World Upside Down (a short tribute to John Lever, Band on the Wall, 1998)

Pushing and shoving on the dance floor

We must have looked a right sight

Ducking and diving next to the waves

Of distorted guitars and tribal like drums;

Our Hair blowing wild in the over ripe summer air

As we laughed at the singer

Stumbling at his words for a few seconds

Before carrying on, pushing each other

Up and down the dance-floor

Your hair was punked up, dyed bright purple

And resembled Sonic the hedgehog a little

Whilst I ended up got stuck at jury service

I was attending up the road

Until just before we were due to meet,

Leaving me with no choice but to turn up in my suit

Which drew some curious looks

From the bouncers at the front door.

The first beer went down, a bit too well

In a full measured stroke

As we both laughed at the support act

Pulling time, with a casual swagger

With how I dodged a horrible case

In the morning, only to end up on a botched robbery

That went on and on and on and on

While you carried on moaning

About your boss who was about to leave.

By the time the band you wanted to see

Came on, we were both half cut

On three and a half pints of Skullsplitter

Which left us wobbling all over the club

Stitching our drunkness

In out of synch singing

When-ever the band started songs

You said you knew,

Ribboned in energy.

When World upside down came on,

I stuck my head up with a primitive yeah

Adding unwelcome backing vocals

With a drunken slur

Gliding over the guitars

And drums bursting into life,

Only for you to fall into me

And sending me spinning

All over the place.

Waking up afterwards

I was told I had fell backwards

Spinning around in a huge circle into

A small group of chairs

That could have seriously hurt me

If the drummer hadn't leapt from his stool

Like an Olympic diver,

In a frantic panic

To make sure that I was okay.

I found out afterwards

That was John Lever.

(John Lever was most famous for being the drummer in 1980’s and early 2000’s Manchester, UK band The Chameleons which was my favourite band but also played in bands such as Chameleons Vox, Sun and the Moon, Weaveworld, The Professionals, Wilson and others I no doubt have forgotten about. This story above was a personal memory put into a poetic form about a gig I saw at the Band on the Wall in Manchester in 1997 when he drummed for Wilson which has been wrote upon hearing of his sad passing recently).

New Write Up on the End of Summer

The following write up has appeared on the publication page of The End of Summer by Michael Holme (for which i am grateful for)

Right from the start of the first poem in this collection, I realised I was reading words penned by a writer very different to myself: “The first few times we met / was under a crossing of invisible bridges…” Whilst hard to picture, it seemed ironic, then not, crossing bridges separate, whilst it was established that a meeting had occurred. Andy’s words are sometimes simple, sometimes hard, and at other times plain obscure. I thought he offered a set of poems levelled at all manner of minds. My own poetry often mentions the season, more often spring than any other, and I like the seasons as a theme in Andy's poetry. Do not expect clichéd descriptions here though: “After Summer / autumn is always brushed / under the carpet / like a half baked afterthought…” Expressions such as “womb sunrise,” “forgotten shadows,” “splattered hammers,” “colliding motionless,” “like a postcard out of breath” and many more, make the poems the readers own. They offer an ambiguity that begs the book is reread with a different angle on previous suggestions. Some poems, for example, Out of Reach II, make me imagine parallels with the abstract painters, but not total abstraction. Again, there is left an offer for the reader to define the looser parts. In “Edge of the Flames” I recognised a poetry I was more accustomed to, and it’s presence in the volume only added to the overall richness. This, as an example, was admittedly, an easier read for me. But still offering gems like, “Before morning / the night was as vicious as ice / and the wind branded the windows / with a punk like sneer.” And the poet doesn’t always restrict himself to formal sentence structures, something I have never had the courage to do myself. Does it lack because of that, and the odd missing comma? I don’t think so. It’s like further food. For me the clearer works like “Divorced Memories” were favoured. Then I though, is that a laziness? And I loved seeing local references. I felt the last piece summarized much, in a hope and mystery perhaps?