Culture was politicised, workers were striking, the youth were out of work and out of luck, but the reggae was blaring and the drinks were cheap. In some ways a lot has changed since the Ethiopians’ 1968 hit Everything Crash hit the airwaves, in other ways it’s a fitting title for Tim Wells’s new poetry collection.

Wells is a necessary voice of dissent amongst a narrative dominated by austerity, high rents, funding cuts and Tube strikes.

His poetry, rooted in the politically charged aspect of reggae culture, resonates with the “people’s music” which provided the soundtrack to a disenfranchised black youth growing up in the ’70s and ’80s.

Everything Crash is constructed out of the sounds of East London: “Cockney, Yiddische, Gammon and Yard is the well I dip my pen in,” he reveals in My Friends The Poets and every poem carries the distinctive rhythm of Wells’s East End accent.

The regular punters that hang out in East End pubs appear within these pages in various states of inebriation, spattering their vomit and toilet habits across the pages, upsetting David Cameron in the process. It isn’t pretty but that isn’t the point.

Everything Crash is a vehement defence of the working class. Wells’s lines, fuelled by lager and cheese rolls, performed across rowdy pubs reinstate the pride and camaraderie of a community staunchly resisting the horrors of Whole Foods Market and soya milk, even as the “aerosoled cock and balls” is replaced with rent-rising street art.

In The Story of Dalston, the former reggae club the Four Aces is bulldozed and developed as “plush flats” — here the poet acts as custodian of the memories embedded in places that no longer exist.

Yet for all the “hair clogging the plug hole” and “drunk scrunching of an empty crisp packet in a clammy hand,” there is a playfulness and deep appreciation of language.

Poems that speak of all the promise of a Saturday night and all the hopelessness of a hungover Sunday morning navigate the tensions between hope and despair with wit and humour. “These men we have been and could have been. Wasted force spent with passion; initials pissed against the wall.” This from My Sad Hooligans, which could be said to vulgarise Keats’s famous epitaph: Here lies one whose name was writ in urine, which would at least leave a smell so all is not futile.

Review by Kyra Hanson

My Sad Hooligans
After Thom Gunn

One by one they slip to birds,
curries, darkness.
Saturday night never lives to its promise,
though a nod and a wink sometimes does.

These men we have been
and could have been.
Wasted force spent with passion;
initials pissed against the wall.

The bully of the supermarket stockroom
sleeps drunk in the Boogie Lounge.
He wakes with a start
as the mirrorball explodes.

This poem is from his new collection Everything Crash, published by Penned in the Margins and available to buy here.

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