error of talking to this chap outside the venue as I waited for the headliner to get back. I warned myself against the
desire to mollify aggressive men, but there you go – part of me wants as many members of my audience to walk away happy as possible.
Among other jabberings, he took the time to
faintly praise me for “carrying the torch” (sic) of Hammer & Tongue Cambridge. It
took me until I got home to work out quite why I was so annoyed by that particular phrase (probably because it was drowned out by what happened next). When I wryly thanked him, saying we’d
carried it but changed its shape somewhat, he took the opportunity to complain about how he’d felt
tense and repressed (at least, I think that’s what the crouching body language and bouncing, palms-down hands implied) throughout. Maybe I’d noticed, he confided, that he
wasn’t entirely sober by the end. Yeah, I had. He theorised about my
hosting style being
responsible for this tension. This tension that, as far as I could tell, only he felt. He then appeared to do
an impression of me speaking, murmuring: “Mehr, mehr, mehr-mehr-mehr.” Then, as I barely responded past a side-eye from under my hat, repeated it: “Mehr, mehr,
mehr-mehr-mehr,” complete with smirk and crouching little dance to complement his “feeling repressed” gestures of earlier. Yeah, I got it, dude –
you think I’m a less than dynamic presenter.
I was able to
pay the headliner and leave shortly after that. By the time I’d got home, after lengthy catch-ups with said beloved headliner and my other too-long-unseen friend, it turns out I’d
let this fucknugget get in my head. “Mehr, mehr,
mehr-mehr-mehr.” – the sound of a softly-spoken, female-presenting person
doing their job. “Mehr, mehr,
mehr-mehr-mehr.” – the sound of a
mean schoolteacher oppressing the God-given rights of
naughty men to be as loud as they want while someone else is talking. “Mehr, mehr,
mehr-mehr-mehr.” – the sound of someone who’ll
never measure up to the shouty posturings of a third-rate poet and tenth-rate event host who used to drunkenly insult me from the stage and, I discovered years later, buy/ sell drugs in the carpark during the tediously extended intervals, taking up disproportionate swathes of time on the stage with his own repetitive work. My
nights aren’t perfect. I could work harder at getting more people in, do
more publicity, make
more of a spectacle of it, but I’m
never going to get loud just to suit other people – I decided long ago that that course of action gets you nowhere – they’re just going to have to lean in to hear better.
Last year
a headliner calmly told the audience that he
wanted to stalk me, and they seemed to lap it up. Certainly
no-one told him off or offered me support afterwards. One of the audience, in fact,
told me afterwards that I loved the headliner for it. I didn’t remonstrate with either of directly (too many years’ training of “mollify the man, soothe him in case he hurts you”?), but I’ve
written a poem about it, so that’s all right. {eyeroll} It’s still a
tough world as a female-presenting performer and MC.
For every ten people or so who think I’m doing a good job, and loves what I’m doing as an artist and a host,
there seems to be one who thinks I’m
fair game for stalking,
pervy comments about my voice, claims that
my voice is “fake”, off-stage
racist diatribes they think I’ll support, or
jittery banter about my unshouty hosting style. “Mehr, mehr,
mehr-mehr-mehr.”
Carrying the torch? Fuck you, buddy. How about
ditching a toxic legacy? How about
transforming the event into something welcoming and professional? How about feeding and transporting that guttering flame and
building a hearthfire? How about
soldiering the fuck through with no support from my predecessor’s Old Guard? How about
nearly four times the length of service in this event alone compared to his? How about the fact that I
run a stage at Strawberry Fair that’s
dedicated to spoken word and brings people in from fifty miles around? How about my
five-star shows at Edinburgh Fringe? How about my
BBC and other commissions? How about my
national reputation as someone who
works to raise and safeguard the spoken word scene? How about my
national reputation as
professional, hardworking, and talented? How about my
well-known propensity to make every performer and audience member
feel welcome unless they’re a hate-mongering douchecanoe? How about
my small press, my
open-hearted open mics, my
fund- and awareness-raising for local charities, my
groups set up to encourage and foster peer support among the spoken word community?
(Do you know how hard it is to write all the above without the likes of these
Mehr-mehr-mehr arseholes’ voices chiming in my head telling me off for showing off? The lifelong legacy of making myself smaller that I have to actively resist every time I leave the house, let alone this?)
For some people you’ll never be other than the last (or first) time they saw you. For some people I’ll never be other than the
victim of bullying at school, whichever part of that experience they were part of. For some people I’ll never be other than
that administrator who was always late to work. For some people I’ll never be other than a
certain person’s pathetic ex. For some people I’ll never be other than the
quiet one who lost so spectacularly at whichever slam they saw me lose spectacularly at. For some people I’ll never be other than the
nerdy sidekick of a misogynistic poseur. For some people I’ll never be other than a
classical singer and choir conductor. For some people, I’ll never be other than
Melody Starchild. For some people, I’ll never be other than the person who
encouraged them to get into spoken word. For some people, I’ll never be other than the person who
wrote that poem for their anniversary that made them cry. For some people, I’ll never be other than the
first person who taught them about clerihews. For some people, I’ll never be other than the
first person to publish them. And for some people, presumably, I’ll never be other than the
Glastonbury Festival blogger 2019.
Tough breaks. You’ll
forge your own destiny and some people will want to
keep you down, cling onto the old version of what you were. Oddly enough, that was the subject of one of the
first performance poems I ever wrote, way back in 2007, striving to survive on a scene that
depended on the goodwill of the people
still labelling me that person’s ex, the interloper, the Welsh one, the “failed lesbian” (true story). The
crab bucket will always want to cling onto you, keep you chained,
call you by your deadname, keep you from the light. The
best thing for these remnants is to let them go with love, knowing
that the shit you went through was one of the things that
forged the stronger person you are now, but that
you owe it – and these nostalgia hounds –
absolutely nothing for the joy of finding your
own path, your
true name, the clothes that
fit you far better.
Let them go, and use your energy to
cherish the people who’ll expand their first image of you into something complex and spectacular, and will
help you find that joy. And
let one of those people be yourself.
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Photo of Fay Roberts hosting Hammer & Tongue Cambridge - (c) Nikki Marrone |