Hammer & Tongue Slam featuring Simon Munnery with support from James McKay

Order tickets via Eventbrite:http://htcdecember13.eventbrite.com/?aff=efbevent

Time for the next open round of the Cambridge Hammer & Tongue 2013-14 season… Spoken word artistry and competitive mayhem. What more could you want?

This is your chance to become part of the spoken word slam brilliance that has graced this here fair city since 2009, in the warm and wonderful surroundings of fabulous venue The Fountain. Sign up as one of the eight to compete for a place in the Regional Final next September, become a judge, or just dive in and soak up the atmosphere and talent on display. And some great beer.

Tickets are a silly £5 full price/ £3.50 concessions/ £2 for slammers early bird (from now until 10 days before the event)/ £6/ £4.50/ £2.50 otherwise in advance and a still frankly ludicrous £7.50/ £6/ £3 on the door. Doors are at 7:30pm; kick-off at 8pm. There’s also a bar upstairs… 😀 (Please note that “The Loft” part of The Fountain is, unfortunately, not currently accessible to wheelchair users – please contact us for further details.)

Simon Munnery is someone it is almost impossible to describe in an original way. It will probably be enough for us to simply urge you to take this almost unprecedented opportunity to see this “unsettling madman with a highly amusing and unusual take on the world” do poetry.

If you need more urging, consider this: he’s a Winner of The Sony Gold Award for Radio Comedy and writer of ‘London Shouting’ and ‘Alan Parker’s 29 Minutes of Truth’. Put a kettle on his head and he becomes the League Against Tedium. He’s also a British Comedy Award Nominee, a Perrier Award Nominee, a Barry Award Nominee, a Sony Radio Award Winner, and a Boothby Graffoe Award Winner.

He was the star of BBC2’s Attention Scum and Radio 4’s Where Did It All Go Wrong?

The Observer described him as “One of the most original and inventive comics in the country.”

Stewart Lee described him as “The Peter Cook of his generation.”

Rarely less than surreal, always funny, frequently satirical, this legendary comedian is also a poet and, because we love you, we’re bringing him to Cambridge so you can describe him and his work for yourselves.

To find out more, visit http://www.simonmunnery.com/

And he’ll be supported by James McKay, who started writing and performing poetry about a decade ago. Since then the poems have found their way on to Radio 2, into a book (Quiet Circus), and a lot of very different rooms across the globe. He reads a lot of books, drinks a lot of coffee, and has memorised a startling number of epic Victorian poems… http://www.mckaypoetry.com

Hosted by Fay Roberts, a Cambridge-based poet, musician, and unrepentant geek.

Fancy Slamming?

The rules for H&T slams are as follows:

Slammers are chosen at random from the sign-up list to perform – spoken word only, no music, no props. Each competitor has 3 minutes from the time they start talking on the mic. After 30 seconds’ grace period, they start losing points (1 point for every 10 seconds!). At the end, they’re given points out of 10 by 5 judges chosen from the audience, while the top and bottom scores are removed to ensure fairness. The slammer gets a score out of 30, and the competition moves on.

The winner of that evening’s competition goes through to the Regional Final (the Cambridge one tends to be held in September), and the winner (and runner-up) of the Regional Final goes through to the National Final. The winner of the National Final gets crowned H&T National Slam Champion and can then go on to compete in things like the Radio 4 slam championships, the international slam championships, etc.

Aspirant competitors can sign up either by rocking up as doors open on the night (typically 7:30pm for an 8pm start) or by booking slam tickets in advance online (£2 from Eventbrite – the relevant link is above). You can “express an interest” by emailing your name in advance, but that only gets you on the reserve list until you pay on the door (£3).

There are no limitations on style of poetry – a typical slam will see sonnets, blank verse, hip-hop, rhyming iambic pentametric couplets and more all cross the stage – and we’ve seen winners who’ve read their poems out from the written version (paper, kindle, phone, beermat) so, while there are advantages to learning your pieces off by heart, it’s not a requirement!

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