They kept telling me, with some puzzlement, that it was much quieter than usual. Compere Isobel Malinowski said at the end of the evening: “The Tudor thrives on noise. People who come here like that buzz.” I began to think that it must have been something to do with me, if Write Out Loud Wigan, a venue that many regard as the heart and soul of this poetry website, if not live poetry itself, was not firing on all cylinders as usual. Maybe they were just on their best behaviour; but maybe they protested too much. After all, the amount of noise generated should not be the only indicator of a great open mic night.

I had travelled here – even though, as Isobel pointed out, the Royal Festival Hall is a much handier venue for where I live – to witness Write Out Loud Wigan for myself. Wigan, once the territory of the Brigantes, an ancient Celtic tribe, and home of the world pie eating championships, fabled dance mecca Wigan Casino, and, of course, Wigan Pier. What I saw and heard on Thursday night was a wonderful mix of warm-hearted, irreverent, and occasionally bloody rude, poetry and poets, that emphasised once again the empowering, confidence-building qualities of live performance.  

There was the good-humoured and moving defiance of George Melling’s poem about old age: “I can become invisible. Will I? Bollocks!”. Hazel Connelly, working to one of Jo Bell’s excellent ‘52’ prompts on the subject of ‘My first …’, wrote about her life-changing first poem read out in front of an audience. Baz, pictured, who had been listening from the adjoining bar, and one day decided: “I can do that, too,”  performed with additional, unscripted hiccups and burps. Write Out Loud regular Dave Bradley arrived on crutches and with a broken ankle. 

There were hilarious moments: Chris Yates’s ‘The Job Interview’, involving a misunderstanding about pole and maypole dancing; Dave Carr’s ‘I’m in Love with a M&S mannequin’ and ‘I’ve gotta lotta respect for my bitch’. Isobel performed her showstopping, crowd-pleasing ‘Poetry Cabaret-style’: “Poetry makes the vorld go around.” She also paid tribute to Dominic Simpson’s poem about a meal with his in-laws: “A poem you really connect with – that’s what I love about these nights.” Joy France was there too, a slam-winning, stand-up performer who cut her teeth at the Tudor, and is now an established name on the north-west circuit.  

There were poems about fracking, a sofa that had seen better days, an old man of Hoy, and one that mentioned "the citric smell of your piss". The genial, long-serving host of Write Out Loud Wigan, John Togher, was the penultimate performer, and Tom Stevens rounded things off in pugnacious style, describing the best poetry as “like a whistling mortar shell”, as well as insisting at the same time that “poetry is bullshit”. Discuss.

Isobel called out to me: “Greg, be honest. You wouldn’t get this at the Southbank, would you?” Write Out Loud Wigan is certainly legendary. John Coopey had told me a couple of days earlier in York: “I’ve appeared a couple of times in Wigan; the first time I was booed off, the second time I was booed on.” But there’s more to it than noise, or lack of it. I was left with the deep impression of a succession of folk who had gained strength, encouragement, and empowerment from finding their voice and making themselves heard at the Tudor, where every performer received their own recorded musical fanfare as they stepped up on to the stage. There are no guest poets to put on airs; all human life is here, and a lot more besides. The Southbank has its place, down in that London. But Wigan is very much what it’s all about, too. 

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