Aisle16

One of the best things of last twelve months is that I have been doing gigs as part of the poetry collective Aisle16.  Aisle16 were formed in 2000 by poets Ross Sutherland and Luke Wright, and have toured the UK several times, appeared at Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading and Leeds festivals, as well as full runs at three Edinburgh fringes, most notably the show Poetry Boyband. Recently Aisle16 expanded to include long term acolytes Tim Clare, Joe Dunthorne and myself. In 2008 a few of us were in the pub talking about the worst place to do a gig.

Several ideas were suggested, and this gradually turned into the idea that we all did gigs in our home towns. We'd each do a gig in the town where we grew up and film it all for a documentary. It was such a horrible, terrifying idea that we knew we had to do it. And so Local Boys Done Good began. In November 2008, Chris Hicks, Ross Sutherland, Joe Dunthorne, Tim Clare and myself got in a red Ford Escort. The first destination was Brigg, North Lincolnshire, the town where I grew up. I can honestly say that driving from East London up to Brigg was the most terrified I've ever been, I felt sick with worry. I didn't know if anyone would turn up, and I had never performed in front of my mum and dad before. And we had to repeat the process every day for each 'Local Boy.' The tour included Portishead, Swansea, Coggeshall in Essex and Quarley, which has a population of around 150.

How did the tour go? Check out the footage on myspace.com/homeworkLDN. The live recording is taken from Homework, a night of literary miscellany run by Aisle16 at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, which has seen special guest appearances from Tim Key, Kate Nash and Jon Ronson.