Twenty years ago, roughly, when in my twenties, I was in a band, once described as ‘like Portishead on speed’ in the NME. Cassette tapes were an important part of our writing process and practice sessions. We would often improvise and tape it and, me as the lyricist and vocal melody maker, would take away and craft a song out of it, writing the words. Sometimes we would all work on the structure. New songs we could listen back to this way to see how they were working. When I moved my belongings permanently away from my house in Bristol, when moving to Edinburgh, Scotland, two years ago, I found a box of these practice tapes and noted that they could be a potential project of some description. I remember doing the same finding discarded Polaroids of my mother’s which I ended up working with in my book Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid, which came out with Hesterglock Press, back in 2021. Within a couple of weeks of noting this interest, Steven J Fowler asked me to perform at a Writers’ Kingston Cassette Literature night. I took that as a sign and set about writing responses to the different tapes. In the band we had practiced mainly at Unit 3 in Bedminster, South Bristol, which now belongs to Massive Attack, a studio I have had the privilege to be in since their occupation. When we had to stop practicing at the unit, as it was closed for a time before Massive Attack bought it, we started practicing in a concrete tower block in the north-east of the city, in Fishponds. A strange building with a swingers club upstairs, which we all, of course, found highly amusing. We had some good practice sessions in the Factory Practice Rooms. With these poetic responses, I titled the poem as the cassette was labelled. I didn’t respond in chronological order (after the first). I felt the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape with this project, as I traversed back through two decades, responding in the present, which was also the future to the past. These are the only poems I’ve written in response to the tapes so far. There are more for me to dip into, should I wish to. Most of these responses were written late night under the influence, in keeping with the mood and context of the tapes themselves and what life was like back then. A departure from my surreal narrative poems and different to my photo-poetry, which is often based around music, it is salutary, I believe, to investigate different sides of ourselves through our art. I hope people find something of interest in this atmosphere- and language-led short sequence, a realm of sorts, of sound, word and tape-based time-travel.
Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor, educator and critic from Bristol, now living in Edinburgh, UK. Her books include Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock), Strangers Wave (zimZalla), Poets (The Red Ceilings) and The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN). Her pamphlet, Some Deer, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books and her second full-length collection, Nervous Tic, will be published by Sublunary Editions in Spring 2025. Her poems have appeared in such places as The Rialto, Magma, Tears in the Fence, Perverse and Dreaming Awake: New and Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, edited by Peter Johnson and Cassandra Atherton (MadHat Press) Her reviews have appeared in such places as Poetry London and PN Review and her regular column, ‘Commitment to Chush’, ran in Sublunary Editions’ Firmament magazine for three years. A regular performer at the European Poetry Festival, Vik is a Poetry School Tutor (teaching on the Surreal Narrative, Absurdism and the Grotesque in Poetry) and Director of Disrupted Blue Indie Press Publicity. She co-edits Surreal-Absurd at Mercurius and is Digital Editor at Sublunary Editions. She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham. Her chapbook, One by One, an Oulipian collaboration with the poet, Bob Brightt, is out now with Derek Beaulieu’s No Press.