The studio space at Chapel Allerton’s Seven Arts, where poet Matthew Hedley-Stoppard and Lewis Young multi-instrumentalist from The Glass Delusion played the second of two launch dates promoting their terrific new album Runt County, is compact and bijou – and very busy. The audience, eagerly awaiting a promised alchemy between art pop and poetry, gaze at the makeshift stage before them. On it – as if to underline the point that this is going to be no ordinary performance – a pair of electric guitars and an ancient keyboard are augmented by a neon green skull, a vintage portable typewriter and a novelty clothes brush in the guise of a duck.
The first of the evening’s two support acts is Tony ‘The Great’ Baltini. A familiar performer on the live poetry circuit, Baltini is clearly nervous as he steps up to the microphone, grasping a fistful of poems. There is something of Carry On actor, Jack Douglas about his twitchy mannerisms, but his poems are something else. Wryly inventive, they are shot through with obsidian humour; consumed with compassion for society’s forgotten fallen. His poignant, disturbing account of the death of a teenage prostitute resounded a terrible echo of the day’s news from Rotherham.
Open mic sessions are traditionally a mixed-bag, but thankfully tonight’s performers are consistently good. Swelled in number from four to seven, there is a slightly frenetic pace to be maintained if the main event is to go ahead before curfew: poems are (variously) intense, funny, nostalgic, and downright prurient. Leeds poet, Becky Cherriman, dressed in Angela Carter red, makes a striking impression performing her poem, the chilling, precisely worded, Wolves.
After a short break, the second support act of the evening is Greg White, whose words loop and coil like saccharine-coated barbed wire. Dark suited, and seemingly reliant on a stage persona that channels rage and self-loathing in equal measure, he cuts to the very heart of the matter. The frankness of his poems makes for uncomfortable listening. But isn’t that the point?
When their time finally arrives, Matthew Hedley-Stoppard and The Glass Delusion are on feisty form. Tonight they play a capsule set, forgoing the improvisations of the Hull performance earlier in the week. There is little onstage banter, but there is no need. An outing for early collaboration Right Honourable Reverend Doctor Smith sets the tone with its chiming staccato chord shapes and bonkers time signature changes. Neatly dressed for a spot of Bletchley Park style code-breaking in suit and knitted-tie, Hedley-Stoppard squares up to the microphone. Recent single, Revenge Song, swaggers into life with sibilant menace as Young bludgeons his guitar with gusto.
The album is presented as a series of flourishes. Exile growls with righteous anger, every syllable enunciated with barely concealed antagonism. Elsewhere, the jaunty lyricism of album opener, Quite Contrary, contains a deviant reveal, like a Kinks song in the imagination of Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P. Orridge. When it is played, the lead single from the album, You’ll Find Us In The Parks, has a mercurial self-confidence trick up its sleeve.
Occasionally, between album tracks, Young is called upon to perform – exquisite curios of jangly pleasure. At these points, Hedley-Stoppard retires to the typewriter, seized by some muse or other, for a spot of impromptu creation. (These he turns into paper aeroplanes which he fires into the audience as each song comes to a close. The chances are these are fragments of poems, but it’s amusing to think the poet might be typing, again and again, the phrase ‘All work and no play makes Matthew a dull boy!’)
Despite sporting a horse’s head on the cover, Runt County is no one trick pony. Between them Matthew Hedley-Stoppard and Lewis Young have sidestepped any accusations of drear worthiness and have created a richly rewarding album. Earlier in the evening, Greg White claimed that Hedley-Stoppard deserved to be so much better known. With new poems in the offing, and a solo release from Young, it is only a matter of time.
The album Runt County is released by Adult Teeth Recordings on 1st September.