Four years, 1,115,880 views and 54,944 subs later…

Four years ago today, The Boozer Cruiser became a thing in my life that the world could hear about via my YouTube channel. The first lockdown of 2020 helped focus my energies; I stopped thinking, “Poetry is a thing I’d quite like to do” and started thinking, “Poetry is a thing I’m doing.”

I write what I call “ditties” and “epics” – ditties explore an idea briefly, along with some fun with words and structure, and usually take a few weeks to write; epics tend to be stories of fictional or semi-fictional characters, drawn out in luxurious detail, usually with a strong structure to fall back on and with more sequences of less intense wordplay.

The Withy was the first epic. It’s based on Professor Mike Parker Pearson’s suggestion that the community who built Stonehenge were inspired by the thinking of a single person. I found that person a few centuries earlier on Orkney – a scared 10-year-old who saw the world differently than everyone else and wanted to help them see more than they did, only the village shaman had died before completing the boy’s training, and he was left to find a way of explaining the world he saw to people who were under pressure not to understand.

It came to live with the music of award-winning composer and producer Jacob Holm-Lupo. Our connecting was a fluke, to say the least. I’d interviewed him for Prog magazine and we’d kinda clicked, and became friends on Facebook. When I posted a request for any of my musical friends to provide music for me to use as inspiration, Jacob got in touch. The Withy was hard work because it was all new. We were amazed when it reached 10,000 views, then 50,000 and so on. Now it’s passed 157,000.

Jacob and i did a few projects together, each more ambitious and challenging, mainly epics but also the incredibly powerful anti-war ditty No Liars Were Harmed – inspired by the Ukraine invasion and, at one point, being views by thousands of people in Ukraine every day. That was when I realised I had the ability, but also the responsibility, to keep going, to tell stories for people who need them, and who can’t always tell their own. No Liars has 108,000 views for the studio version and 99,000 for the live version – so it’s the most successful piece in terms of making contact with the wider universe.

Our winter ghost story, The Ghost of Terror Bay, languished for a while there; I have no idea why, since it’s powered along by the ghostly (woops, nearly wrote ghastly) vocals of The Blackheart Orchestra’s Chrissy Mostyn. The big question at the end is: who’s really the ghost? And in recent weeks it’s being stacking up the views, reaching 86,000.

The live version of Vellum – we never got round to a studio version – is possibly my favourite ditty. It’s about caring about the art you create, then realising your work and your passion is being used against you for commercial reasons. In this case it’s a monk who creates medieval illuminated manuscripts, discovering that his pages are sold and collected by the rich, and are never seen by the ordinary folk he made them for. It’s done 66,000 views.

After some real struggles to make it land with an audience, the live version of our Halloween ditty The Scavengers Grow Brave finally worked out this year, reaching 101,000 views to date.

The single hardest piece of work I’ve saddled myself with has been The Gilded Silver Boar, an intense and elaborate Shakespearian epic about the person who betrayed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and how he tries to justify his actions to himself. I also saddled myself with a stupidly elaborate video to go with it – a horrible experience, but once you have the vision for something you can’t just go, “Nah, too difficult.” And it worked: Boar is my single most popular video so far, with 159,000 views. It’s my first collaboration with Laurie Glass, who offered to do it after hearing the demo vocal I’d sent to his dad, Andy Glass, of Solstice.

I did Waves of Nightingales with Andy, a modest success but an incredible thing to do because we jammed it live at a Solstice show and, incredibly, came away with a version worth releasing. I also did a slightly arrogant update of Wilfrid Owen’s striking war poem Anthem For Doomed Youth with visceral guitar growls from Andy, another successful ditty with 60,000 views.

Laurie and I have more work on the way. I have more work than I have time to do it, and some projects have been lying around for two years or more as half-baked ideas whose time has not yet come. Even as a semi-retired boat-dwelling pub explorer, real life can get in the way, and I have calls on my time that keep me out of the creative zone (and the horrible virus that’s going round this year, meaning my voice isn’t working enough to record vocals).

But four years in, at time of writing the channel has 1,115,880 views and 54,944 subscribers. Not bad for a project I wasn’t sure I could make part of my life! Thanks to everyone who’s been part of it so far –– don’t expect to get away with not being dragged in again…