This evening of poetry and music isn’t usually the sort of thing we cover, but it continues York Theatre Royal’s run of impressive bookings across genre boundaries.
Like last year’s Sancho & Me, the evening pivots around the persona and charisma of its central performer. Simon Armitage is a more lugubrious presence than Paterson Joseph, for sure, but they share a care with words and an ear for a well-hewn turn of phrase. (Armitage is, of course, the Poet Laureate, so you’d hope so.)
The pre-interval performance is Armitage solo, kicking off with “Do We Really Care? Pt.2”, a set of lyrics produced for a collaboration with producer / musician Future Utopia. It twists partial rhymes into offbeat shapes that somehow still flow: “injurious” linking to “nucleus” and still making sense.
Between poems, Armitage lets loose with his wry humour, so understated you might have to double-take to realise he’s just taken a withering (but loving) potshot at the audience. Armitage’s selection tonight certainly showcases his poetic wit, with one lighter piece constructing anagrams from his own name in a supposed attempt to pin down his identity: “Aiming maestro”, “I am moist anger”.
Another takes on a pastiche of Ezra Pound’s style to ruminate on a visit to Poundland. And “Let’s Bird Table” is a reductio ad absurdum of management-speak jargon. Yet among the humour there are always subtler human insights, reflecting on everyday activities as well as the larger societal experiences that the Poet Laureate is tasked with capturing. A moving poem, “The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash”, speaks beautifully and simply to the losses felt at the height of the COVID pandemic.
He also offers insights into the inspirations behind the works he shares, from lying in a hammock watching a hot air balloon go by to the thrill of fleeting teen summer romance. Even between readings, his words are weighted and freighted with slanted insight: after the sunny heat of a post-exam fling, post-school relationships "end in September, in acrimony and downpour".
In the second half (really more like the final two thirds, time-wise), Armitage is joined onstage by LYR, his band Land Yacht Regatta. The central collaboration is between Armitage and two multi-instrumentalists, Richard Walters and Patrick Pearson, though they’re here joined by two other musicians to round out the full band sound.
It is a dreamy, textured sound, sometimes drifting, carried on loping, atmospheric loops, and sometimes driving, with motorik beats and throbbing basslines. Fans of Public Service Broadcasting might take something away from “Snow Day”, for instance.
LYR have been involved in a number of commissions, from which they share extracts tonight. Their work for the National Trust involved setting some of Armitage’s words, published in the recent collection Blossomize, to music. Of these, “Folk Song” is another of tonight’s highlights, a euphoric wassail of a tune.
Even while sharing anecdotes of spotting polar bears as he’s making a TV programme on Svalbard, even given the people he’s met and the places he’s seen, Armitage has a way of making the extraordinary seem everyday. The gift of his poetry, indeed, is in the opposite: his playful, moving word games make day-to-day life sparkle with newness.