and the smoke has risen.
SpeedPoets went off with a bang yesterday, celebrating 10 amazing years! Here’s a few snaps from the gig.
As always, Sheish Money opened the day with a song. Sheish has been part of the SpeedPoets family for 8 years and I just can’t imagine the gig without his distinct sound. Baron Field and I also had the pleasure of joining Sheish on stage for the opening track, Baron picking some mean banjo and me reading Max Ryan’s poem, Jim.
After a couple more songs from Sheish, I joined him on stage again to kick off the first open mic session of the day, reading the poem, Blood, from the man who coined the name SpeedPoets, Fakie Wilde.
James Waller delivered the first feature set of the day; reading a set of poems that conjured images of willows lining Merri Creek, preachers and polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz.
Brisbane troubadour, Baron Field was next up, playing a set of songs from his recently released self-titled, debut album. The room was hoppin’ as Baron was joined again on stage by Kieran Waters (banjo) & Sheish Money (slide guitar), the trio, ripping through a red-hot set featuring the tracks Writing Lines, Fallen Lighters and Month of Sundays. You can listen to all of these tracks at Baron’s bandcamp site. Well worth checking out!
And rounding out the trio of features was Fern Thomsett, who read poems about poems, poems about eggs, poems about eggs being poems, poems about writers block and poems about marrying two book collections.
Add to that the 32 Open Mic readers who each performed a poem, a closing song from Sheish and Baron and I am sure you can picture the large crowd, filtering out into the dimming light of evening, buzzing with conversation, already hungry for next month’s event.
Roll on April I say!
I will be posting more pics over at the SpeedPoets site during the week so make sure you drop by.
And finally, big thanks to Cindy Keong for all of the photos!
