Interview with Dead Poets

How did you meet MC Mixy?

We entered a competition organised by Phrased and Confused a couple of years ago. They were looking for something that combined poetry and lyrics. So we entered that, but we actually first met at a poetry gig where Mixy had come along to check out the poetry and his hoodie got set on fire by some candles. We got chatting and had a bit of a laugh about it and I figured he wasn’t as scary as he looked, so we tried seeing if we could work together and come up with something.

So was the competition the motivation for forming Dead Poets?

Well initially you could win a commission for £1,000 to write your own 15-20 minute show. We came up with an idea with me as a poet trying to learn from Mixy and trying to involve rap with what I did and Mixy learning from me and trying to rap about poets, or change the perceptions of poetry. The whole show is about changing perceptions and challenging people’s preconceptions of both the art forms.

What similarities do you see between hip hop and poetry?

Well there are more similarities by a long way I guess, is what we discover as we’re going along. They’re both essentially about using words to make people feel something, or make people question something. The main things I struggled with were things like vocabulary, the difference in pace with rhythm instead of meter and subject content as well. I’ve been battling a bit in hip hop night clubs in places that have been trying to be a little bit 8 Mile. My side of the deal is that I’ve been going round for six months battling hip hop MCs in night clubs around midnight whilst wearing a suit and actually surprisingly winning all my battles, except for the King of the Mic competition, where I got though to the final against Mixy, but he’s been the guy that trained me. So that’s one strand of the show; who I’m battling and what happens and what gets said and then working towards the final. The whole idea of the show is that we then perform that final battle and the audience get to decide who they think wins. I think Mixy hates to admit it, but when we played the Edinburgh fringe this year I won the majority of those battles, but we’ll see, I don’t want to get too cocky.

Do you write separately or together?

A bit of both. We do write our own material. The earlier material in the show is our solo material to give an example of what we normally do, but as the show progresses the pieces become more and more fused. We had to get used to writing together, which basically involved arguing for hours on end about a range of things. A piece that lasts about two minutes would probably take us about six hours to write. We both get quite picky about what we use. Mixy will like things that I think are dreadful and I’ll like things that Mixy thinks are pretentious and we’ll argue backwards and forwards for quite a bit. We usually end of getting a pint and chilling out though and it always looks a lot better the next day.

I was trying to think of acts that were like you guys and the nearest I could get was Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip.

Yeah that’s not a bad one. I’d definitely say that for both of us, Scroobius Pip’s writing has been an influence. A lot of Norwich based writers have been an influence as well. People like Luke Wright, Tim Clare and Ross Sutherland and the Aisle16 collective have inspired me particularly and Mixy even more so, but he got introduced to them later. I think Mixy has more lyrical influences, but I’d definitely say that there are aspects of it that if people are into Scroobius Pip it will interested them. I think Scroobius is quite unique in what he does though. I don’t think anyone’s quite managed to hit what he does.

Will this be the first time Dead Poets have performed in Norwich?

We toured with a band called Wood Pigeon, Murray Lachlan Young, who was the first poet to be offered a million pound record deal by EMI, Aoife Mannix and Janie Armour on the Phrased and Confused tour about a year and a half ago and we performed at the Norwich Arts Centre then as well. It was a great gig and we really, really enjoyed it. That was way back when the show was very rough and only lasted about 15 minutes and now we tend to go on for about an hour and ten. It’s definitely evolved quite considerably since then, so we’re looking forward to coming back. I went to UEA to study American English Literature, so I’m always keen to go back to Norwich ‘cause I’ve got lots of friends in the area. We also do some work with Bright Sparks who are based in Norwich, but it’s kind of a rural touring thing for teenagers. We’re pleased to be doing more adult gigs though because we seem to be branching more into working in schools in special measures in central and south London.

So it’s good to have a mix then?

Well yeah ‘cause we have a lot of material we can’t use in those shows, so it’s good to be performing for an adult audience.

What can we expect from the show?

You’ll hopefully see poetry and rap linking and interweaving. We start off quite separately but it’s a true story. The whole show is kind of a journey for both of us from when we didn’t know each other and we were doing our own things to becoming an experiment that fuses poetry and hip hop more and more. Hopefully we cover a range of topics from serious political pieces to ridiculous comedy and stories. It really does range all around the place. There’s this underlying storyline of our personal journeys, but the majority of the show is quite experimental in mixing hip hop and poetry.

Do you encourage audience participation?