LAST MANGO IN PARIS

A busy month…

I’ve seeded the idea for Moving Space, a project which sees schools around the world having creative conversations via the web;

Tongue Fu in August featured sweet performances by Charlie Dark, Michael Horovitz, and students from Tower Hamlets Summer University, who produced some inspired work in a workshop I taught earlier that day. Dis is dem…

Read a review of the gig here, in the excellent Ctrl Alt Shift online mag.

We did this back on returning from an excellent Big Chill. Tongue Fu rocked on Friday night; Salena Godden, Josh Idehen, Kate Tempest and Ben Mellor all on top form, with impromptu appearances from Polar Bear and Frisko, who both jumped onstage for a freestyle with Kate at the end of the night, rocking the full house crowd before we had our sound cut off.

We performed our new musical, ‘the girl who learned to beatbox out of her ass’. It’s genius! More soon, we want to take it to Edinburgh this year… here’s the band in performance mode!

We’re performing it next month at Stoke Newington International, joined by loads of friends…

It’s part of Hackney Word Fest, which I’m performing for a few times in the next month.

The next Tongue Fu will also kick off; Disraeli is my favourite poet in the country; Caroline and Inua are also hot writers, and Malik is a prodigous talent, even though he’s not even eighteen yet!

I’ll be in America for seven weeks later this year, hitting Chicago, NYC, Vancouver, Seattle, LA, San Francisco and Puerto Rico.

I’m featured on the last track of the long awaited, freshly mastered Bandish Projekt album.

Bandish’s Mayur and I laid down a fresh tune yesterday, and recorded a video for it today, featuring bharat natyam by Jyoti Argade.

I’ve written a fresh killer piece for performance, which I’ll be dropping at various locations over the next month; the first is on September 11th, opening the Poetry Olympics Enlightenment festival alongside John Agard, Michael Horovitz, Mahmood Jamal, Stacy Makishi and many others.

I have also spent a considerable amount of time in the countryside, writing, reading, listening to music, and tuning in to the language of the birds and the trees!

the image above, and the ones from the Big Chill, are taken by the ever-loving Briony Campbell, and the flyers have been designed by the ever-prolific David Cuesta.

Till soon…