The Beat poets (with Ginsberg at the helm), the Punk poets, Latino poets, Def poets and more, work to subvert, shift and shake the zone that is comfort, urgently experimenting - then and now - with mixing the performed verse of social protest with backing tracks of music and noise. Kieran Hurley in Heads Up picks up this beacon and blasts his own trail through the genre, in a performance piece that races like an amphetamine-fuelled trip and drops you, clammy and twitching and staring wild-eyed, into a bleak, cavernous, catastrophic future. Or no future at all.
‘There’s no future no future no future for you’ The Sex Pistols scream
in their ‘God Save the Queen’,
and that queasy blend of anarchy and emptiness creep
as Hurley enters and takes his seat.
He’s sat barefoot, in a suit, at a desk,
with a mic and some lights and his fingers rest
on the levers and knobs that produce the sound -
the music, the throbs, the rhythm that grounds.
And grinds and whines as he tells his tale,
of four different folk in their own private hell.
First Mercy, a woman who reads the signs,
a trader in futures who sees and tries
to warn our race it’s the end of our years,
that there is no future. But no-one will hear.
Next Ash, a young girl who’s screaming inside,
betrayed by a boy, she is trying to hide
her face and her pain, since her body was bared
for private use only, but yet has been shared.
Now Leon the rock star doing some lines,
a self-absorbed coke-head whose butterfly mind,
wired and taut, clicks on stuff to promote,
to raise his profile and his knighthood hopes.
Poor Abdullah’s a pot-head, dazed and demented,
in his job down the café he’s confused and tormented.
Named and shamed by the mystery shopper,
he’s failed ‘people perfect’ and all staff now must suffer.
They conform to their norms
and project their selves for others’ consumption, but those in turn
know nothing of life that’s not taught or assumed,
all are what they’re told and live to consume.
Bypassing need and empathy too,
online you can’t tell who’s looking at you
and don’t see how they feel when you’re spewing your bile,
with no mirrored emotions you won’t learn to smile.
And as the light fades and apocalypse looms
the four everymen unite in gazing out at the gloom.
And people shout, race, dance and some sit and cry.
At what point will it dawn you can’t run from the sky?
Of course Hurley’s powerhouse writing is nothing like this. Nor is it actually performance poetry, although it bears many of its hallmarks. It is superbly destabilising, unsettling, storytelling that leaves you exhausted. It is a verbal migraine with all the visuals. The mic allows him to play with vocal qualities of sound, the occasional blinding lights and Michael John McCarthy’s backing track play with the outer edges of what is bearable to the ear and the eye. This is a style that forces a deeper attention to the text. A brilliant text. An animator’s dream… anyone?
Runs 23rd – 25th Feb