S4E31: Simon Armitage

Rockonteurs with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt

Rhino UK

Pop, Interviews, Music, Rock

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2023

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on Rockonteurs, we are joined by the current Poet laureate Simon Armitage. Simon is a music obsessive and always wanted to be in a band or be a rock star. Raised on a diet of The Smiths, B52’s, Joy Division and many more. He is a fascinating character with incredible tales on the impact that both Ted Hughes AND David Bowie had on his upbringing in small town rural life in the early 70s. Listen to Simon's band Lyr and check out their latest release 'The Ultraviolet Age' which is out now.

This is a really interesting listen from a different but just as inspiring guest. Rockonteurs is produced by Ian Callaghan and Ben Jones for Gimme Sugar Productions

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello Guy and I noticed that I put up a post on something recently oh yeah it was a picture of my new
0:07.2	pod and in one of the comments underneath someone just
0:15.0	what we do so we have the poet
0:20.0	so we have the poet laureate of the United Kingdom on our show today.
0:26.0	We're upping our game. Yeah, yeah. But what's so nice is we're at an age where we now have a poet laureate who doesn't come from some
0:36.7	sort of unimaginable ivory tower sort of netherworld of literary fancy He's someone who grew up with the Smith's,
0:45.4	and you know comes from the same place as all of us.
0:50.3	Yeah, absolutely. If you're wondering why he's on, he's got a band, they've just released their second album.
0:56.4	He recites lyrics in them, poetry slash lyrics. He talks with the music, and it's absolutely amazing. Now I have got a little bit of trouble because we're going to have to ask him because the band is L Y R Land Yacht Regatta.
1:11.0	How do you pronounce it? I say L. Lyer. When I first saw it
1:14.8	I didn't realize it stood for Lagnot Regrata and you just assume he's a poet
1:19.3	his northern that it's a liar I was thinking medieval the liar yeah yeah even though that has an he and his partner in that
1:26.9	is in fact someone who's worked extensively with burner Butler you're talking about Richard
1:31.9	Walters I am okay so but also you know he Butler. Are you talking about Richard Walters?
1:32.6	I am.
1:33.4	Okay, so, but also, you know, he's dabbled in music for a bit.
1:36.9	You know, he did, he worked with a guy called Craig Smith on the Scaremongers back in 2009. He's had 20 collections of poetry out. He's written librettos. He's written a novel. He's written plays. But he also wrote this fantastic autobiography, that's easy for you to say, called Gig, which was about him wanting to be a rock star
1:57.4	when he was a younger man, which I fascinated to talk to him about.
2:01.5	Well, yes, oh my God, I've just realized that I had my mic turned on my phone so I've
2:08.1	basically everything we've just said written down in a sort of garbled version as a text message.
2:14.0	Does it make poetic sense?
2:17.0	Is it in a stanza or is it a summit?
	...

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