Website: www.poetryvandals.co.uk

The Poetry Vandals have been lighting a fire under Newcastle's performance poetry scene for nearly five years now. Literature North East speaks to Vandals founder Jeff Price.

How did you get together?
Aidan and Annie and I were good friends and part of the Dharma Banana open mic nights and then Scott turned up one night and that was really the start of it. Karl came along later and Kate very recently. We started doing stuff together and thought that we complemented each other nicely: there are age differences, style differences and we're all from different backgrounds. The name came about when we were starting the spoken word night at the Fighting Cocks. And rather than just say our names we needed some kind of collective name. We were sitting around talking about it and there was a group in Newcastle called the Poetry Virgins and we thought well, if they're the virgins, we're the vandals.

The Fighting Cocks was a weekly thing so you had to come up with something new every week, which is quite difficult. So sometimes we'd just take somebody else's poem and vandalise it a bit, make it your own. It's a small part of what we do, but part of the reason we did that was we introduced nights where, for example, we'd have a Liverpool poets night and we would read McGough's work or somebody else's work so that the audience, which was not a traditional poetry audience, would become aware of other poets. For example, McGough's Let Me Die A Young Man's Death, I vandalised it to Let Me Die A Geordie Death, to put a local spin on it.

Is performance more important than poetry to you?
We don't worship the form in the same way a lot of other people do. We're happy to blur the boundaries. For example, two of our members, Kate Fox and Scott Tyrrell, are more from the stand-up comedy side than the poetry side and they call what they do stand-up poetry. And it's an odd mixture of the two. So that again vandalises the form, it challenges the form and it also is a way of having a crossover audience - we can put on a night with stand-up comedy and poetry.

Is your work ever finished or is a poem always a work in progress?
It can be tricky because firstly the poetry itself may not exist in a unique form, it might have different forms on the night. With John Cooper Clarke, the Manchester poet, for instance, if you look at some of his poems, you can find 20 different versions of the same poem, because he'll modify it all the time.

We've been going for nearly five years now and we'd done a CD, but we hadn't done any printed material because we didn't feel the need really, we were more about performance. But then you think OK, there is a market out there for people who want our poems written down. But not all of them are suitable for that. All of us have written stuff which we've never performed, because it wasn't suitable - some of that went in and what we also did was take some of the performance pieces and rewrote parts of them and put them in, so it's a kind of a mixture of the three. I did one book with Annie [Growing Old Disgracefully], and we've got another one for sale on the website called The Poetry Vandals' Greatest Hits Volume One, which is the one we're producing for Prague. Oh yes, we're going to Prague at the end of May to take part in the Prague Fringe Festival - we're the first spoken word act, or poets of any sort in fact, to be invited to take part.

Is there still an audience for poetry?
Well, we consistently get good audiences, 40-50 people usually. The best we've ever done was for a slam at the Black Swan last year when we got over 100 people. But most [traditional] poetry events, you get 15-20 people and you know every one of them. We always said we were going to build audiences and we do it by going to where they are, by providing poetry and performance in a way that's accessible, but without compromising. I know we use comedy a lot, but we're not Pam Ayers! I still think it is to some extent frowned up by the poetry establishment though - I think we're considered a bit lightweight. But it's a lot harder to do some of the stuff that we do.

One of the things we consciously try to develop is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts, so there's a lot of banter between us on stage - we will try and work material that complements each other. Every gig is always completely unique. It's frowned upon to turn up with the same material every month, we still impose that discipline on ourselves - there must be something new every month. The most common thing that people say to us after a gig is, That was great, I didn't think it could be so entertaining. And one of the things we say is that when you get up on stage, the object of the exercise is not to impress people with your talents, but to entertain them.

How long have you had your own website?
Right from the beginning. I created the first site with Microsoft Publisher and I've still got a copy of it on my PC and it's embarrassingly awful. But we became very aware that our audience was used to the web as a way of finding out what was going on so we used it as a way of communicating with them. We were very lucky that in Scott we had a very talented designer and we were all very keen on making that our calling card, to make it really good. We were going to have photographs of ourselves on it, but decided on cartoons as we thought that if your website looks the same all the time, people stop going. So I wanted to do something that was dramatically different and that no one else had ever done - and you wouldn't have expected to see a cartoon. Actually, if you go to Scott's page on the website, you'll find a cartoon of a stand-up comic - we're going to do a recording of one of us doing a poem and Scott's going to animate the whole thing and put it on the site.

What's next for the Poetry Vandals?
We want to do a tour, that's definitely got to happen. In order to bring other people here we have to go to them as well and I'd like to see more performance poets coming to the north east. At the university you can see all sorts of traditional poetry, which is great, but what you can't see in this area is a lot of performance poetry. We've brought some people here but from a cost point of view it's very difficult. So I'm going to see if we can get some funding for that. We also want to encourage more people to take part. The The Poetry Vandals have been lighting a fire under Newcastle's performance poetry scene for nearly five years now. Literature North East speaks to Vandals founder Jeff Price.(New Word Order) project that Kate and Karl are involved with is a way of training new poets, of getting young people more involved in performance poetry and doing their own stuff and passing on the skills that we've learnt.

The Poetry Vandals are Jeff Price, Aidan Halpin, Annie Moir, Scott Tyrrell, Karl Thompson and Kate Fox. The Vandals can be found at the Cumberland Arms, Byker, on the first Thursday of every month.