2:05pm Friday 5th March 2010
THE open mic circuit in Southampton is a great place for new artists to learn their trade and establish themselves.
Nerves that inhibit early performances can be shred and stage craft shaped. All you have to do is make that first performance.
For the Southampton poet Kim Techno his first step on the stage was initiated by his mate: “Andy bet me a pint I’d chicken out, and so I thought ‘for a pint I’d do it’ and that was the start of all the madness.”
And Kim certainly has made an impact. I first heard about his performances from the lighting engineer Glynn Davis who saw him support ‘Science of Eight Limbs’.
Glynn was surprised by how much the audience were taken by his ‘spiritual poetry’.
“Every time I do one of my pagan poems it’s a pagan ritual as far as I’m concerned.” Kim told me during a recent interview. “It puts me into an altered state and recreates the feeling when I first wrote the poems.”
And Avebury, one of the spiritual homes of the New Age movement, is the source of most of Kim’s inspiration.
The stones circles and the new age life loom large in his poems but what strikes me most is how Kim distils the complex into simple observations.
He talks about how Avebury ‘deep-spelled’ him and, in a way, his poetry has done that to me.
The whole interview is on Amazing Radio (DAB and online) tonight at 7pm, repeated Sunday 3pm. Visit amazingradio.co.uk
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