THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.125 - GEORGE THE POET AT LONDON PODCAST FESTIVAL 2019

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

Adam talks with British poet, rapper and podcaster George Mpanga, aka George The Poet. Recorded in front of a live audience at The London podcast Festival, September 13th, 2019.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for additional editing.RELATED LINKSADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (AUDIO BOOK AT AUDIBLE) (2020)ROSIE BOUNCING AT OFFER OF WALK (YOUTUBE, 2015)HAVE YOU HEARD GEORGE'S PODCAST? - EPISODE 2 (POPCORN) (2018)GEORGE READS A LOCKDOWN POEM ON RADIO 4'S WORLD AT ONE (2020)GEORGE THE POET ON HATE CRIME (2017)GEORGE THE POET - THE BEAUTY OF UNION (2017)LD 67 MEETS GEORGE THE POET (YOUTUBE, 2018) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how are you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. Welcome to the second of two live episodes recorded at the London Podcast Festival in September 2018.

The previous one was with American comedian, now living in the UK, Sarah Barron. recorded at the London Podcast Festival in September 2018. The previous one was with American comedian, now living in the UK, Sarah Barron. And today's episode, number 125, is with George Mpanga, who goes by the stage name George the Poet. George Vax. George, aged 29 as I speak, is a London-born spoken word performer of Ugandan heritage. His innovative brand of musical poetry has won him both critical acclaim as a recording artist and a social commentator. The first time many people saw George was when he read a love poem that was played at the top of the official TV coverage of the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Prince Harry is a big supporter of a charity that is particularly important to George,

apparently. The poem began, loving is lovely, like licking a lolly, then poking and stoking a fire. Oh no, sorry, that's one of my poems. George's poem was called The Beauty of Union. Link in the description. Here's a quote from the website of his former school, Queen Elizabeth's, who have written proudly of their former pupil. George's growing national profile as a poet rests in large part on his work commenting on major issues of the day. Excuse me, I'm trying to do a podcast. Can you keep that down a tiny bit, thanks. Yeah, all right. Well, look, we'll talk later on, shall we?

Some of these birds, I don't know. George's growing national profile as a poet rests in large part on his work commenting on major issues of the day. In 2017, he released a video showing himself reading a poem on hate crime. Link in the description of podcast. The video was produced in collaboration with the Equality and Human Rights Commission

to coincide with the anniversary of the murder of MP Joe Cox. That from the website of George's former school. Despite all this upstanding behaviour and royal friendliness, George is wary of being co-opted by the British establishment and turned down an MBE in 2019, citing, says Wikipedia, the British Empire's treatment of his ancestral home, Uganda. His multi-award winning podcast, entitled Have You Heard George's Podcast is a series of imaginatively produced audio collages that variously feature interview clips, atmospheric

field recordings, little sketches and music all tied together with George's thoughts and commentary and spoken verse, often providing a powerful, seldom-heard perspective on the experience of being black in Britain. Dr A. Buckles calls it a marriage of art and journalism. Brilliant. My conversation with George was recorded in the large auditorium at King's Place in the King's Cross area of London

on a warm tail end of the summer night in early September 2019 as part of the London Podcast Festival. But if you, like me, are not a massive fan of live podcast episodes, especially when the podcast is usually recorded without an audience, so, you know, Richard Herring,

he always does his show in front of a live audience and it's brilliant because of it. But for someone like me, suddenly having a conversation in front of a live audience requires quite a unnatural change of gear that sometimes makes the conversations a bit less easygoing, I think. I don't know. Anyway, I say all that only because I think this one is a good exception. And as you will hear, George is one of the most relaxed and relaxing people to talk to and listen to, even in front of a live audience. He seems enviably comfortable in his own skin.

And we had a great conversation, which began with me coming out on stage and welcoming the audience and George by playing a video of me asking Rosie if she wants to go for a walk. Back in the old days when Rosie would actually come for a walk with me, today she just shook her head and stayed home. She likes going for walks in the evenings now, but she's not so keen on the afternoon walks anymore. I don't know. But the video I played to George and the audience at King's Place

was a montage of me asking Rosie if she wants to go for a walk that I made back when Rosie was about four, I suppose. And in those days, she would lift off vertically into the air at the mere mention of a walk, like a parrier jump jet or a hairier jump jet. Now, I wanted to say that the podcast will be taking a short break for a couple of weeks

and I'll be back at the end to explain a little bit more. But right now, with George the Poet. Here we go. Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat Thank you. Just for anyone, like for hardcore podcats, that is my dog, Rosie George,

with whom I go on long walks in the countryside. Do you have a dog? I don't have a dog, no. Have you ever had a pet? Nope. Do you wish you did? I don't have a dog, no. Have you ever had a pet? Nope. Do you wish you did? No. No.

I feel like I'm letting you down in this conversation. Not at all. You know, I was like you once. I was petless for many years. And even accused of being a dog Nazi. Wow. Yeah. What changed?

Well, I had children. And then my middle son just went on and on and on about, can we get a dog? Can we get a dog? Please, can we get a dog? Can we get a dog? And we were having some struggles with the boy. And my wife said, maybe a dog might be quite good. Like, he'll take care of the dog and he'll learn some responsibility and it'll bring out a softer side of him.

And also we will have done him a massive favor. So we'll have one over on him. So anytime he's uncooperative, we can say, we got you the dog. And if he doesn't do what we say, we'll threaten to hurt the dog. and if he doesn't do what we say, we'll threaten to hurt the dog. That story makes me feel so guilty, because the family did have two budgies that I just refused to acknowledge. So there was no budgie bonding at all?

No. So for years, I resentfully had like feed and clean After the budgies And then one day one of the budgies passed away I still after those years Felt nothing The end I know what you mean I know exactly what you mean you don't necessarily have that

sort of relationship that other people do with their pets anyway rosie came along as a three week old puppy whip it poodle cross and she was a pain in the rectum but then the thing that changed was the podcast. I sort of started with this exact recorder. This is my backup recorder. I would start going out on walks with Rosie and making voice notes on this thing and just sort of using it as a therapy ramble, you know, just talk about what I was doing, maybe work out ideas, that kind of thing. And it was so enjoyable that I thought well maybe I can turn this into

some sort of podcast you know these rambles that I have with Rosie so this was a completely personal thing at first it wasn't for an audience yeah exactly crazy but there were elements that I thought actually that might be okay some of this I could share I could put it out and it does feel personal in that way did you ever do things like that? Where do the field recordings in your podcast come from, for example? So I felt like there was so much inspiration from my lived experience that fed into my work. And it's exactly the same.

It started as completely personal. I wanted to capture the magic of what I was witnessing on a daily basis just so that I could relive these moments. And eventually, I felt like they would give more context, because I would have these recordings on my phone, and then I'd be driving, listening to a song, and it would make me think about the conversation that we'd have. And a lot of these conversations are things that don't reach the mainstream

or are not known about my part of the world. So I just thought thought if you could marry that quality of conversation with the songs that people might perhaps recognize give a lot more context to what these people are going through who for example recorded your mum talking to your nephew in your popcorn episode i did thanks for asking and noticing that i really i my nephews are my muse and just they're so weird you know kids are so weird and um one thing that's always fascinated me is how children have the ability to cry as if the world is coming to an end over really trivial stuff yes it says a lot to me about the human condition and how we learn to

self-regulate you know i heard my nephew crying over lego and i heard what my mom was saying to him like one of his constructions had disintegrated yeah and he was so frustrated and i remember that i'm not that far removed from that experience and obviously my mum was the one who had to talk me through those frustrations and listening to her talking my nephew through you know 20 years removed for me I felt like I had to capture that and I did it personally and eventually the podcast occurred to me see my little nephew stressing blessing because his lego fell apart but from the way my mum handles it you can tell she got hella hot first she recognizes why my little guy is stressing then she tries to make him see the life lesson if you do something properly it will not break if you do it in a hurry talking non-stop

looking at nicolases yeah moving all over the place you will not build it firmly and it will break okay so what you need to do is challenge yourself to build it firmly so it doesn't break. Okay? That's my mom. And it was so sweet and nice the way she said it. I just thought, wow, that is good going. Yeah, man. How old was your nephew at the time?

About seven years old at that time. Yeah. So it's funny because I try to show my mom appreciation. I talk to her about how amazing her parenting has been. And she has this weird thing. I don't know if it's a Ugandan thing or if it's an overly Christian thing, but she just feels like praise is bad. She has to resist the praise.

But by capturing that and putting it in context you couldn't run you know i'll be able to say adam bux has said that you're a good parent so anyway rosie yeah was it was a total game changer and now i record my podcast intros and outros and it's very therapeutic it's nice to be out there have you ever lived in the country? I've spent a lot of time in Uganda, rural Uganda. But even urban Uganda has a lot of green spaces. Right. So when I'm out there, that is my country experience. And I guess being at university as well was not the most urban experience.

It was a change of pace for me. Yeah. In Cambridge? Yeah. Yeah. So you're not too far from us out in East Anglia. Right. I try to avoid Cambridge now because I've had so many fights with members of staff at the station.

Is that a running theme in your life or is it Cambridge station? There's something about Cambridge. I mean, the main thing is that they've just decided that making the trains run on time isn't that important. that making the trains run on time isn't that important so literally half the time the train will pull in and you'll miss the connection so you have to hang around for an extra hour i mean literally half the time but you know fuck me because i'm privileged and uh who cares so i take it out on the staff which is who are just trying to do their jobs and then I had a row with the guy in WH Smith's because I wanted to buy some tobacco but I couldn't remember the brand I wanted

and they wouldn't let me browse the tobacco. You're not allowed to see the packs. Where they're sold, where they're stocked. Yes, where they're sold. So they go in a black cupboard. You know, the logic being that if children can't see the packs, they won't think about it and then they won't smoke. Whatever, maybe that works. So I said, oh yeah, I could have some tobacco,

but I can't remember the brand. Can I just see? No. I was like, really? you won't let me see no so i said well okay um can i have some lights so they open it up and I was like she gets out the Marlboro Lights and puts them down and I was like oh no it's okay I'm not going to have those can I have some but by then she was like she knew what I was doing

and then she stood in front of the cupboard so that I couldn't see while she was putting the Marlboro Lights back. You can't see. No, you're not allowed to see. It was so insane. And then I tried some other tactic and then she called the police.

Escalated quick. I mean, I feel like you're not giving us the full information about this. No, I tell you what I did is I got out my recorder. That's the problem. I took it to an insane place. And I started recording because I thought, well, maybe this will be fun in the podcast. I don't know.

And I was like, I'm here at WH Smith. At Cambridge. And they won't let me see that. And so while she was doing it, she was like, Mike, call the police. Call the police. There's a customer who's causing nuisance. And anyway, so the guy came out and he's like,

no, it's okay. We don't need to call the police. But it's one of the many reasons why I try and avoid Cambridge Station. You haven't had anything negative happen, any serious misunderstanding so far from your work, have you? I don't think so, man. Every now and then, if I make an appearance like question time, what happens is that people that weren't interested in me before form really strong opinions about me, maybe from a moment or from a sentiment that i put out there

which i always have to ask myself could you have represented yourself and your perspective better in that moment but it's scary when i see verified people on twitter like talking passionately about george the poet constantly coming out here and playing the race card of this stupid orange tracksuit i just got this tracksuit right but yeah you have to kind of have a level of zen about things you can't control in it you do don't you i've yet to achieve that overall listening to your podcast even just the way you speak i'm impressed by the fact that you seem to have already achieved that level of Zen. You seem so sorted. Where does that come from? I mean, it made sense when I heard your mom speaking. I was like, ah, that's where that comes from. But is that the way your upbringing

was just sort of very calm and sensible? Well, I appreciate you saying that because it was just this morning that one of my closest friends was telling me that she's only now realizing how unstable I am but I think I have been put in situations in which I am sharing space with people that I really disagree with or don't see eye to eye with that was my childhood experience so early on that forces you to compromise and to listen a little bit obviously also a lot of people in my house and I'm kind of curious about people as well so when it comes to public address I try I don't always do a great job of it but I do try and consider that my perspective isn't

I don't have a monopoly on the truth That is a refreshing thing to hear Who were the people you were disagreeing with when you were growing up? So a lot of my neighbours the children that I was growing up with there was a lot of anger in the environment and I, obviously being a child

this is the first reference that I have about the world beyond my house. So I just thought, this is what some people are like. Looking back now, I see conditions that those young people were dealing with. I haven't seen in the same measure, kind of anywhere else, the extent, for example, of fatherlessness or poverty crime unemployment it didn't occur to me that you know it's later on that we get the language for these things but growing up around it all you perceive is the behavior and well into my teens I was still associating the behavior with people around me and their individual choices.

I very much felt that. And it was so strange to see a wider perspective. Now we get that a great deal, I think. People have grasped that in a lot of different areas. But yeah, growing up, that didn't occur to me at all. It was all on an individual basis i still think that that's sometimes the case when i have my run-ins with people who are just trying to do their job i'm engaging just on the basis of my personal peeve with them at that moment and not

seeing the bigger picture not thinking about the kind of day they've had and the kind of interactions they've had or whatever i mean you know sometimes i think i shouldn't have to think about that i don't see why they can't just be more helpful you know what i mean but yes i hear what you're saying so where was it that you were growing up this is northwest london between wembley and kneesden geographically the estate was quite secluded on one side we had a road called the A406, which is a big road that goes from west to east London. And on the other side, there was a big industrial park. So a geographically removed location, largely residential, not many access points. So it could at times feel like a hotbed

of tensions among young people. But growing up, I realized that there were many different experiences of that location. It's just that that was the time that I was born in and it's even changed now. So what would you have been doing on a balmy Friday night as a young man on that estate? As a young man, so not as a child, in my teens,

I would be trying to not be on the estate. I would be out, but I'd be somewhere else. Because unfortunately, by that time, there was a heavy gang culture that was emerging among my peers. And it really set in in the local schools so if you've gone to a school in the area and everyone knows the bus that you take to go home and everyone went to similar primary schools then there's even more pressure on you to represent yourself as someone

from this area someone who cannot get. Everyone was getting robbed back in the day. Someone who won't fall victim to violence or someone who won't just get bullied. And a lot of the guys internalized that. Now, what I didn't realize is that some of my other neighboring estates had a similar culture, but a little more order. They had hierarchy hierarchy my estate was not known for order or hierarchy so um a lot of the behaviors that these guys were taking on they would direct it just in a scattergun way like to each other towards me there was a spate of burglaries on the estate for a long time there were robberies of older people so my estate was like the pariah estate to this day in our part of northwest london and for that reason on a balmy friday night i'd be anywhere the fuck else man i'm trying to be there

what form did the gangs take like what what did they stand for if they stood for anything bless them they stood for their estate because that is all they knew about themselves no one ever talked to them about who they were before it was a largely immigrant community growing up it was predominantly Jamaican you've got like third fourth generation Jamaican immigrant kids who are significantly removed from the experience of the homeland and ultimately have had parents that have grown up you know under the time no blacks no irish no dogs yes they've grown up at odds with the state so there's a statelessness among a lot of these young people and all they know for sure is that the council placed my family here that's what their identity was uh-huh and there would

have been people probably my mom would have been one of them who would read in the daily mail that the way that maybe the british gangs were inspired was via hip-hop that drifted over from west coast america you know what i mean was that a big inspiration or was it a factor yeah so i felt like i suspected that for a lot of my childhood but remember you remember the factors that i told you about the fatherlessness crime poverty unemployment i didn't relate to that in my home so i it took me a long time to understand the presence of these factors within the household, which I go on to talk about in episode two. After giving you the scenario of my mom talking to my nephew, I go on to talk about next door, my friend, and the lack of structure in my friend's life. Anyway, for the majority of my early life, I didn't identify with that. But what I started seeing from the age of 12 onwards was a lot of my friends withdrawing into themselves and shedding parts of their personality and their character that used to be loving and used to be vulnerable.

Everyone started presenting themselves a lot more as the rappers that we listened to presented themselves. So I made the same mistake that you say readers like your mom made. I confused correlation with causality. I hear all of that stuff going on in the rap music. I hear what these rappers are saying. And I see what you kids are doing. And you kids must be doing it because of the rappers. But the correlation might have more to do with the conditions that

these guys are actually coming from and their identification with the rap might be again going back to the whole point of belonging they don't belong necessarily in this country they don't feel that same identification with where their parents are from there's a generational gap with their parents you know their parents are in a predominantly working class situation. There are constraints on their time, on their resources. Their parents have the best of intentions, but might not have all of the tools that they would like to give to their child to help them navigate what is quite a hostile environment. So in the home, there's this breakdown of communication. It's quite a hostile environment.

So in the home, there's this breakdown of communication. And ultimately, the story that these rappers have been painting starts to make a lot more sense by the time you're 13. Because you're getting a similar narrative, or you were, with drill music recently. Yeah. And the association with knife crime, etc. Yeah. And it's so tempting, isn't it, from an outside perspective to see those as being uh

so you know intrinsically linked i saw a video of you talking to a rapping man from a rap gang and he was wearing a mask yes he was from six seven that's right. And you were talking to LD. Other members of 6-7 rap gang include Monkey, Dimsy, Liquiz, ASAP, SJ, General Lucas Aid, Yo-Yo-Yo Ma, Fragrant P, Fidget Spinner spinner i'm making some of these up now but they're available if anyone wants them this guy's doing his research he's more clued up than me durwood fuzzy felt and mc nice andrew but yeah you were talking a little bit about that, about the overwhelmingly negative associations that a lot of people have now with drill music. Because your background is music, is that right?

That's right. Yeah. So what sort of stuff did you start making? Were you doing kind of genre music immediately? Yeah, I made grime when I first emerged as a rapper yeah well i first wrote in a more u.s style of rap which is just stylistically different but yeah grime is a far star homegrown version of rap that is native to our accent which is a big thing again about identity and belonging so at 14 years old i started off with that but i took an

ideological stance quite early on i felt like all of the examples of rappers that we grew up on spoke from an individualistic place and tried to use their art to boost themselves and create a sense of power and autonomy and independence of thought but i just saw a contradiction in that because what happened was everyone started behaving the same and exhibiting the same sometimes self-destructive behaviors so at 14 years old i was really curious about how we could tweak the formula so that everything that we are could be expressed in the music. We're all someone's friend and there is no violence, no machismo involved in that. We just chill with people. So how can we just be chilling with people in the music that doesn't involve any negative externalities or how can we be siblings how can we be family

members how can we be people that at some point went to sunday school can we represent all of that in the music as well and because i was so obsessed with that question how do you do all of that and still be cool and still be recognized as someone that is worth listening to. I went down a very different path in terms of the content that I was creating at an early age. So by the time I was 19 and I started at Cambridge and a friend of mine asked me to perform at a talent show that he was putting together, I already had content that was substantively different, but I also had some notes about how the difference can be further expressed. And the first of those notes was maybe I could just talk the lyrics as opposed to rap in them. Because the physical action of rapping is very intense, especially if you're on the stage, especially if you have been trained as a gram artist.

It's a very visceral thing to do you're projecting from your stomach there's a lot of strain on sometimes your neck muscles and your vocal cords yeah and that informs the energy of the music a lot of the time it's sort of like someone's having a bit of a paddy a lot of the time isn't it i'm very angry and i'm talking like this you know especially with dizzy rascal yeah complaining a little bit like this yeah yeah yeah a hundred percent and i always i think going to a school that was very middle class yeah and in the suburbs at a time where grime wasn't what it is today it wasn't the new rock and roll necessarily it was to us but it wasn't nationally recognized as such yeah i always had the challenge of having to interpret the whole culture to people that found it funny

found it laughable these little details became very apparent to me as kind of barriers to communication yes so what was the school that you were at a sort of nice grammar school? It was in Barnet. I was in a school called Queen Elizabeth Boys. I had no concept of what a grammar school was. Bless my parents, neither did they. They just knew that our local school wasn't really working out for my big brother at the time. Remember what I said to you about how gang culture and estate, the negative side of estate culture can just flare up in the playground. My brother was educating the whole family on that firsthand through the challenges that he was going through.

It was a crash course. And that shocked my parents into rethinking their approach to my education. So that's how we learned about league tables, learned the process of applying to a grammar school. And yeah, bless my mom, she actually had to personally teach me some elements of maths, like long addition, in order to prepare me for the exam. Clever person. And so your grammar school then presumably helped in the process

of putting you on the path to Cambridge. Yeah, straight up. It's funny because I was an inconsistent student. So a lot of my teachers had serious reservations about my Cambridge application. But there was one teacher, my sociology teacher, the subject that I, to this day, have loved the most out of anything I've ever studied.

And she was young. She was like in her early 20s at the time as well and strongly felt like I had a chance to study particularly sociology that's what I wanted to do at Cambridge so she really encouraged me Nisha Manoharan Maya she's a she doesn't live too far from here now man she's a very good person been very crucial to my journey but the whole school really trained me in a way that unfortunately a lot of my friends didn't have the opportunity to experience going to the schools that they did did any of your friends end up going to the same schools as you the same school the same yeah the same grammar school not a single one no no it was the concept didn't occur to a lot of like this is information that a lot of parents would jump at right but it just didn't reach many of our parents social

circles or the idea that you can set your sights on a school outside of the community and transform the child's opportunities because of that. And was there any sort of stigma attached to that for you? I felt social pressures into like I used to when I was coming home from school like year seven year eight the early years of secondary school my school was very strict about uniform and I used to carry trainers with me that were appropriate for the estate and i would just change little aspects of my appearance like what i was wearing on my feet and like if i had a hat on and whatnot i would just transform on the bus ride home just just like double agents put your straw boater on upside down that's what we used to do if we were going into town with the rough lads.

Turn our collars up, maybe loosen our ties a little bit. Shows that you're down. And then were you on board with the whole Cambridge thing? Did you get on with it immediately? I did, I guess for a second generation immigrant as well you're aware of the move of the whole strategy right my parents came here with materially with with nothing i don't like to say with nothing anymore as a blanket statement because they came with a sense of self they came with a strong network back home they came with a plan for their

children a plan for themselves and that was transmitted to me somehow so I felt like they were passing the baton on to me in order to you know generate more opportunities down the line and I did kind of see it as business and I thought this is a good school what I loved about Cambridge is that people are really insanely dedicated to what they're studying. And I felt like I was as well. So I didn't go necessarily for the most exciting social experience. And also, having grown up in the estate that I did and gone to the grammar school, I wasn't a stranger to being out of my depth socially. That wasn't the worst thing in the world it was doable

so i went there but to be honest with you the reality of being there was tougher than i had mentally prepared myself for just the amount of work that was expected nah the amount of work i did expect but i guess the loneliness oh okay yeah i was kind of lonely there just not having a scene that you could feel part of i took that for granted yes i had the same sort of thing when i went to art school eventually because by then i was a bit older than everyone else because i fucked up all my exams but it is lonely and so by the time i eventually got to art school, I was that much older than everyone else. And I just was into doing art. I wasn't there to have social fun. I'd made most of my good friends at school anyway.

And I was still in touch with them, my friend Joe and Louis. And I was still hanging out with them when I went back to London. So I didn't really have that much interest in forming new social groups at college right but it is lonely and I ended up renting everything from blockbusters that there was yep of an evening yeah that's I became a recluse and that's how my poetry really right became a thing yeah yeah yeah and so you started writing a lot at that point I had already got into the habit of writing a lot because my journey my commute to school since obviously like 11 years old was an hour and a half on the bus staring out the window an hour and a half that's what i'm saying like wouldn't have occurred to most parents to put

their child through that kind of process yeah but um that gave me space to write lyrics and i used to try and do it just because i have a bit of an obsessive personality i used to try and do it whether or not i was in the mood so it developed as like a craft that i was obsessed with and yeah so by the time i was in cambridge that was my escape like escape. I don't need company for that. Would you be okay to do a poem? Would you do a poem? Can you do one of your poems? Will you do a poem?

I could do a poem. Thanks. Yeah, that would be great. Thank you. Thank you. Impossible is a word people use to describe something they can't do sometimes they might want to be sadistic tell you they're just being realistic say it's near enough impossible not impossible they want you to think you'll lie in hospital for defying obstacles and trying not to fall.

But their impossible isn't my impossible. There are no winners until someone's won it. You won't know what I'm capable of until I've done it. I could either sit here, patient and listen, wanting to make an incision, having to wait for permission. Or I could make a decision. I could take a position. Impossible is the manifestation of your inhibition. So fear of trying is fear of flying. Imagine your mind's racing and your heart isn't out to help. They're turning against you and you're starting to doubt

yourself the nights get cold the mornings are rough now you're worried about people calling your bluff second guessing your ability and all of your stuff but no you alone more than enough this is the truth i saw before I went to sleep. I knew my time would come eventually. So I celebrate every test ever sent to me. Because I feel like what's about to be, is probably meant to be. It's remarkable to try, but I can't afford to die. Knowing my ambition didn't kill me.

Forget the voice of reason. Listen to the real me no guts no glory thank you thanks for listening that was very good that was great man thank you I love your delivery

I love the delivery and the tone you have in the podcast. And you have conversations with yourself. The podcast is beautifully produced. Who produces it? The podcast is produced by my main collaborator. His name is Ben Brick. He's right there. He's amazing.

Ben. After like a year and a half of listening to this podcast i still walk into the studio every day and i just see him sit there at the laptop and it's like a dopamine boost i'm like yes ben brick's still alive yeah yeah i really appreciate him so ben brick is classically trained right he knows music in a way that most people don't for for two reasons first of all he loves it and when he loves things he loves it like me like obsessive weird chill out love yeah but then he's also literally a scientist did you study physics sound physics yeah yeah like he actually knows the physics of vibrations and stuff and he knows a lot about computers so he can do things with sound that the average person can't do and that has been crucial to the podcast it just wouldn't exist in the same way without that guy right there do you use the loops on logic pro

you should they're good they're very good um i got you a present i got you a couple of presents uh one of them is a book that i like or at least i like bits of it and i thought you might like it and the other one i'm not very familiar with but I thought that might make me look good if I give that to him It is poems by a poet. He's called William Blake Get in and these are all selected by Patti Smith the musician So I mean, I don't know what how that would affect your enjoyment of the william blake just imagining patty sort of nodding and being blissful do you like william blake thank you i actually really appreciate i love

william blake thank you so much okay well you probably got those but those ones were selected by patty smith so they'll probably be better than the other ones you've got. And how do you feel about Bukowski? Bukowski, no problem with Bukowski at all. Have you got Bukowski already? I ain't. Oh, good. Well, this is supposedly the best anthology of his.

It contains my favorite poem called The Shoelace. Have you ever come across The Shoelace before? I haven't. Oh, it's a peach can i read a tiny bit of it please don't read the whole thing but i thought these were good and i thought i'd be quite because you talk about cross-pollination and the the value of being open to ideas from unexpected places and sources and i think that is a a very good thing to be into and I thought that there was something that was similar about Bukowski's aesthetic working class Los Angeles though in the 40s 50s and beyond

and just the griminess of some of the things that he's dealing with reminded me a little bit of some of the subjects that you talk about i'll resist the temptation to read it out in a charles bakowski voice but he was a strange guy he drank a great deal was a german american teased mercilessly for having a German accent as a boy growing up in Los Angeles. His father was fairly abusive and beat him a great deal. He had terrible acne growing up and all these things combined to make him furious and express his pain in very direct and quite shocking ways in his poetry a lot of the time. Although this I don't think is that shocking, but we'll see.

The shoelace, a woman, a tire that's flat, a disease, a desire, fears in front of you, fears that hold so still you can study them like pieces on a chessboard. It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse death he's ready for or murder incest robbery fire flood no it's the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse not the death of his love but a shoelace that snaps with no time left the dread of life is that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer and which are always there

license plates or taxes or expired driver's license or hiring or firing, doing it or having it done to you, or constipation, speeding tickets, rickets or crickets, or mice or termites or roaches or flies, or a broken hook on a screen, or out of gas, or too much gas, the sinks stopped up, the landlord's drunk. The president doesn't care. And the governor's crazy. Light switch broken. Mattress like a porcupine. $105 for a tune-up carburettor and fuel pump at Sears Roebuck. And the phone bill's up. And the market's down. And the toilet chain is broken. And the light has burned out. The hall light. The front light. The back light, the inner light. It's darker than hell and twice as expensive. Then there's always crabs and ingrown toenails and people who insist they're your friends. There's always that and worse.

Leaky faucet, Christ and Christmas, blue salami, nine-day rains, 50-cent avocados and purple liverwurst. Or making it as a waitress at norms on the split shift or as an emptier of bedpans or as a car wash or a bus boy or a stealer of old ladies purses leaving them screaming on the sidewalks with broken arms at the age of 80. Suddenly, two red lights... It's almost finished. I thought I may as well read the whole thing. Suddenly, two red lights in your rearview mirror and blood in your underwear. Toothache and $979 for a bridge,

$300 for a gold tooth, and China and Russia and America and long hair and short hair and no hair and beards and no faces and plenty of zigzag but no pot except maybe one to piss in and the other one around your gut with each broken shoelace out of 100 broken shoelaces one man one woman one thing enters a madhouse so be careful when you bend over that's the shoelace by charles mccaskey so much that just gave me anxiety man that was so stressed so when i was listening to that i was wondering first of all how did he know secondly is it just me like is it just us are we a type of person that gets stressed out

by the everything of everything like that's how i feel there's too much information there's too much to get irritated at there's too much that i'm channeling constantly sometimes when you're talking i just close my eyes god i can't there's too many shoel irritated at there's too much that I'm channeling sometimes when you're talking I just close my eyes there's too many shoelaces in the room right now but I don't know if that's just me and people like Charles just doomed to just overthink everything for the rest of our lives

you feel you're an overthinker do you? yeah have you always been like that or has it got worse? how old are you now if you don't mind me asking? 28 you're old Have you always been like that or has it got worse? How old are you now, if you don't mind me asking? 28. Right. You're old.

28, though, you're over the hump, the 27-year-old scary hump when people either stick with it or check out. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the podcast came when I was 27. Ah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the podcast came when I was 27. So before the podcast, people were used to receiving my words in two to six minute bursts. And that was appropriate for my journey. There were a few transformations that happened. Obviously, I was a rapper. Then I started putting little like three-minute poems on YouTube. And then I met a good friend of mine who I hope made it tonight. His name's Rob Ryan. There he is. Rob's a great guy.

He's a very talented director. And he spotted me before a lot of people did, just doing like some underground show. And he was like, you know know you should do stuff to camera and that was a turning point we put together a short film called my city poem about london and that was pretty much the format for the next few years people wanted what rob kind of initiated george in front of a camera saying some words but there was all that like the shoelace of things was always on my mind and i didn't know how to explain everything that i saw until as i was telling

you before i started paying a bit more attention to stand-up comedy and to podcasts and realizing that long form can really invite an audience that is prepared to pay a lot more attention. So that allows us to get into the minutiae of day-to-day life. And it helped me deal with a lot of my stresses that I couldn't communicate before. I haven't really heard anything like that before. I couldn't think of too many other things like that. Are you aware of similar things? Were you influenced by other other types of shows either radio shows or films or tv shows going back to your point adam about cross-pollination i was influenced very much by disney so i grew up around the disney renaissance

era when you know i think beauty and the beast was the first animated film to win the best animated Oscar. That was my childhood. Lion King, Aladdin. And I felt like there's something about that, especially in the way that they use music. That had been on my mind for about three years in the run-up to creating the podcast. That's interesting. And like I said, cross-pollinating the relationship with music and fantasy in Disney movies with my addiction for current affairs and sociology. Like, how can you make sociology feel as fantastical as a Disney movie?

And that's how the podcast was basically born. Right. Oh, it's good, man. I mean, it's so, it was one of those things my i don't know about you but i'm so pathetic that if people rave about things and say how good they are i tend to go no fleabag no oh but it's so good yeah no so i read about your podcast i was like but it is it's treat it's like a uh wonderful refreshing mind bath and so i thank you for it george thank you so much for coming along

thank you it's really a pleasure to meet you It's a thrill to get to talk to you. And congratulations on the podcast. It's magnificent. Are you sort of making things up as you go along? I ask people this question a lot. Or do you have some sort of plan for the next five years, how things are going to go? A bit of both.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The great leader Stalin said that the plan... Always a good one for inspirational goals. He said that the plan is the plan, but then the way things happen is the actual... Yes. It's a different story altogether. Yes.

Or, as John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Yeah. All right. Shit on my... as John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Alright. Shut up. No, listen. You love Stalin, that's fine. Wait. This is an advert for Squarespace.

Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics, and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop.

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Hey, welcome back, podcats. George the Poet. I'm very grateful to him for coming along and making the time to talk to me at the London Podcast Festival. It was a real treat to meet him and to meet his producer, Ben Brick. There's a few George- related links in the description of the podcast including a link to his brilliant podcast and especially the popcorn episode that I mentioned and that I played a short clip of towards the beginning of our conversation the one with his mum giving advice about making lego constructions and there's a link to George reading a poem

that he wrote since the lockdown began on Radio 4's World at One. A link to George's poem for Harry and Meghan. A link to the video montage of Rosie bouncing at the offer of a walk. A link to Adam Buxton's Ramble book in audiobook form. If you haven't already had the pleasure of making it a part of your life. Now I said at the beginning that the podcast is taking

a break for a couple of weeks which is just to give me a chance to get a few things together. Also my mum is not well. It's not COVID, I'm happy to say, but we did have to take her into hospital and she's being looked after by the wonderful people at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. And I'm so grateful to them. God, they're nice and kind and friendly and, you know, can't say enough good about them. And even my mum, who can be quite grumpy and daily mailish at times, kept repeating how lucky she felt to live in a country where the NHS exists and are there to take care of us so well.

Anyway, I'm not sure how long Mum is going to be in hospital, but when she gets out, we'll be looking after her here at Castle Buckle, so that'll be taking up a bit more time. But normal podcast service, at least for a few episodes, will resume in a couple of weeks. Until then, take great care of yourselves and each other. And if it's at all useful, please bear in mind that I love you. Bye! Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe.

Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a pat when my bum's up. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a pat when my bum's up. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe.

Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a pat when my bum's up. Bye. Thank you. you