Spoonful of Poison at The King Eddie

Open Mic nights on a Saturday are few and far between so it was with great anticipation I awaited the return of Spoonful of Poison in its new Stratford home of the King Edward pub. For those who don't remember the original incarnation, Spoonful ran for many years and brought every eccentric from across the capital together to enjoy a night of punk poetry, haphazard magic, experimental music and general shouting. I met Emily Capell at a Spoonful night and went on to manage her, and the band we recruited, for over a year. I met Dangerous T at Spoonful. It is a night of historical importance to me.

It is also the only open mic I know of who had to put in their written expectations that no-one was allowed to take a dump on the stage.

So what was it like? The acts were as varied as I had expected with some old familiar faces returning to the stage. The audience were chatty, drunk and very much the embodiment of the original Stratford rather than the Westfield East-ised version with it's unaffordable flat developments and twenty gazillion pound infrastructure revamps. Heck, even Unique Technique was in attendance to support his mate Scope MC (if this means nothing to you don't worry about it, its not a story worth retelling).

I did three tracks to an audience who largely had to be coerced into participating but for every person who stared into their drink or shouted over to their mate, another laughed in the right place or shouted "two shots" on cue. In short, what you might expect from a crowd of east enders wondering what on earth had ushered in a ramshackle mob of the artsy, strange, earnest and bizarre. I will return.