Blue Bank by Penny Broadhurst

She has a fanzine too, and a podcast, both called Instant Classic. Penny has played with the likes of: Patrick Wolf (at his personal request), Damo Suzuki, Melt Banana, The Vichy Goverment, Help! She Can't Swim, DARTZ!, Stephen K Amos, Valerie, Curtis Walker, Das Wanderlust, Frank Turner (Million Dead) and The Seven Inches. She has also appeared at Ladyfests around the UK and literary festivals including Off The Shelf and Ilkley Literature Festival.

In Summer 2005 Penny played Glastonbury and Truck festivals (the latter to a packed-out tent filled with fans and popstars). She also began to get radio play on BBC 6 Music (Phill Jupitus), Radio Magnetic in the UK (on their B playlist), FM4 in Austria and other local and international stations. In 2006 she will be working on her second album and will soon release her first EP - FILTHY ROARS.

Penny started doing this when she was 17 and dead shy. Now she is still dead shy, but ballsy as f*ck on stage. Have you ever seen kids moshing to poetry? She has made this happen. She is FIERCE. Please give her gigs and buy the album and that, she'd really like it.

MICHAEL RICHARDSON (JOURNALIST AND WRITER):

"I really like the message behind '8 Mile High', a poem about poets not writing for writers, but writing for people. I hate writers who concentrate so wholly upon being literary that their writing becomes alienating drivel. I, like Penny Broadhurst, want to speak to the people. And I want to kick arse.

Listening to Penny's voice reminds me of just why I could never be a performance poet. Penny's voice is booming and loud and angry and funny - it rattles the speakers on my laptop (which wouldn't be so much of an achievement, piddly as the speakers on my laptop are, if it weren't for the fact that The Polyphonic Spree - a whole f*cking orchestra - don't make them rattle).

I like 'Music I', for obvious reasons. I like 'Hands', it's very beautiful. I like 'Bus Park', even though Penny's 'Loooooser' made my dog leap off the couch, a poem about chavs, and looking like a dyke but not being one, and wearing glasses, and having your own teenaged lynch mob (something I can definitely relate to!).

But I love 'Etiam Disiecti Membra Poetae', even though I haven't a clue what the title means. It's raining men, P.I.S.S.I.N.G down. A poem about classifications, and modern culture, and finding yourself. It's very good. I'd like you all to hear it.

Sometimes I think that everything is sh*t, that there aren't any real arists anymore, that everything is p*ss-poor, pre-packaged, watered-down version of something that has gone before. But then I hear something like Lycanthropy, by Patrick Wolf. I find out that the Scissor Sisters have had a number one album (one in the eye for the people who - like myself - dismissed them as a parade of tw*ts making crap electroclash). I listen to Penny Broadhurst practically biting my nuts off through the speakers...

And everything is right in the world."

Average Customer Review: