Coffee-Table Notes

The arrival of new work by Heathcote Williams is always a cause for a very revolutionary kind of celebration. In certain circles, after all, Williams has long been regarded as the conscience of a very fractured nation. A key figure in London's 1960s counter-culture, as a writer, his first book, The Speakers, was an impressionist portrait of the characters who brought Speaker's Corner to colourful life in Hyde Park. An adaptation of the book was later staged by Joint Stock Theatre Company. As an activist, Williams was a prime mover in the 1970s squatting and graffiti scenes that graced the streets of London's then run-down Notting Hill district, and he co-founded the alternative nation of Freestonia. As a playwright, Williams penned AC/DC, a critique of the anti-psychiatry techniques pioneered by R.D. Laing, and wrote The Local Stigmatic, which was championed by Al Pacino. In Hancock's Half Hour, Williams explored the debilitating curse of fame through the final m

Mayday looks set to be an extra special occasion for Kevin Williamson this weekend. This has little to do with the political past of a man who, as a one time Scottish Socialist Party firebrand, was the first person to be ejected from the Scottish parliament building in Holyrood while making a protest against the Iraq war while sporting a George Bush mask. It is to do with the launch of #UntitledOne, the new poetry anthology and accompanying music compilation produced in association with Birlinn's Polygon imprint by Neu! Reekie!, the monthly poetry, music and animation night presented at assorted Edinburgh venues over the last four and a half years by Williamson in partnership with poetic whirlwind Michael Pedersen. While the former features the likes of Tom Leonard, Scotland's Makar Liz Lochhead and Douglas Dunn nestling up to Jenni Fagan, Aidan Moffat and Jock Scot, the latter sees Mercury Music Prize winners Young Fathers line up with the likes of The Sexual Objects, Momus

Poetry, jazz and radical politics aren't exactly strangers to counter-cultural activity. As the black civil rights movement grew during the 1960s, so jazz grew ever free-er and subversive as words and music cried out for liberation. One of the pioneering provocateurs of black American poetry is Amiri Baraka, the New Jersey-born poet and playwright who has been agitating, educating and organising ever since he moved into Greenwich Village, where he discovered jazz and Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Since then, the artist formerly known as LeRoi Jones has become one of the most significant writers of his generation, courting controversy with every line that questioned what he saw as an oppressive establishment. This has been the case whether in volumes of jazz criticism, revolutionary inclined poems that were a clear influence on early rap, or as a figurehead of the radical Black Arts Movement. Baraka's poem, Black Art, in which he called for 'poe

The last time a new work by Heathcote Williams was performed on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe twenty-odd years ago, his trilogy of ecologically minded epic poems that began with Whale Nation had become some of the hottest property in poetry. Whale Nation, Autogedden and Falling For A Dolphin, alongside another volume, Sacred Elephant, were produced in a series of lavishly illustrated large-format editions, while their subject matter predated a mainstream concern for life on earth that was still regarded as marginal. The books sold in bucket-loads, while the performances by Williams' long-term collaborator Roy Hutchins packed out the Traverse Theatre and the Assembly Rooms. Since then there's been an apparent silence by Williams, whose loathing of the attention fame brings with it had previously caused him to retreat from public view during the 1960s. Then he was a key figure of London's counter-culture, where he mixed with the underground cognoscenti in a pri

When Benjamin Bagby walks onto a bare stage at The Hub this weekend with only an ancient harp to hold onto and accompany him in his solo rendition of Beowulf, it will be in stark contrast to pretty much everything else in Edinburgh International Festival. With no hi-tech jiggery-pokery, multi-media wizardry or cross-artform collaborations to gift-wrap it with, Bagby’s rendering of one of the most ancient stories to have survived is as about a pure a piece of story-telling to be seen anywhere in the early part of the 21st century. Half-sung, half-spoken in an arcane and captivating form of old English, the sheer guttural physicality of it punches the air with force as it regales the audience with its monster-strewn quest underground. If any of this sounds like some dry and dusty heritage industry bore-fest designed for tweedy academics to poach from, think again. Because, so rich and so alive is a performances that fizzes with the power of suggestion, Bagby’s Beowulf is rock and roll

When John Cooper Clarke declaimed an epigrammatic “Why struggle?” at the opening of his final late-night 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe show in his trademark deadpan northern twang, the statement was a typically double-edged mix of the philosophical and the practical. While the be-suited and be-shaded bard of Salford’s proclamation smacked of existential enquiry, in actual fact the motor-mouthed stick-insect was merely moving a table closer to the microphone in order to rest his bag full of verses on top and within reach. What follows is a rapid-fire barrage of rhyming vignettes that map out life’s everyday absurdities with a decidedly surrealist vision. Hire cars, not so wedded bliss with a bug-eyed extra-terrestrial and a verbal picture postcard on the salubrious delights of Greater Manchester’s satellite suburbs are all in the mix, each one punctuated with the driest of one-liners that rounds Cooper Clarke’s act up into the deadliest of routines. All this and slumland grimoir ‘Beasl

On paper, John Cooper Clarke shouldn’t work. The nasal twang and dulcet deadpan tones of the Salford stick-insect who more or less invented the spoken-word scene during punk’s first flush, after all, will forever be associated with his own heroic recitations of his finest works. On the page alone, the machine-gun rhyming couplets and social-realist surrealism of ‘Beasley Street’ and ‘Evidently Chickentown’ simply shouldn’t cut it. Yet Cooper Clarke made the grade on the GCSE curriculum years ago. One of those to graduate from the school of Cooper Clarke lyricism was Arctic Monkeys vocalist Alex Turner, whose own meat-and-two-veg vignettes were laced with similar northern English observations. Turner has even acknowledged his debt by printing his mentor’s words on the band’s record sleeves. Those wishing a lesson first-hand, however, should attend the week-long late-night residency that sees Cooper Clark play mein host for his first Edinburgh Festival Fringe dates since the mid-1990s. N