#0028 CASEY BAILEY - WORDS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Welcome to the Creative Nowhere Land Podcast. 

On this episode, we're joined by Poet, Writer, Educator, and Performer Casey Bailey. 

Casey is a storyteller and, from a young age, realised the power of words to influence people in both a positive and sometimes negative way.

His work spans Poetry, Music, Theatre, Books, and TV, creating work for both the Commonwealth Games and the Hit TV show, The Peaky Blinders. But, at the core of it all is education and community. For Casey, it's all about being a positive input. To create a positive impact. 

Things could have easily gone very differently for Casey though. Growing up in an environment of crime, poverty, and gang culture, Casey had to try and balance two lives, one studying for university, and one in and around the streets. A balance that nearly cost him his life. While trying to diffuse a situation, Casey got stabbed, a life-changing moment that could have gone either way.

Luckily, Casey chose to turn that negative into a positive, and what he's achieved as a result has created an unquestionable impact on many people's lives. 

In this episode, we discuss Casey's journey from being kicked out of English class to becoming Birmingham's Poet Laureate. Being stabbed and balancing two lives, forgiveness, and not being defined by our mistakes.

We talk about music, poetry, and theatre, and how limitations can actually aid creativity. We discuss teaching and how we help open conversations to inspire young people, but most importantly, how if you can't stop and feel like the stuff that you've done has been positive for you or other people, then what's the point?

Check out the links below to see Casey's website and social media while you're listening to the podcast, of course!  

Hope you enjoy this episode of The Creative Nowhere Land Podcast.

CASEY BAILEY WEBSITE: https://caseybailey.co.uk/

CASEY BAILEY INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/casey_bailey/

Transcript

Growing Up Between Books And The Streets

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Hello everyone and welcome to the Creative Nobel Am podcast. On this episode, we're joined by poet, writer, educator, and performer Casey Bailey. Casey is a storyteller and from a young age realized the power of words to influence people in both a positive and sometimes negative way. His work spans poetry, music, theatre, books, and TV, creating work for both the Commonwealth Games and hit TV show The Peaky Blinders. But at the core of it all is education and community. For Casey, it's all about being a positive input to create a positive impact. Things could have easily gone very differently for Casey, though. Growing up in an environment of crime, poverty, and gang culture, Casey had to try and balance two lives. One studying for university and one in and around the streets. A balance that nearly cost him his life when, while trying to defuse the situation, Casey got stabbed. A life-changing moment that could have gone either way. Luckily, Casey chose to turn that negative into a positive. And what he's achieved as a result has created unquestionable impact in many people's lives. In this episode, we discussed Casey's journey from being kicked out of English class to becoming Birmingham poet laureate, being stabbed and balancing two lives, forgiveness and not being defined by our mistakes. We talk music, poetry, and theatre, and how limitations can actually aid creativity. We discuss teaching and how we help open conversations to inspire young people. But most importantly, how if you can't stop and feel like the stuff that you've done has been positive for you or other people, then what's the point? You can check out the links to Casey's website and social media while you listen to the podcast. This one is packed full of good stuff. So let's get into it. Thank you for having me. You posted something on your stories on your social media that just said, what's it all about, really?

SPEAKER_01 2:44

What's it all about, Katie? Good question. I asked it as well. Should have knew the answer when I said, No, I think for me, there's lots of different answers to that question, isn't it? But they all I think they all come back to I guess trying to have a positive output and input. So I posted that I was away sitting on a big cliff somewhere, and my son took the photo and I was away with my family. And I work really hard, I do lots of different things. And when I get moments where I can see the positive impact, like I love the work that I do, I think I'd probably do it if nobody ever paid me to do it, but then I wouldn't know how to take my kids on holiday or to give them the things that they want and all that kind of stuff. And so I think what I was thinking about in that post is if you can't stop and feel like the stuff that you've done has been positive for you or for other people, then what's it all about? And in that moment, I was very conscious, just for my own little tiny bubble, my family, the work that I'm doing is having some kind of positive impact to them because we can go and chill and relax. And we weren't in Dubai in the five stars, we were camping in Wales, but I'll tell you what, it was lovely. Yeah, for me what it's all about is having a positive input and having a positive impact.

SPEAKER_02 3:55

And those drivers have always been about positivity because as we sit here, you're a writer, educator, performer, inspirer, musician. You've written books, you've created theatre productions, you've been commissioned by the BBC, you were the Birmingham Poet Laureate, you've got a doctorate in education, you've done a lot. And I imagine those drivers about positivity have been integral to that journey. But life didn't start like that, did it? With necessarily that positive energy.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Yeah, no, it I think what's weird is there's almost like three sections of my life. Well, people who've known me for years think there are two, which was the really bad times and then the quite good time. So what's the third? Is before all that. And it's funny because I grew up in an area which which had lots of issues with gangs, drugs, violence, criminality. But I still remember being like a 13-year-old kid telling my brother and his friends who were a couple of years older than me. What are you doing with your life, man? And seeing everything around me as being I could see it was negative. I didn't aspire to be bad or involved in drama.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

And were your brothers in that situation?

SPEAKER_01 5:06

My one of my brothers, definitely, very much, and my other brother, a bit like myself, had skirted around it. I guess for me, the positive there is none of us are anywhere near that kind of lifestyle anymore. We've all made a very big and clear and structured moves to be in a better position and to do positive things and to be positive contributors, I guess. But for me, that that period of time is when I think now about when people say to me, How did you go from the drama that you were in to the way you are now? I think really the way I am now is the way I always was. And certain things happened that that happened to people who grow up where I grew up and that happened in and around you.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

And I don't want to glamorise any of that, but it is part of the story.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

100%. I I yeah, I grew up in and around gangs, and I think for me, so my real journey into that is my brother was away. I was out and about with friends, and there was a drama that occurred, and it ended up in me being stabbed. And at the time, it's weird because I look back on it and how old were you? I was 17. Wow. And this to go back to what I was saying about always having a positive kind of spin. I got in those trouble at school, but I wasn't trying to be, I wasn't necessarily trying to be bad, I was just as a bit of an angry kid, and I've got ADHD and I didn't get diagnosed until 19 years old. Funnily enough, Paul spoke about your poem Tap Tap Tap because Paul's obviously recommended you as well podcast. So that's and that poem really does look at what it was like in school having ADHD, but me not knowing and nobody else knowing. And so me starting to take on, like lots of kids do, the story that I'm being told about myself. You're naughty, you're rude, you're aggressive, you're all of these things. When actually those labels were being put on me, and I was internalising them and thinking this is who I am and I'm bad but whatever. But when I got stabbed, I was 17 years old in the summer between year one and year two of A-levels, doing chemistry, biology, PE, and psychology. So I wasn't sitting around going, oh, I don't want to do anything or whatever. I was trying to make a lot of things happen in my life.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

Was that hard to balance that lifestyle of being essentially in a gang and trying to study to better yourself?

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Yeah, because I think the thing is, and I think this is connected to the ADHDs, maybe, and it's connected to how I live now, I suppose. Is like on a on an average morning, I wouldn't wake up and think, what am I trying to do with my life? I'd wake up and do the things that were laid out in front of me. So I wake up on Monday morning, I got college because I got college on Monday, I got chemistry because I've got chemistry. But that's what I would do because that's what I was doing. If I got home at five o'clock and one of my friends knocked the door and then we're going to a rave, then I'm going to a rave. There was no plan, there was no structure. So the weekend I get on, and my friends are, some of them are just on road 24-7, some of them are a bit like me, they're in and out of this and that. So they come and say, Oh yeah, we're going to this dance, and this is gonna happen and that's gonna happen. Cool, grab my hoodie, let's go. I just did what was happening. I never thought about what it meant. I never thought I've been in places where ultimately I've gone to a rave, I've come home, and I've woke up the next morning and found out that someone was killed. There, and I'm like, oh now, there's no magic as to why that wasn't me, it just so happens. And so there are decisions that I made like that that in the long term could have had a massive, very different impact on my life. And I'll never forget sitting down, I was in a quite a notorious pub at the time in Birmingham, and sat down with a guy who I won't name, but he was quite a big and prominent member of the gang in the area that I grew up with, and he pointed to one of my friends, really good friend at the time, and he said, Why is he here? I said, Oh, he's cool, man. He's he's he's one of us man is with me. He said, No, I know who he is. I'm saying, Why is he here? Why do you think he's here? And I'm like, Where else is he gonna be? And he says, Exactly. So why are you here? I was like, What do you mean? Because you could be anywhere else. I was like, What do you mean by that? He's like, You're too smart for this man.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

So he was essentially doing what you were doing to your brothers in that third life that you were talking about, what you're doing with your life. Yeah, yeah. Where did that young man go? That was it just lost in the world that you're in.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

I think it goes back to what I was saying, because I was just tripping through the days, like my life was like a domino run. There was no strategy, there was no plan. The first domino dropped, and every other domino was gonna drop afterwards. So if somebody knocked my door and said, XYZ has just been beat up around there, we need to get around there, then we have to get around there. If somebody called my phone and says, Oh, we've got to go and sort this out, we have to go and sort that out. So things just happened as they happened. And even going to university, I was I did three years of college because I dropped out of two A levels because of dramas with, I say with teachers, dramas with me that I had with the teachers, and dramas with other students. So I ended up doing three years at A level. My girlfriend at the time was going to this university. Everyone at my sixth form, staff-wise, are saying, What uni are you going to? And I'm like, Who's going to uni? What are we talking about here? But you're on track for four A levels, some decent grades in and amongst it. Of course you're going to uni. Like to them, you do your GCSEs, you do your A levels, you go to uni. So they're talking to me like that is what is going to happen.

SPEAKER_02 10:15

But they're not living this sort of half-life where you are.

ADHD, Labels, And Finding A Diagnosis

SPEAKER_01 10:18

And as someone who was never thinking about what was going to happen, whenever I was at college, I'm talking about uni. Whenever I wasn't at college, I was never talking about uni because it was present when it was present. And when I wasn't in the environment, I wasn't thinking about it. And so when I applied to uni, this we might get onto this later, but the course, I didn't even know what it was. And six weeks into my degree, and one of my lecturers said I was doing a sport on PE degree. And my lecturer said to the group, in four weeks' time, we're going to be teaching the kids from the local primary school. You got three weeks to get your lesson plans back to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I stayed at the end of the lecture and I called her to one side and I said, I don't want to teach the kids from local primary school. What are you talking about? I was like, that's not what I'm here for. And she said, You're doing a PE degree? I said, I know what degree I'm doing. But I don't want to teach the kids from the local primary school. She said, I would query whether you do know what degree you're doing. I thought, what do you mean? So you're doing a degree that teaches you to be a PE teacher. I said, Am I?

SPEAKER_02 11:14

What did you think it was then?

SPEAKER_01 11:15

I do know what because you that's ridiculous, isn't it? Because you do GCSE PE is uh roughly speaking, so anatomy and physiology, psychology of sport, sociology of sport, infrastructure, funding, all that stuff that impacts sport, uh you study all of that in GCSEP and A-level P. A degree, you study that in maybe sports studies, or you do more niche anatomy, physiology, sociology of sport, whatever. PE is uh physical education, it is looking at uh how you teach PE. And so I was thinking, I was just continuing down this road, like if you do uh art at A level and then you do art at uni, you go from doing art to doing art. I kind of went from doing uh studying sport to uh studying PE teaching and didn't realise that transition had happened uh accidentally.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

Um it's interesting to me that obviously you went for a more sport PE based thing, and you didn't quite realise what it was when you went to university. But it wasn't English, it wasn't English literature, it wasn't any of that. This goes back to the three lives of Casey Bailey. This is what I mean. When when did you go from balancing A levels to let's just say uh life on the road and getting mixed up in stuff? When did you realise because you were still uh you were MC in Pirate Radio, so when when did the music come in and when did your understanding of your ability to write and tell stories essentially come in? And uh final question uh why did none of that transpire into you taking that skill set to university to do English, to do English literature, to do so interestingly again, the three lives with Casey Bailey.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

I've never thought about it like this before, but here we are. Before GCSC English, I was already starting to MC a little bit, I was writing raps, and words were my thing. They've always been my thing, they probably always will be my thing, I'd like to think so. And whether that was getting in trouble for having a quick mouth or being able to resolve a problem that could have been a conflict or being able to create a conflict that could have been resolved, I always had a way with words, you can say, right? But in year 10, English literature, I had a run-in with my English teacher. I had two run-ins two weeks in a row. One, I won't really relay it because I'm very unproud of what was said, even though it's like I was a kid and I said all kinds of stuff. But very long story short, I said something quite offensive about somebody else in the class. I feel like I have to say it now because that sounds like I could have said anything. Long story short, a girl in my class had beaten up a boy in my class with an umbrella. Very bizarre. But and the metal part got exposed and she kept hitting him, it caught his head open and he was bleeding. And I said to him something like, I can't remember all of the of what I said, but in what I said, I referred to her as a bit. A word that I wouldn't use these days for lots of reasons, right? And the teacher said, Casey Bailey, you will not refer to a young lady in this classroom as a bitch. And I said, But why if she's not a young lady? Why if she's a bit which is a great combat?

SPEAKER_02 14:13

Which is a great combat, but I understand we're not promoting calling anyone a bitch.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Never ever. And she kept me out of class and she was really upset, and there we are. And the girl who I still talk to every now and then now, she thought it was hilarious, and hindsight. Pretty quick, hindsight wasn't ideal. And then two weeks later, I was back in her class and she read John Agar's Half-Cast, which you may or may not know, it's a poem about not using the term half-cast essentially, and it's got lines like, You mean when Tchaikovsky makes a black key with a white key with a half-cast and funny? It's a very good point, and I love it. It's one of the poems that really made me love poetry, but not in her lesson, because she read it and she looked straight at me and she went, Was that okay? And I said, Being the angry young man now wasn't particularly liking it. I said, I don't know, I've never heard that effing poem before. She was like, Get out. Why do you feel like she addressed that to you? I mean, I think it's quite obvious.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

But yeah, she might this is an audio podcast.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

So I just did a very expressive piece of body language there for anyone who yeah, I think because she looked at me, I'm a mixed-race boy in the classroom. We weren't the only mixed race. Yeah, that's what I mean. Well they're not other mixed-race people in the classroom and I think this goes back to things like I'm ADHD, so I was probably tapping, fidgeting, looking around, and so she probably wanted to land that on me. But all I saw was I'm the mixed-race boy in the class. You've just read a poem about how people who look like me and people like me should not be labelled in a certain way. And then you're asking me, Am I okay with it? You're the English teacher. You tell me if it's good, you tell me if it's okay. And at that point, I was banned from going to English. So I did not attend an English lesson again for the rest of my school career. I'd never went to English in year eleven. Really? I wasn't allowed to go to English, go to the library.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Have you now that looked back at that English teacher and just sort of yes and no, because I'm not sure. I mean, you're not that person, but what I'm saying is the amount you've achieved subsequently.

Choosing Teaching And Clean Slates

SPEAKER_01 15:58

But who knows? Like, I feel like one of the real beauties, and maybe we'll get onto this, one of the real beauties of what I do is all of the stuff that I do in terms of writing is balanced by the fact that I have a very good stable income through teaching, and I teach English now anyway, um, that allow me to do this stuff because I love to do it. And maybe if I'd have gone off and did an A level in English and got an English degree, and I know lots of people have got English degrees and creative writing masters, and they're so bent up by what they were taught and how they were told it should be and how it's supposed to work. And I never went through that. I found out how I think it should be through reading books, and I read great books, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna try and write some stuff. So, when you got kicked out of your English class, were you still writing for your music? So that so really that was around about the time when I really started writing grime music, and it wasn't connected, the two things weren't connected. There was a guy who used to come into my school called Chaos, who was a DJ. He was trying to teach everyone to DJ, and I was trying to learn how to MC. So I was like, Let me just get the mic. And he was like, What? I was like, why'd they do the DJing? Let me just get the mic and I would MC a little bit. And he was like, You're you're a decent MC, you are. And then he'd invite me to little other workshops he was doing elsewhere, and I'd show up and I just started MC and it felt as other things in my life became more strained and problematic, it was a real release. The funny thing is, when I first started writing, it was very reflective about where I was living. You know, I went through a whole phase of just like angry music, murder, murder, kill, kill, angry everybody, angry at everybody. But before that, before I really did much in the studio, I was writing lyrics about this isn't right, the system that we're living in, the environment that we're surrounded by is killing us.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

And what, you think the life that you were living just sort of overshadowed that?

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Yeah, absolutely. It was a balance. As I say, I was writing hip-hop in that kind of style. But when I'm going to MCA rape, it's all grime, and grime music brings out a either cocky, arrogant, braggadocious, I'm the best MC, I'm the best MC. Everyone look at me, I'm the best MC. Or be em what be em what I'm gonna beat him up, and it really leans into that. And so now I was gonna say it's a real push and pull, but there's no push and pull in me, it's all pulling. I have a real clear focus that I'm not gonna empty about that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Getting stabbed, was that the catalyst to go, hang on. I got it.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

No, that's what made me write angry stuff. That made you that wasn't the catalyst to get you out, it made you worse. No, yeah, but until that point, I was in an area around issues and just uh dabbling on the outskirts of dramas. After that, I I fell very deeply into drama for a couple of years, really.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Angry was dabbed rather than it didn't scare you, or did that fear come out as I will fight back?

From PE To Poetry: The After‑School Spark

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Yeah, no, I wasn't, I wasn't. I think for me, I've always been the kind of person who people around me are have literally been murdered, and the people who I've grew up with who have gone to jail for murder, I've never believed that wouldn't happen to me. So the idea that it did happen didn't make my life any more scary because I'd always known where I am and what I'm doing and who I'm around and all that stuff. It opened the door to that that happening in my life. So it actually happening just made me mad, and it made me mad because it happened in a situation where it's funny because my dad used to say to me, Your mouth will get you into trouble, and it has on a number of occasions. But in that situation, I was trying to defuse a situation, I was trying to prevent a problem from happening, but I was doing that in an environment where lots of people, and I'll say through no fault of their own, and on both sides of the situation, kids who have grew up in the ghetto, grew up around violence, have little aspiration, nothing to aspire to, nothing to aim for, they didn't want a resolution, they wanted violence, they came for violence and they were going to get their violence. And I put myself in the middle of that to try and stop that from happening and ended up becoming the target of the violence. And I would tell anyone who I didn't care about that's exactly what you should do. But I would tell my son what my dad would have told me, which is just get out of there. This is not your problem. Remove yourself from that. This does not have to be your and it was connected to my friends. It wasn't like I just walked over and entered a conversation that wasn't mine. I'd managed to diffuse a problem earlier on, and it came back bigger. And I thought, I'm gonna have to try and do that again, and it didn't work out and ended up getting stabbed. And so I was mad because in the big grand scheme of the moral right and wrong, I didn't do anything wrong. And I wasn't an occasion where I'd said, Oh, we'll see. I'll catch you later. It wasn't an occasion where I was flaring up, being angry, being aggressive, wound up. I was very calm, very clear in everything I said that we this is this shouldn't happen. We don't want this problem, we shouldn't have this problem. And in the end, we had the problem anyway. And so I was I was angry, I was angry at the way the situation occurred, I was angry at the way my friends reacted to it at the time. I'd put myself in the middle of something, and then the people I put myself in the middle of it for weren't in the middle of it with me. And the problem that that caused is then people who came around me afterwards who were more ingrained in a negative lifestyle than me at the time, they're saying stuff to me like, if I was there, this wouldn't have happened. I'd have done this, I'd have done that, I'd have backed your case. And so I start, these are people I start circling around, and everything's rage and everything's anger, and when we see them and when I see him, and that became for a short while how I live my life. And I think one of the weird things I suppose now about where I'm at in life, I know who did that for me. I I will see that person now and I will shake their hand, I'll give them a hug. And I've got Do you see them? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've got friends who will say, like, I don't understand how you can do that. But when I was 17 years old, I made a whole load of mistakes. I did a whole lot of things wrong, I'm sure I'll cause a lot of harm to people. And I did that, I believe, in part because of where I was from and what was happening around me, I made choices, and lots of them were bad choices, but they're choices I don't think anyone should ever have to make. And I'm 100% confident that individual has got that exact same story. And for me to be able to say, I don't want to be judged by the mistakes I made when I was 17 years old, and I don't want to be vilified for the mistakes I made when I was 17 years old, I have to be able to say, I don't think he should be either. Otherwise, it's nonsense. Otherwise, I'm basically saying change the rules for me, bend it for me. I know I did this, but look past it because it's me. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if I'm talking to a 17-year-old kid right now, I'm telling them whatever they've done, they could turn their life around. Whatever mistakes they've made, they are not the precursor for the rest of their life. I have to say that knowing that I mean it about the person that and I believe Because you've made those changes.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

Yeah. But that takes so I mean, goodness me, how long? I mean, like, I mean, I know you said you're angry afterwards, and I imagine that you took a long time to get there. That's but look at all the stuff that you've achieved in that time to be that positive role model. What's the catalyst then to start changing that around? Was it going to university? Was no, so there's a there's I'm trying to get the time for that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

There's lots of things in my life that feel quite murky to me, and I don't know exactly when they happened and when they didn't. The Angry Music, you know, I could put a pin right on it. There was a boy who I was around at the time, he passed away now, so rest in peace to Omi. He was a legend. He was uh he was like a troublesome young individual I always had a lot of love for.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

Because what you saw some of yourself in it?

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Yeah, he just I he's there was things that happened around him, and and with him, that's that thing got unfair to like a lot of us, but in slightly different ways, he was put in a position that he shouldn't be in, and that's the life that that we grew up around. But he I liked him, he's funny. He had a he had an amazing character about him. And somebody called me one day and said, He is doing this thing, that thing, and that thing that he shouldn't be doing. He's been very aggressive, and things are going bad, and and I don't think you'll listen to anyone but you. So I jump on my bike and ride myself over there, my BMX. And he jumps on the pegs on the back and off we go. And we get back around where we're, I guess, both more comfortable. I said to him, What are you doing, man? Like, what's going on? And I'm making music that's about this, I'm living in this kind of way when I'm not saying to him, What are you doing? Like, oh, I can't believe this. Shocked. I'm just on a quite a calm basis. What's going on? What's happened? You know what I mean? Like, and he said to me, Oh, it's like you say in this song, and he quotes his lyrics back at me. I'm like, Do you remember the lyrics? Yeah, I remember them very clearly, but I won't say them out loud. Um, but he says this to me, and I go, This is what I'm doing, this is what my words are doing, and in a really weird sliding scale, I went from look at what's going on around here, it's a mess. And I was still making music like that at the time, but into I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, you don't want a problem with me, kind of music. And that's what he's listening to, and that's and that, and he's telling me that's what's in his head. And you're realizing that influence you're having. Yeah, that's the impact on my words. And I remember I went to a friend of mine and I went and I started speaking to him about it, and I says, I said it, and you know when you say something that feels quite grand and nobody believes it, even though everyone knows it's true. I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like it makes sense. And I said to him, if I can do that with my words, what else can I do with my words? And we just laughed it off and off we went. And that was about six months before I went to university. At that point there, I can say confidently, I don't believe I've written a lyric since then that in any way promotes or glamorizes the negative lifestyle where I grew up. Just like that, that was it. And at that time I was writing a lyric like that every day.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

And is there some sort of draw in in when you're MCing and doing radio stations? That's what people want. People want the angry, they want the aggressive, you being aspirationalist, it's just like fucking hell, okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

So when I went off to university and I started writing again, I wrote a few songs which were like there was a song which was like about the girls and the women in my life saying basically you deserve better. And there was another song about like moving on from the dramas that that we have around us. People were all over me, man. Come on, man, don't write that, man. We want to hear this, man. We want angry music. People were on my head. We want the angry music, we want the aggressive music, don't make this, man. When you're gonna drop another one like this, people were sending me my old songs, when you're gonna do one like this. And that's when I stopped writing. That's when I just point blank stopped writing, I stopped writing.

SPEAKER_02 26:34

That's a lot of pressure for someone to say when you don't want to write that sort of music.

Owning Identity And Writing With Responsibility

SPEAKER_01 26:38

And the thing is, there are people who say to me now, I think if you'd have just carried on down that path, bro, you'd be huge now. If you'd have just kept rapping those angry lyrics. And they say to me like I'm meant to be like, Yeah, maybe I messed up. I didn't mess up. I didn't mess up. I made a decision, I made a choice that none of that is worth the conversation that I had with a boy where he says, I did this because you said that. Well, you understood the power of your words and the power that words can have on people. So yeah, so that for me was when, and it's weird because it that tied in with just changes I was making in my life anyway, because what made me start changing the way I was living is I understood a lot of it was false. But you grow up in an environment where everyone's fighting and you say, Yeah, I'll have a scrap, yeah, I'll do. And some people never have to make that choice. Like at the time, I judged people for this very harshly and very negatively, but in hindsight, it was really unfair. But what I realized is if we go out and I'm with five of my friends and we see ten people who we've got a problem with, three of my friends will run. So this is not real. So I'm potentially gonna go out and die or get into major drama for someone who, in the real crux heat of the moment, is not going to do it for me. So you start to realise even in the deepest depths of this life, people being gang members and bad boys, and a lot of them don't want to do it. And so you just keep putting yourself in positions that are gonna end up bad for you when nobody wants to be here.

SPEAKER_02 28:08

Yeah, and it's funny because I'm looking at my notes and I'm looking at survivor guilt, and it's about trying to live up to the idea of the man you're supposed to be in that environment, and like you're saying, most of them don't want to be don't want to be it.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

Don't want to be that guy, don't want to be it. And there's even the more aggressive, tough ones, there's people who I know who I grew up with who are tough, and they are inherently, for whatever reason, quite violent people. Yeah, I think there is very much that sense that most of the people who end up in it, it's like, what else was I gonna do? And that's the other, that's the added layer of when you add in poverty and you add in no role models, and people say, Oh, we've got role models. I would argue in in in a lot of areas of real deprivation, the people who people want to put forward as role models don't feel like role models to those people because it feels unobtainable.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

They're the bad man, they're the one that's got the car, they've got the those people become role models because it's obtainable.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Obtainable, attainable, both. But if you look at such and such, he's the CEO of this organization, and people go, come on, who's gonna get there? You know what I mean? It's like you don't climb out Everest by starting at the bottom and looking at the top, you climb to the base camp.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Do you know what I mean? Did you have did you have role models though growing up? You've seen you're in an environment where the role models aren't necessarily the best ones, but did you can do you remember having any role models?

SPEAKER_01 29:26

My dad was a huge role model, massive role model in my life. And weirdly, I'm sure he wouldn't thank me for saying, even some of the trouble I got into I attribute to the spirit of my dad and of my mum, but talking of male role models. Can you say more on that? What do you mean the spirit is? Yeah, like my dad, my my dad is somebody who doesn't stand foolishness, he doesn't take nonsense. But I remember being in a situation with my dad where we were travelling somewhere in Birmingham, and I was like, Dad, I shouldn't really be around here. And then he then he laughed, and it was a genuine laugh. And he was like, Do you think these little boys are gonna trouble me? I was like, Oh Okay. Like he was there was no worry in him, no fear in him. Oh gosh, why would we see these gang members from over here? It was like we see him and they think they're going to trouble my son, we'll see what happens. So he wasn't trying to be a bad guy or whatever, but he I never saw within my dad like a fear of a problem or a confrontation or whatever. He would never create a confrontation, he would never start a problem. But if we were somewhere as a family and a situation seemed problematic, my dad was never like, oh god, you know, we need he'd be like, it's a problem, we can have the problem. Like, and I carried that into a lot of situations. And I'm not my dad. My dad is a much more fierce individual than I am.

SPEAKER_02 30:36

I'm sorry to this might be a bit personal, but how do you think, bearing in mind he is that individual, how do you think he reacted to the say the troubles you were getting in, the fact that he was stabbed?

SPEAKER_01 30:45

I know how he reacted because he was, yeah, he was he was he was very honest with me about it. My dad had told me from probably about the age of 15, 16, the decisions that you're making are going here. This is where they're gonna end up. And when it happened, he he said, I told you. But he said, This is and I think there was an element behind the scenes of him being obviously being worried and being but but he never conveyed worry in that sense, he conveyed quite stern and clear disapproval. Like you're being an idiot, and dumb things are happening. Do you see how that works? Like, you know, you're doing dumb stuff and dumb stuff's happening. Do you see how the two are going together? Maybe stop doing dumb stuff. And he was very blunt and honest about that.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

Do you think he was scared when he saw after the stabbing that you got more aggressive?

SPEAKER_01 31:30

I don't really think that my dad did see that. I don't think he did see that. Again, for my family, I got up in the morning and went and did A levels every day. If I went out in the night, I went out with my friends, but these are the same friends I've been going out with for years. So I don't think there was a sense in my house that I was getting into the kind of bother that I was getting into. Sometimes, and small elements of hold on, what's going on there? Or that's a bit weird, or this is a bit out of place. But broadly speaking, not really. And I didn't, I was gonna say rarely, but not really. I never there was never any problems at my house because nobody ever showed up at my front door going, Where's where's Casey? Well, you know, that never happened, so they never really saw that kind of side of what was going on in my life, really.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

So after this moment with the friend that you realised you had such a powerful influence on your world, you just stopped. Yeah, you it put it put you off writing, it put you off music, it put you off everything. And then so is that at university? You didn't write much through university?

SPEAKER_01 32:26

I wrote a couple of songs. I tried to write a novel about three times, but I realised I struggled with writing long form anything. I think it's an ADHD thing, but I might be wrong. And I'm sure I probably could now with more of the structure in my life. But if I know what's gonna happen at the end, it ruins the story for me. I can't write it. So if I know that Bob's gonna die in chapter three, I struggle to make Bob important. I'm like, oh, am I building up Bob Fourman? He's gonna die. But so I essentially stopped writing, and I didn't really start writing again until I was my second year of teaching, actually. So, how do we go from the PE degree to teaching?

SPEAKER_02 32:58

Because obviously you've had such conflict with your English teacher when you kicked out your English class. Yet now as we sit here, you're I'm a teacher.

Open Mics, Craft, And Finding A Voice

SPEAKER_01 33:05

You're a teacher. Um and I don't really think like this anymore. But the two things that inspired me to teach were really good teachers and teachers like my English teacher. And I still think like I do about the really good teachers, but there was a hundred percent a need to prove someone wrong and redress a balance there that I try not to walk with that kind of thing anymore. If somebody doesn't think I'm great, that's fine. But my there were teachers that were also teachers, my history teacher, my former tutor, Mr. Richardson, legend, Mr. Wilkinson, my A-level P teacher, legend, Miss Guy, pastoral leader of my school, legend, that made me see the positive impact of teaching. But again, I didn't I didn't set out to be a teacher.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

What about those teachers showed you the positive aspects? Were they did they take you under their wing in some way? What was it about that all?

SPEAKER_01 33:50

Yeah, my I think the biggest one, my former tutor, Mr. Richardson, were very different people. And I'm I wouldn't say I'm like him, but if there is a core value in teaching that I've taken from someone that I think is present in my teaching, some people see this as a negative thing, and that's okay, they're welcome to that opinion. But I would come in the morning, I'm having a bad morning, and Mr. Richardson will say something, and I'll tell him F after that brother. And the next day I'd come in and say, You're right, Case. And there was no you spoke to me like this yesterday. Teachers talk a lot about giving a clean slate and blah. But very I think it very rarely happens. People we're human, people harbour feeling and sentiment and emotion. And as a teacher, I can say with more confidence than you could bring a million people who I've taught here to vote for it. I do not, as I've said to you, I don't hold a grudge on the man who came quite close to very severely changing our ending my life because I think that when we're young, we make mistakes and we get it wrong. And so when I teach kids, there are very few kids that I've taught who are more problematic in the classroom than I was. Very few kids I've taught who could say something to me that I haven't said to one of my teachers, and I like to think I'm doing okay, so I think they could do okay. So I'm not gonna write them off, I'm not gonna and more than anything, I look at them and I think, what's going on behind this? And that's how I always felt like he dealt with me.

SPEAKER_02 35:11

So, where did we go from PE degree to deciding to be a teacher?

SPEAKER_01 35:16

I remember the second year of my degree, a woman called Laverne Barba, literal hero in my life, one of the greatest people I've I could ever know. She told me at the time that I was doing my degree at Worcester. Worcester also have a teacher training qualification of PGCE, and she says, I hope you're not planning to apply for a PGC here because you're not gonna be on that PGC, and just you're not getting it right. You're doing this, you're doing that. I was messing up all over the place. I'd come out of living the way I was, but I still had all the mannerisms, and I remember my phone rang in the middle of a lecture, and if the ringtone was two-packed, last ones left. West and his mother. And I just picked the phone off, hello? Oh, and they're like, what's going on with you? Like, why would you think that's okay? And so I was robbing people up the wrong way, and she kept working with me and she taught me for dancing gymnastics. A lot of people don't know, I'm clearly a dancing gymnastics dun. Not true, not true. I'm not a dancing gymnastics dun. I just did it as part of my degree.

SPEAKER_02 36:10

Okay, I was gonna say we might have to record special social media reel there, okay.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

It would be a very interesting one. Anyway, she's a very strange vision in my head now of you with a ribbon. But she, in my third year, she said to me, I know she haven't applied for the PGC yet. And I was like, You told me not to. She says, Oh, come on, man. I was that was 12 months ago, Casey Bailey. You're doing amazing. This is Goma, that's Goma. You really need to apply for the PGC. We want you to train to teach you. What happened in that year that made you go from being disrespectful answering the two-pack ring turning? Again, I think I would say to I would say to kids, the things that get you in trouble when you're young will make you really successful when you're old. So, like the belligerence and the having an answer and all that, then you sit in a meeting when you're 25 years old and somebody has to pipe up and say this is wrong. It's the same person who told the teacher, you're sure about that. That just that's just the way it goes because there are qualities that seem really negative when you're boxed into a system where you're meant to be quiet and do what everyone else does and play the game. And then when someone needs someone to go, is that right? Is that supposed to look like that? You think about artists, it's the same artist who got told not to do it like that in art class, who now we go flipping out, that's a groundbreaking technique there. Yeah. Because school is not a great place for people to be individuals and to stand out. No, you're trained to be part of the herd, aren't you, really? And when you get out of school, people go, We need someone who thinks differently. It's a person who got in trouble at school. And so for me, what was happening is I was now starting to, when we were doing projects or when we were doing presentations, but even when even stuff we were writing, I weren't writing like other people writing, I weren't thinking like other people were thinking. And my lecturers, who still knew I was a bit of a pain, were starting to see, hold on, there's a perspective here that is not, we haven't put it in. And what as teachers, you put a lot in and you just expect to feed back because it's always a weird situation. How were you writing differently? How were you? I think I'm not from that establishment. So I so when I look at I did a thing around occupational socialization, which is very fun for everyone to hear, I'm sure, which is about how when people go into an organization, they bring in a load of new ideas, and very quickly they get beaten out of you because that's not how it works. I know you've just done your degree, or I know you've just done your apprenticeship, or I know you've read 55,000 books, but it's not how it works here, it works like this. Kind of evolutionary psychology, in a way, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 38:29

You're the one that stands out from the herding, no, no, we should do it.

Commissions, Constraints, And Creative Truth

SPEAKER_01 38:32

No, we do it like this, we do it like this. So, what do you do? You start doing it like that. But when I wrote about that, my lecturer called me and said, There's lots in this. Like I'm referencing sources that are not around education, and I'm looking at it from a broader kind of perspective, and my lecturer's like, there's lots in this that I've never considered before. And I wrote my master's dissertation on this. And I was like, Oh, no, I've got okay. Because I never I didn't think that was a weird thing to look at. I didn't think it was weird to go beyond the scope of what the degree was asking me to do. And I think lots of people, they come in and you do a lecture and the lecturer says ABC and you write your paper and you write ABC and you hand it back in. The lecture goes, wicked, you heard what I said, job done, pass. Whereas I was going, oh yeah, you said ABC, which is interesting. What about D? Critically thinking about it. What's going on with C what's going on with E? Have we thought about maybe it's not ABC, maybe it's BCA? And sometimes that didn't land. But when it did land, it was like, oh, you're not thinking about things in the same way. And that was even in my dancing gymnastics. And but also the reason that I say Laverne is a hero in my life is it was in my first year of uni. I went into her lecture, first time I went into one of her lectures, and I sat on the front row and I was tapping this pencil. And she said, Could you stop tapping, please? I said she carries on. I start tapping again. She goes, I should stop tapping, could you stop tapping? Five minutes later, I'm tapping again. And she looks at me and she goes, Well, you're this is actually really problematic now. You're taking the link. I'm trying to deliver a lecture, and every time I get into a flow, you just start tapping again. It's like you're trying to stop the lecture from working or whatever. And I was like, I'm really sorry, da-da-da, blah blah blah. Cool. Ten minutes later, I start tapping again. She didn't even say a word. And she looked at me and I realised and I stopped. I've actually I've done it again. Everyone starts leaving. She says to me, Can I just talk to you, please? I don't think she knew my name at the time. And she says, I don't need to say this the wrong way, but something's not quite right with you. I said, What do you mean by that? She says, The last time I should stop tapping, I looked in your face. She says, and unless you are the best actor in the world and you can put across whatever you want, I was 100% sure, and you were 100% sure you were not going to tap again. Ten minutes later you started tapping. And I said, It's funny she said that because I think I've got ADHD, and I saw them at school, and I said, Oh, just rude. And she was like, No, yeah, you've there's clearly something going on here, which led to me her supporting me to contact Cams, who then did a clinical diagnosis and called Cam's child and adolescent mental health services. Okay. So I don't know why I said that like you wouldn't know. You speak jargon, you started speaking to me about Cam.

SPEAKER_02 41:05

I've been like, I didn't know what it was, and I always try and be the stupidest man in the room on these podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 41:09

Because it helps other people to know, yeah, fair. And they came and they interviewed my mum, and they were like, and I remember the psychologist saying to me, This takes time and blah blah blah blah, but we are going to diagnose with ADHD. It's quite obvious. And I ended up getting the diagnosis. I wouldn't have had that if it weren't for her. And what I saw in so many other people was they had seen that exact same behaviour, but they had decided it was rudeness, naughtiness. Yeah. They had decided that I was choosing to get it wrong to be a problem, to cause an issue, and so they took it personally. And rather than try and understand why, they just thought this kid's this or that or whatever. So anyway, Laverne says to me, You need to get on the PGC. I applied for the PGC, I got on the PGC, I started training to THP.

SPEAKER_02 41:56

And again, you know, sorry, when you had that diagnosis, did knowing change your mentality? Did it change how you acted? How did it manifest apart from the tapping for you? Or how did you I don't know whether this is a combat it? Is that the right word? I don't know what I've started to do.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

Yeah, manage, maybe maybe manage, no, yeah. Manage it, sorry, yeah, manage it. I mean, I definitely do combat it someday, so that's for damn sure. I think there's lots of things in my life that I'd already learned about myself and had to manage. And I think for me, what I've realized is situations where I'd got in trouble, um, situations where I'd mishandled situations, I had to become much better at preparing for those. I'm not an inherently organized person. So I'm not talking about planning or packing your bag correctly because I'll pack the bag correctly and leave the bag up. But I'm talking about when I have like conflict at work, when I've had conflict in life, the decisions that I make now are based around the fact that I know, I know that if their situation becomes as heated and as problematic as it possibly can, I will not manage myself the way that I want to. I'm not gonna hit anyone or beat anybody up, or I'm not gonna do that. But I've been in environments in a work environment where someone has been really rude and disrespectful to me. And because I was unprepared for it, my response is not the response of the teacher in the room, it's the response of the man in the room. Who do you think you're talking to? Like, do you think I'm an idiot? And it's and so when I've had problems at work, like where I wanted to challenge something at work, and I will and then at home the day before I'm saying, What if they say this, I'll say that? What if they say this, I'll say that. What if they outright say this? Why if they lie and I know they're lying? I can't say you're a liar, because that's not how these, that's not how this world works. So my natural instinct would be like, you're lying. But I've prepared for you to lie, I've got it in my head that you might tell a lie, so that if you tell the lie, I'd I've played this whole scenario out in my head. And so when I have a conversation that that I think could be complex or difficult, I've had that conversation 40 times in my head, and it's gone 40 different ways, and I'm ready for them all. Similarly, if someone says to me, like, I've been out with my friends and we're gonna go out, we're gonna have a good night then, and we walk past the venue that we're going to, and outside I can see a group of men who look like they're tough guys, ah da-da-da. Right, I'm not going in there. And people will be like, but that, but then that lessens your the quality of your life or whatever. There's nothing that special in there, like in any of these places or in any of these things, there's nothing that glorious in there, but there are really bad things that happen. So I will avoid uh a really bad thing that has a 1% chance of happening if the 99% chance is just a decent night out. Do without a decent night out.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

But then you've got the hindsight of I've seen how bad things can go.

SPEAKER_01 44:43

You've seen you've been the victim of how bad it can get. I've seen how bad things can go. So that's what I think the ADHD thing for me, the diagnosis, there's two sides to it. One, I prepare myself mentally for quite difficult situations quite strenuously. I'm really clear about how things might go and how I might handle them. The other thing is, which I think is the most important thing for most people with an ADHD diagnosis, because I've learned to forgive myself for mistakes I make. If I do get it wrong, as I say, I pack the bag and leave the bag in the house, genuine real-life stuff. I've had a gig in Newcastle and took my insulin out of my house, dumb diabetic. I've put my insulin on the wheelie bin next to my car. I can sort everything else out, but I can't forget the insulin. I'm near Manchester when I realise the insulin's still on the wheelie bin. Now, if I didn't know that there's a little demon in my head that sometimes makes me forget things, I'd be really mad at myself. I'm not gonna get mad at myself. It happens.

SPEAKER_02 45:38

Yeah, it might happen more regularly to people with ADHD, but I think that's a human trait as well. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 45:42

And I think the thing is, I think a lot of humans beat themselves up about it. And I think I probably would because I couldn't explain it to myself. How have I allowed that to happen? But I can explain it to myself. I can say that as someone with ADHD, I sometimes forget the obvious thing. I sometimes put something down and forget why I've put it down. I almost always walk into a room and go, What do I walk into this room for? And you'll hear me saying to myself, what am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing? Because I'm trying to re-jug what did I come in here for or what am I going there for?

SPEAKER_02 46:14

I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD, but I do that all the time. And this is the thing where you start talking about people go with you, actually. I meet a lot of creatives, and I believe to some respect, like you say, we've all got ADHD tendencies or whatever it might. How does that what does that mean? Do you just have to live with it, manage it better, or I suppose it's level, isn't it? Some people are medicated, some people I don't know.

Peaky Blinders And Birmingham Laureate

SPEAKER_01 46:35

I'm not medicated, but I but when I first was diagnosed, I was put on medication. I didn't like it, he didn't agree with me, I didn't like it. In what sense? Why didn't it agree with you? So I I took Ritalin twice. First time, I remember I spoke to the woman and she said, she gave me all this stuff, all this information. Don't do this, don't do that, don't take it with this, don't do that, all that stuff. And one of the things she said was, you can't take it after around about 4 pm. It'll give you insomnia. You will not sleep. Point blank, will not sleep, it will keep you awake all night. I don't sleep anyway because I've got ADHD. So I'm like, whatever. Right. But so I thought the first time I took it, I had no lectures that day, had nothing to do, didn't need to take it, but I thought, let me just put one of these little pills in and see what it feels like. Because I don't want to be finding out what it feels like at a time when I feel like I need it. And then I was meant to start taking it regularly. 12 pm, sit down, pop this rhythm in. Woke up at 9 p.m. Really? Just knocked me out. I was like, hold on, this thing's meant to give me insomnia. This thing's meant to stop me from sleeping. Just knocked me out. Just gone. And the next time I took it, I was doing one of my teaching in local primary schools, and my lecturer Laverne was there. She said to me afterwards, are you alright? I said, Yeah, I think so. She seemed different today. I said, I feel different. She says, That's bizarre. And I said, Not really, because I've taken that tablet. She says, Oh, have you? I said, Yeah. She said, You don't seem slow, but you seem slow for you. Because I've always got an answer, I've always got a response, I've always got and I think what happened to me is elements of what it what is essentially ADHD, what people call being quick-witted, and in another instance, people call being rude or whatever, they became my personality. If I'm sitting in a room with people and somebody says something, I'm gonna be the one who says the joke straight after. I'm gonna be the one who picks up the innuendo and looks at my way and goes, oh. And that is because I have an inability at times to control my impulses. So where lots of people think it and go, let me lock that down, I do it and then think probably shouldn't have done that. In an environment where people know me to not be a malicious person or horrible person, and we all know each other, that makes me hilarious. In another environment, people I can't believe he said that. And so that's become who I am. Yeah, I remember my dad met the mayor of the West Midlands, and he said, Did you know your son would become the voice of Birmingham? My dad said, I always told him his mouth will get him in trouble. But yeah, so and um, like as a teacher, I walk around the classroom, I'm spinning around, I'm drumming, I'm whistling, I'm telling kids to start whistling, then I start whistling. I'm singing songs, and kids are like, he's a you know, but they because they know over time that I'm I care about them and I want them to do well, couldn't care less. Kids walk up to me and say, Serve them in this spins today, and I'll do a spin on the spot and walk off. But that become who I am more than just what I have. Oh, you've got ADHD, you know, I'm Casey Bailey. Yeah, and you know, the reason I can probably freestyle off the top of my head better than your favourite rapper is because they come to my head and I say and I say, and that's just who I am.

SPEAKER_02 49:37

I feel like we've gone off on a bit of a tangent on the ADHD, but I think it is an integral part of ADC. It's a massive part of who you are. So you get onto the PGCE, what, with the intention of going to teach PE? Yeah, I did teach PE. And again, I'm still trying to work out how we get here because we've done all this stuff, spoken of all these amazing things and all these negative things that you've combated, the mental resilience you've had to do to take yourself out of certain situations, to stop writing negative lyrics. Were you teaching PE when the writing club for the challenging kids came up? Can we go into a bit more of that? So I feel like we jumped forward a little bit in the story.

SPEAKER_01 50:14

So my first year of teaching, I'll speed through the nonsense bit, but first year of teaching, I got a maternity cover. So I was teaching PE for one year, covering a woman who was our maternity lead. So as we come to the end of that year, she's coming back to take her job, as is the case, and I've got a one-year contract, so I've got to find somewhere else to work. And the kids at the school created a petition called it Bring Back Bailey. And they got 150 signatures, put it on the headteacher's desk saying they don't want me to leave. No way. Um, bizarre case, it was special. Uh, and I love those kids. I would say that about every school, but yeah, I love it. And the head called me in and she said, the fact that this has happened is ridiculous. You've been here a year, I've never said anything like this. But some of the names are what makes it particularly impressive because these kids don't care about any of us. So they're like FTA teachers, and they want you to stay. So next year you're gonna be the positive behaviour coordinator.

SPEAKER_02 51:05

I was gonna say that just shows what a positive impact you're having on people's lives. Right.

SPEAKER_01 51:09

And I say, What's a positive behaviour coordinator? She says, I don't know. I made it up in a senior leadership team meeting the last week, and uh, we're gonna meet in the middle of the summer, and you're gonna tell me what it looks like. I says, Okay. And the next year I was a positive behaviour coordinator, which looked like me doing behavior intervention groups, doing observations with staff, working specifically with kids with ADHD as well, and looking at that aspect of things. The more challenging children, not just ADHD. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think I'm a stickler for stuff like this, so I always think the more challenging is probably the more challenged. So they're the kids who are they're struggling more with this than we're struggling with them almost all the time. And part of that was started a group for some kids who withdrew from English and didn't like English. I started this writing group. So after school on a Tuesday, we had Bailey's rap and poetry, rap. And later I do I I've done loads of workshops under this. I still essentially work under that label, I guess. And I often joke, I called it Bailey's Rap and Poetry because Casey's rap and poetry doesn't have the same strength as an acronym. Um but I started this club and we started with I got them writing rap music, and then I'll start sneaking in a poem, poem like this, or a poem like that.

SPEAKER_02 52:21

Were you trying to give these kids the positive? So when presumably they knew about your musical history. No, no, no, no, no, no, didn't oh heavens, no, my musical history was very angry and very bad. But this is what I mean in the sense that you stopped writing angry, aggressive music. Were you trying to influence the people in this class to write in a positive manner? Yeah, yeah. Or was it you've just got to write what you want to write?

SPEAKER_01 52:43

I wouldn't restrict what they were writing, so I wouldn't say to them if they wrote something negative, then to me that was a beautiful window into a conversation about it. So if they were gonna write, they're gonna do this. That's nice. Then I'd say, okay, why are you saying that?

SPEAKER_02 52:54

So I would never say to them, don't write a full window into a conversation. That's a nice way of looking at it. You see something in their lyrics and you go, okay, somebody's not writing.

SPEAKER_01 53:02

And that could be a conversation. That could be around violence, it could be around like misogyny, which is quite common in rap music. And and so I was always using these entry points into really important conversations. And then kids started saying to me, So you write something for us? And I had written something anyway to introduce them to the club, which was about so rap that I sometimes do about power of literacy. But they were like, write something new, right? And they would give me like little tasks. So they say, write a poem about a water bottle in the ocean. I'd be like, Cool, come back next week, and I'd be a poem about the water bottle in the ocean. And that led me back into writing stuff on the wrong. I'm guessing that was that's a real thing.

SPEAKER_02 53:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got that written down somewhere. No, you found this inspiration again to write the stuff that you were writing. Was that self-reflective, or was it always on someone else's brief, or were you exploring your own ideas?

SPEAKER_01 53:53

Or no, yeah. Then very quickly, I just started writing poems that I wanted to write. So one of the one of the earliest poems that I just chose to write is a poem called Half Breed, which is a flip-on half-cast by John Agar, and it's ingrained in my head because of that experience. So when I was growing up, lots of people called mixed-race people half-cast, didn't think anything of it, half-cast, quarter cast. That was just it. In my own house, we would have referred to ourselves as half-cast. And it took time to realise that wasn't a term that you should use.

SPEAKER_02 54:23

Sorry, in my naivety, if you were using it as a term to describe yourselves, what was it that made you think we shouldn't be using?

Accessibility, Parks, And Poetry For Everyone

SPEAKER_01 54:30

But for me, it was the John Agar tone. Right. But broadly speaking, then I you start to delve into why then. And obviously, a cast to cast something is to make it. So if something is cast, it's made. If you're half-cast, you're half-made. So I'm not half-cast, I am fully cast out of two different things. So I am the culture and the story of my Irish mother and my Jamaican father. I'm not half of anything. And so that became something that I became very conscious of. But at the same time, when people were using half-cast with no intention of being offensive, people were also calling mixed race people half-breeds with the intention of being offensive. And so when I wrote the poem Half-Breed, it was to call out not necessarily ignorance, but more so an aggressive kind of attack on people who look like me. But yeah, so at that point I was writing whatever I wanted to write, and I was loving it a good time to be alive. And all of my poems rhymed, they were so closely linked to the way that I wrote music, rap music, and grime music. And I still write sometimes poems that rhyme. I sometimes write poems that are just absolutely nowhere near rhyme, and I play with it all. But yeah, it was a that was a real like period for me of just that's I think that's the first time been a rapper for years and wrote little bits and pieces. That's the first time I felt like an artist, like someone refreeing for you. Yeah, 100%. 100%. Because I wrote about the things that I've that made me the most happy and the things that made me the most sad. And I and it was all there.

SPEAKER_02 56:03

And it's always not about the cultural things that you thought people wanted you to write about. Yeah, I didn't care. Negative.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

But was I wrote about negative stuff, but I would I do I didn't write negative things, so I reflected on negative situations, but I couldn't have cared less what anybody wanted me to write. I still write like that now, but it was but that was the first time I felt like I was writing like that. And growing up where I grew up, nobody wants to hear that you're a poet. Nobody cares that you're a poet, nobody wants to hear your poems. But there's an element of freedom in that because I didn't come from the world or the land of poetry. When I would go to a poetry reading, very few of the people, there are people who look like me, there are people who might have had similar experiences to me, but they didn't come from where I come from, and most of them didn't go through what I've been through. So in that kind of environment, I was a bit like I didn't care what anybody thought of me there. Like there was not, you couldn't that's freeing as well, yeah. Yeah, like you, like me and you are not the same. And these days, I still don't care what anybody thinks of me, where it's not really through that same lens. But at that time, I was very much, even though I've come out of the negative cycle, I was in I'm a teacher in a school and whatever, I still had that get old hood mentality of like I'm from here, so nothing that you think matters to me because I'm you're not from where I'm from, bro. You're not like me, and so I was very dismissive of the idea that somebody might not like it. I might have so what? But at the same time, was that I was gonna say, was that helpful? Because yeah, 100%. But years and years later, until I started talking to poets who would say, I'm talking to a poet who I've seen perform 10 times, they've done 10 different poems, I think they're all amazing, and they're like, I don't feel like I can call myself a poet, and I'm like, What do you mean? And I don't feel like I can call myself an artist. People who paint all the time don't feel like I call myself an artist. People who take a million photographs, I don't feel like I can call myself a photographer. And it was, I'm so glad I entered the way that I did, because I wrote one poem when I was a poet in my head. Because I'm a poet, look, I wrote a poem, boom, job done. And then I just started writing poems. Whereas I realized years later that lots of people struggled with this idea, can I say I'm a poet? Why wouldn't you? Like to me, I was like, Why wouldn't you say you're writing poems? And so I think like I still have the kind of doubts around as we order around the quality of what I do and could it be better or this person's better than me or that. But that that step into the idea of being a creative or being a poet, I found so easy. Where I realized years later, lots of people struggle massively with that. I think what we do is we that there's no doubt in your own head that you're a poet, you think that's about a poem. There's a doubt whether people are going to accept you when you say that. I didn't care about their acceptance. So whether they think I'm a poet or not really didn't matter. And that then when I was at home and people are saying to me, You're writing poems, fam, he writes poems, fam. This geezer writes poems, and I'm like, Yeah. So what? Like, yes, I do. Should we talk about the decisions you're making?

SPEAKER_02 59:00

Did you have a kind of split perspective? Did you have the people that you were friends with from your other world, shall we say? You're writing poetry, but then did you other people going, wow, what a different, like you say, a different perspective on it?

SPEAKER_01 59:12

Um I see, I don't I think probably what I felt like, and it's probably unfair. I definitely had the first thing that people going, why are you writing poems? Waste man writing poems. But then within the the world of poetry, was the exact same questions, but from the exact opposite point. Why is he writing poems? What's he writing poems about this this rough yeah?

SPEAKER_03 59:32

Shouldn't he be making that rap? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 59:35

Right. So so at the time I I never felt like there was any, broadly speaking, anywhere where the idea of me being a poet was accepted, but I didn't care about it. Yeah, you've almost got half a foot in one world, half a foot in the other world. And what happened uh over time is I just realized that lots of poets, particularly poets who I became like great friends of Leon Priestnall, Amira Sale, or even not poets, people in the poetry world like Paul Stringer, like they've declared. Couldn't have cared less about those stories and that all that baggage that I brought to it. There's this to my poem and go, I think that poem's sick. I'm like, cool, thanks.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:10

And that was it. It was so how does that work? You start writing in the school for the kids, and then you've got this buzz again for writing. What you go to poetry nights and you just find places together. Just open mics, pop up open mics, and just is this how we bridge the gap from you being teacher, poet to then Birmingham poet laureate.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:29

Yeah, it was literally, and I speak to people now, and I think that there's a thing of people will speak to me, people who are 10 years younger than me who are writing poetry, and they'll go, What should I be doing? And I'm like, writing poems and performing poems. If you want to do performance a because some people just want to write poem. What should you be doing writing poems? If you want to do what I'm doing, write poems, perform poems. And what I was doing at that age was I was showing up if there was an open mic holes on it. I remember I did a poetry workshop at a school in, I want to say Chichester, but I could be wrong. And it was because the guy who was at the school at the time, I went to university with him, he sees the poetry I'm doing and he calls me up and asks me, Can I come into this workshop? And I traveled down and I'm staying in Southampton, maybe, or just outside of Southampton. And so on the way down, I'm checking, are there any poetry nights in the in the area at the time? And the night I arrived, there was a poetry night called 451, and you had Vanessa Casoule and Selina Goddon on who are just legendary poets. And I remember coming down the line, I'm gonna jump on the open mic and still having that kind of like fresh confidence of I'm gonna wow everyone and blow the world away. And I did my poems, and people were quite positive. Vanessa Casole got off and did some poetry. I was like, I'll flip it up. Okay, this is the bar. And then Selena Goddon got off and did some poetry, and I was like, rah, okay.

Commonwealth Games: Pride And Reckoning

SPEAKER_02 1:01:45

What was it about their work that you were hearing that night that hit that made you think, wow, it was it just more raw, more emotive?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

What so Vanessa Casoule is just, I just think a stunning writer. And her ability to, in performance, to capture humour, sadness, everything. And so it was just there were like moments of bits of imagery that she crafts in her writing where it's just crystal. You she says it and you're just like, I get that. And that to me, poetry is always about I always feel like poetry is about exposing things that are already there, not about creating some weird kind of unobtainable or difficult to understand idea, which I think poetry can fall into. But that was Vanessa Soule and Selena Garden, it's just she's just like a tour de four, she's just like a bulldozer with a pen, like she just says stuff, and it's so clever. Not clever, like I'm not going, oh, that was such an intricate metaphor. It's clever in the sense that it's sometimes blunt, it's brutal, it's funny, but again, it's exposing. You hear it and you go, of course that makes sense. Why didn't I think about it like that before you said it? And yeah, and at the time, I was still quite new to poetry. I wasn't, I was resting very heavily on rhyme and how the rhyme works and not really dealing with the intricacies of imagery and observation, which I think is another key thing in poetry. Is to me, observation is that to me, it's that what makes great poetry is your ability to see things and your ability to relay them back. And I was writing poetry without even really looking back. I was just trying to be clever and to be, I guess, intricate in the way that I express things back. And it took time and seeing poets like that to make me think, okay, what have I seen that you could have stood next to me and not see? And then how do I say it to you in a way that the next time you look at it, you see it? That makes sense. But the point, I guess the point of that story rather than me going to 451 is I was in Southampton for one night. I'd driven three hours to get there. I could have gone to my hotel room and went to bed. And sometimes now that's exactly what I would do. But at 23, 24 years old, the passion. Why new to poetry? I guess it's not so much like a difference in passion, it's uh I needed to hear how this landed, I needed to put it out there, test it, yeah. Test it, absolutely, and so then when people say to me, What should I be doing? If there's five open mic nights on this month, you should read all of them because you're a poet and you want everyone to hear poems. And that's what I was doing. I was just flooding. That was building your name, presumably. Yeah, and then and then there were like cool opportunities and moments that came around. You've got poetry nights where everyone shows up and does a poem or two, and then you've got poetry nights where you've got your headliner, and people start saying to me, I saw you at search and you jumped on the open mic and you were really good. I'm having a night next month. I'd like you to headline it. Do you think you should do it 15 minutes set? Yeah, I think I can do 15 minutes set. You do your 15 minutes there, it goes really well. Somebody else goes, Do you think you could headline our night? And what started happening then is if I'm headlining and they've brought a poet in from Bristol and they're headlining, and so I'm doing the first headliner and they're the main headliner, but we come off the stage and they go, You know, I've got a night in Bristol. I'd love you to come down and headline that.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:04

And that's just how poetry networking is and that builds, and then is this how the Burmian poet Laureate came about?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:13

Yeah, yeah, it was so from that it became things like commission. So people would say to me, Could you write a poem about this event, or could you write a poem about this building or this whatever it might be?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:24

And I said Can we just touch on that? How is that different writing to a brief than writing freely like you you would like to, essentially?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:08

I think for me, I I always enjoy writing commissions, and the reason is, in fact, I say I always enjoy there's one commission, one commission that I've ever written that I didn't enjoy. And when I wrote the poem, I just remember feeling and it was weird because there was just two things going on, and if we're really honest, there's you still gotta pay your bills. So I'm not doing a poem, and I'd never do a poem where I'm saying anything that I don't believe in or agree with. So I'm not saying anything that I find really contentious, but I'm also not saying anything that I find particularly inspiring or and I can't find a really creative way to work because of make sure you say that 27,000 people have blah blah blah, or something like that. And but but it but it was a decent paying gig. And I remember I had a conversation with a poet who I love, absolutely love, but it's the idea of how do you separate? I am an artist who writes poems to express all of these things, and I also have a skill which is writing, and somebody's hiring me to use my skill to say a thing. I don't disagree with the thing, I'm not mad at the thing, I'm not upset about it. I'm not saying yeah, write a poem to promote this thing that you think is horrendous.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:14

But you're equally inspired by it.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:16

But I do have a set of skills that allow me to write this thing, so that was fine in the sense that again, it didn't upset me or I wasn't mad about it, but I wasn't inspired by it. Normally I find commissions really inspiring, and the reason is there's so much to write about, but as creators, we often come back to the things that we come back to when we see them in the way that we see them, and so you can go over old ground or you can try and break new ground and go over it in old ways. It's quite easy to do that, and sometimes what a commission does is it just knocks you into a totally different conversation.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:49

I guess it defies that paradox of choice, isn't it? You can write about anything. No, actually, you've got to write about the 27,000 people that did this and the thing. And the limitations can sometimes be this together, I guess.

Theatre: Writing And Building Grime Boy

SPEAKER_01 1:08:00

I can't remember who it was who said, quote I've seen quite recently, that the biggest threat to art is the lack of limitations. And when we think about great art, the artist will say, particularly physical art, visual art, the artist will say, or even think about films and photographs, I had to shoot it on this because I didn't have that. We had to do it in this warehouse because we would have loved to do it there, but we couldn't. We had to film the thing with me hanging from the ceiling because we wanted a drone, but we couldn't afford the drone. And so we, if you just could have everything, but you can very quickly become like But you embrace the limitation. When you get that limitation, you go, How can I creatively manage this? How do I express this idea in a way that is artistic? And I wrote a commission recently, and when I was talking about it, it felt quite restrictive. I felt quite limited. And I would the reason that worried me is I felt like when I presented it back to the people, to me, there was nothing there to excite them because they had so much input in what I should say. And I remember I sat down and normally I would send an audio recording, I'd send it written, and they asked, could we meet? And I said, Oh yeah, can you show us of that? And I'd do this poem, and halfway through the poems person just starts crying in front of me. And I'm like, Okay, and I get to the end, and they're just like, I can't believe how you've interpreted that. It's so beautiful, your wave of words, and you go back and you realise things that I just think are just things I'm saying or whatever, that's because that's how I write things, and like I feel limited by the bits that they've put on it, but I've still got to come up with how I say those things and where I place it, and even and also the power of those words on the people, if that's their world, yeah, yeah, yeah. So for me, those as much as you can constrain the creative, what you do is you inspire the creativity, because then I have to find a way to say this when not just say this. It's like you say to me, I need one, two, three, four in it. Then I say three, two, four, one, and you go, we've never thought of that in that order before. Looking at different things and drawing in different things. So for me, yeah, the I love the work of commission because it makes you write about something you wouldn't normally write about. And sometimes that's you're talking about research, and I don't really know this thing, so I need to look into it. And sometimes I haven't even fully finished it yet, but I've recently done a commission for the Birmingham County FA, and they saw me as a poet and asked me to write this thing, and they don't know I have a background in football coaching and taking kids to about and won the Birmingham County FA Cup ten years ago. So now I'm writing about something I know really well, but I never chose to write about it before. So I'm bringing in all this wealth of my own understanding, but with all of that, I never sat down in front of a piece of paper and wrote this poem. So now I'm writing it, and so sometimes it's not just something out of the blue, it's something you've always understood, but now someone's asked you to write about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:55

But I think it's interesting because I guess as when we think of poets, we don't think of poets often writing for commission. So even at that stage, you were getting commissions, and then what that opened doors. How does Birmingham Poet Laureate who awards it? Is it people's vote, or what is it?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:11

So it's uh it's right in West Midlands, the council definitely supports it as well. And so you apply, there's uh an interview process, and I applied when I got it, and it's funny because I remember having a conversation, so a lot of people think, oh yeah, you became the Birmingham Poet Laureate, and then you did Peaky Blinders and didn't blow, which actually is the other way around, and Peaky Blinders and lots of other commissions before I became the Birmingham Poet Laureate.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:36

Okay, can we talk a little bit about that then? So the Ballad of the Peaky Blinders, that was a very famous which season were you? It was in preparation for season four of the very famous Stephen Knight show, The Peaky Blinders. That's legendary for our area. So to be honest, was it that Stephen Knight and the Peaky Blinders BBC that came together?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:56

Yeah, BBC. So weirdly, I got a phone call. I was at school, it was after school hours, and I was running a club that I called Boys to Men, and it was about um Motown Philly. 100%. At least someone gets a reference, you know what I mean? Because these kids didn't have a clue what was going on. I'm the end of the session, I'd be like, right boys come to the end of the road. When you get to the end of the road, nothing I didn't care about at all. But it was for a group of boys who we just were worried about and we wanted to put something on for them to support them essentially. But I remember I get this phone call, hi Casey, such and such from the BBC. Have you got some time to talk? So I'm like, okay, talk. And I said, first of all, are you a fan of the Peaky Blinders? I said, Oh yeah, I love the Peaky Blinders. And I go, Great, we're looking for someone to write a poem, essentially to be the lead advertising for series four. So this will be our main campaign. And I start talking to them about it. I said, Who else have you got in mind? And I said, to be honest with you, Casey, we say we're looking for someone, we want you to write the poem. There is no list. I remember she said, We didn't want a poem and then come up with you. We saw your work and decided we want the poem. I was like, wow, okay, that's amazing. And I'd done something with Steve and Knight not long before that, where we've both been in the same place together, and he said, We'll work together at some point, Casey. And I remember we get off the phone, I'm like, yeah, yeah, I could do this, I could do that, yep, no problem. Yep, get it, understand the brief, fine, yeah, make my life cool, wicked. I'll get some.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:20

Can I just ask? Was like even at this point, I know you don't really, but did you suffer from any imposter syndrome at this point? Were you a bit like, holy shit, this is this is big.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:29

And the thing is, I don't want to say I do suffer from imposter syndrome, because I think what I'm talking about, everyone does. I do think, is this good enough for but yeah, there was an element of like sugar. And what I've realized over time is normally when things go bad, no one cares. And when things go well, people love you for it. So nobody goes, Oh and I could be wrong, but I don't think in terms of quality, I think one thing not being the quality that you want it to be doesn't end anybody's career. But I think we get scared of that. But yeah, so I finished this call, hang on the phone. I'm like, I said to my mate Paul, who I was working with at the time, I'm like, they've just asked me to write the campaign for Peachy Blinders, bro. My phone rings again, it's them. So I answer the phone, and um says, Oh, hi Casey, I realise we didn't discuss a fee at all. I was like, Oh yeah, I didn't even think they're gonna have the creative in you then. I didn't just like how much are you gonna pay me? I was like, Yeah, I'll write your poem. And yeah, I wrote it, and then what was that experience like?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:29

You know, it's a big production.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:30

You had to film the poem, you you know they dressed me up as a peaky blinder.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:35

It's a great work. Yeah, it was. Was that probably the biggest thing you'd done at that point?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:40

Uh yeah, at that point, definitely. And I think there are things that I've done since which might like feel like they're on a bigger magnitude or whatever, but the what went into it for a three-minute thing, they rent out this space in Birmingham, which is not easy to rent out, and we we dress the 4.9, cut it all together for our purpose. You watch it, and it's like it's it is, and I've done other stuff with the BBC, which has been really cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:04

But that is this is a BBC production, it feels like the quality which is Yeah, you're not just in it going to a microphone studio booth doing a voiceover, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:13

It was fully you're showcased in this, and so yeah, it was it was amazing, it was really fun to do. And I remember not long after this, I moved house and a guy came to my house to fit the sky, and he's looking at me, I'm thinking, what's going on? I walk out of the room, I come back in the room, and he's got it up on the screen. And he went, This is you, and this is I know what a weird surreal. And he went, he went, This is wicked. This is I love this. I've sent this to this person and that person, and I'm in this geezer's house. And when as soon as I walked in, I thought, that's him from the poem that is. And I was like, thanks. Bizarre. And I went to perform in India and I had this t-shirt on and it's got an Alfie Solomon's coat on it. I've heard some very, very bad things about you, Birmingham people. And I'm in the airport in Qatar, somebody comes up to me, like Irish accent, uh Peaky blindness. And I said, He goes, And you're the poet. You're a poet. I said, I am a poet. Yeah, it's like I like that poem. I just walked off. Really? Airport in the middle of Qatar.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:12

I was like, Can I ask you a question about that? Why do you think that they got you to do that rather than the late great Benjamin Zephaniah? Question.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:22

I mean, there could be lots of reasons. I mean, for one, I won't tell you what the fee was, but it wouldn't have covered Benjamin Zephaniah. No, uh Benjamin Zephaniah to be.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:30

What did you think about that at all, Girl? And of all the people, of all the poets they could have asked, did you ever think I think I thought other people thought that.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:38

And I say that like understandably. So not long before that, the thing that I'd done with Stephen Knight is I'd been commissioned to write a poem when Channel 4 were deciding whether to they were moving their headquarters from London and they were talking about Leeds, West Midlands, a couple of other places, and they had the CEO of Channel 4 come to Birmingham and we did this big presentation. Stephen Knight spoke, and I did this poem, and I stood out on the balcony at BCU and stood with Stephen Knight and spoke for quite a while about this poem. And I can't remember genuinely timeline-wise, I then did a thing where yeah, this must have still been before. I then did a thing where I was commissioned to go to Cannes in France and perform a poem, and Stephen Knight introduced me. And I think again, I think that was also before the Peaky Blinders Commission, so I think that had put me on their radar in a different way.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:29

There was some six years of separation, yeah. But yeah, and obviously that must have elevated you to a next level. Then afterwards you applied again to be.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:37

Yeah, so I applied again, and I remember the conversation good for the CV to get I remember the conversation where one of the people on the panel said, I'd like to tell you, Casey, that if you become the Birmingham Poet Laureate, there are these amazing commissions and this and that. And he said, Well, we told the last guy who became the Birmingham Poet Laureate that, and you've took all of those commissions.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:55

And I was like, Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:57

But yeah, like I'm really conscious that when I became the poet laureate, there are poets who I respect massively, poets who I hold in the higher esteem that I hold myself as a poet, I'm really blunt and honest, who applied as well and didn't get it. And so it felt like a real privilege. But I know people who have said to me, we didn't really know this poet laureate thing was a thing until you became the poet laureate. And I think it goes back to that work rate thing of being of going out and performing.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:22

I wanted to put yourself in front of people, taking these opportunities in their eyes, the people's the BBC, suddenly poetry on a on a global platform advertising the probably the biggest thing coming out of Birmingham in a long time.

Please Do Not Touch: Heritage And Power

SPEAKER_01 1:18:35

And I remember when I interviewed, I said, What I want to do as a poet laureate is bring Birmingham to poetry and bring poetry to Birmingham. So I wanted people outside of Birmingham to know there is a thriving poetry scene here. There are amazing poets here. You should be coming to Birmingham, you should be booking Birmingham poets to come to you. But I also wanted the people in Birmingham who couldn't care less about poetry to say, anyway, well, that's poetry stuff about.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:00

How did you go about doing that? Compared to say previous poetry laureates, because I I'm with you. I didn't know Birmingham had a poet laureate until I think you you were the poet laureate.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:09

Yeah, I think what I did, I think the first thing is, and it ties back into the commissions, and some of that's work that I've done, some of that's chances that I've been presented my way, is I was not just doing poetry in poetry spaces. So when Peaky Blinders had the massive festival, they had a poetry stage, but they had the poetry stage because I had done the poem for the thing, and that was like poetry is now part of this conversation. And I remember performing up there in Harry Curtin, who played Finn Shelby. Hope I haven't just misnamed it, the brother that he played. He was there, and I remember being midway through a poem and clocking him and pointing at him, and everyone who was there, and I say everyone, probably about 50-60 people, they stopped listening to my poem and me like, oh, there's one of the stars of peeking behind us, so I didn't do myself any favour. But then Stephen Knight says to me, I'm gonna I'm gonna go on the poetry stage tonight and I'm gonna read some stuff from my mum's journal. Would you like to come up and open up? And so this stage, which has had 50-60 people all day or for three days, you couldn't get in there when Stephen Knight was on stage because it's Stephen Knight, obviously, and I was there sharing poetry, and people I never really checked for poetry, I never really thought about poetry. And I firmly believe it's just I don't know if it is an official saying or somebody said it or whatever, but yeah, I I firmly believe that lots of people don't look for poetry because poetry doesn't look for lots of people.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:29

We similar in Paul's podcast about how most people don't go to poetry until there's a wedding, a funeral, or those things actually say the power of words, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:38

And it's and I don't blame people who do not move in poetry circles for that, because the reality is lots of poetry feels like it's intentionally exclusive. It feels like it feels yeah, it feels like you're supposed to have a degree to understand this. Do you have an A level in English literature? How would you understand my metaphor? And so there's a really fine balance between writing poetry that's not very good because that makes it accessible, and trying to write a poem which is a very good poem, but that that doesn't have lots of people can come to and just go, oh, that makes sense. All of it, not every word, there might be a reference. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:15

Like And do you think that's what you've tried to do, and that in a sense has made it more accessible in that goal to make it like in saying bringing permium to poetry or poetry to berm?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And that and that to me is like I will read there's poems that I've written that I might never share where I read it back and I think, do I think if I read this poem to my dad, who is a clever man who has a grasp of things that I'm yet to get a grasp of, would he go on talking about? And if he would, how do I expect everyone to just get it? And if they're not gonna get it, who am I writing it for? Just me and five poets.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:46

And do you have a process like that? Is it do you think reflectively about your poems in that sense? Are they gonna be understood or does it depend on the context of what you're writing?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:57

Definitely depends on the context. I remember this really like it was a mind-blowing conversation. Uh I've got a friend called Adrian B. Earl, who's an amazing poet. His poetry is much more academic's a wrong word, but he he does use phrases and things where I think I know some people are not gonna not gonna go here with word out, yeah. But I wrote this poem and it says, somewhere in this lacuna between actuality and invention. And he said to me, Why did you say lacuna? And I was like, I don't know, it's just a word that came to me, and he was like, Nobody's gonna know what you mean. I went back and I changed it to corridor, somewhere in this corridor between and lacuna is just like a gap of space. And I thought it was hilarious. So I was thinking, like Adrian has pulled me up here and gone, like, who are you trying to you're trying to you trying to lock out of this poem? Who are you trying to, who are you keeping this poem away from by using that word? And yes, that's a very good point. And so sometimes I do look at my work and go, okay, is that a bit is that unnecessary? Who's that serving? Because I think so. Leon Priestnall, who rest in peace, Leon Priestnall, one of just a legendary Birmingham poet. Leon said to me once, and I don't know if he was quoting someone or not, but when you think back, you just remember it's something Leon said. He said, something like the writer who writes only for their audience loses himself, and the writer who writes only for themselves has no audience. And so the balance is how do I write something that serves what I wanted to write, but also allows other people to come on this journey with me and access it. And that's the art, right? That's the art because otherwise, there's no point me standing up in front of a group of people and reading a poem that I don't like, hoping it will matter to them. And there's no point me standing up in front of a group of people reading a poem that that matters a lot to me and they don't make any sense to them.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:37

And during your time as poet laureate, do you believe that you achieved that goal in making poetry more accessible?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:43

Not fully. I don't think fully, and some of that is because there were really specific things I wanted to do. Like I wanted to set up this idea of poetry in the park, and COVID didn't really help at that time. But what I realized or decided maybe that public parks are like poetry, they're there for everyone. Everyone can access them, but not everybody feels like they're for them. So those nice green spaces where there's a family having a picnic, there's a guy in the same area going, there's nowhere nice for me to go, man. It's all tower blocks and crackheads outside the pub. And you're like, you know, the park there, and I can't go to the park. Yeah. Why not? And the same people are going, I can't deal with poetry, but and I had this weird moment of realizing these spaces are just like poetry, they are right there for you, but in part you've convinced yourself, and in part society has convinced you they're not for you though. And so I wanted to do this cycle of like these days I'd call it content around people going out into their local park and reading a poem, could be their poem, could be another poem. I would do a prompt. Some people would write around the prompt, and I just wanted people to get out into the parks. Something you still want to do? Probably, but time is I now have three children instead of one I had at the time. But yeah, but absolutely. And it's still something that on a personal level I'm very much engaging with. I'm seeking places out and I want to be in them. I want to similar to when I said I went camping, I want to be, I want to put my feet in the the water even though I can't swim. I want to explore the beach, I want to go out and get the water. So the wind in your face, you know, just feel it. I just wanna I just want to feel it, yeah. I just want to experience those, that nature. This it's so much that is right here for us that we can, in a state of negativity or deprivation and lap, just tune it out. And so we selectively encase ourselves in all of the problems and all of the grey and the negativity.

Music Returns, Labels, And Flow

SPEAKER_02 1:25:37

But do you think that is in some way a contrast to the upbringing that you've had? Your crave nature, the green, the peace, the tranquility. It's more I'm acknowledging it its existence because you used to be the guy who said, I can't go to the park.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:50

Yeah, I would have convinced you that the park wasn't there, because I'd somehow convinced myself that the park wasn't there, the park that I grew up. I wrote a collection of poetry called Waiting at Bloomsbury Park and acted like Bloomsbury Park didn't exist, even in the poems. It's bizarre because I just I didn't see this space where like I think you go there and you could chill and you could have a picnic or whatever. There's people in that area who don't feel like that, and I didn't feel like I had that.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:18

When you live on the park, you go, Oh yeah, the parts where the baggage get or the parts where they're oh no, the family over there are beautiful people.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:24

Chilling and live in the dream. Yeah, I it's more for me about just acknowledging that this stuff is there and it's not and it's there for all of us. And the same is true of poetry. What other people write and what you might choose to write yourself, just write there for all of us. And I know poets who will say to you they don't think they're very good at poetry, who have got books and journals and journals full of words every end out. Not because they think they're gonna be the Birmingham Poet Laureate or National Poet Laureate or whatever, because it helped them. It did something for them, it created space for them. It was an opportunity to breathe.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:57

Yeah, I journal a lot and I just find it it's not for anything particular, it's just for me to get thoughts out.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:02

Yeah, yeah. And as you write it, you you go beyond just going, let me just scribble. I think you do want to write in a beautiful way, creative way. You want to come up with a nice little metaphor. And that's and that's what we like. I wanted people to know. Yeah, that's there for all of us. That's not just there for people who loved poetry in school, people whose English teachers told them they were great rather than told them they couldn't come to English.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:23

But in terms of making poetry more accessible, like you wanted to do, things like the Peaky Blinders, the Birmingham Poet Laureate, presumably the stuff you did for the Birmingham Commonwealth game. Yep, massive global stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:34

And the thing with that is, which I'm really like, I always shudder at the Commonwealth Games of the word Commonwealth, which I hate. But it was funny because I the games themselves reached out to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:44

Did you feel conflicted about writing that poem?

SPEAKER_01 1:27:46

No, and I'll tell this is why, this is why I'll tell you why. The games reached out to me and they said, Could you write something for the opening of the Commonwealth Games? I said my first answer was no. It was quite blunt, quite a harsh no. And then I went back to them and I said, I would love to write something for the games if it has space to really explore what this idea of the Commonwealth is, why lots of people are not happy about it, the harm that it's caused, not just the party that you want to have and the celebration that you want to have. And they said that's not what we're looking for, the opening of the Commonwealth. I said, Fine. Happy days, moved on. My son was born on July the 4th. On July the 5th, I got a call from the BBC and they said, We want you to write something for the opening of the Commonwealth Games for the television coverage. They hadn't had this discussion with the games, they never realised it was a previous discussion. So I says, So I don't mean to come across blunt or but out of order. My son was born yesterday, I'm on the way to get nappies. Yeah, I ain't got time to play about. I says, the games asked me to open, and I turned it down because they don't want me to have a poem where I say the British Empire caused harm and all of this celebration is cool, but I was really clear about the negative impact and the fact that people didn't ask for whether you think it's good or bad, people in Ask for India did not ask to be part of the Commonwealth, neither did you make that, they did not request your presence, you just impose yourself upon them. And I said, So if you ain't got time for it, that's fine. I can even recommend you a poet, but I can't do it. And the woman said, Casey, that's exactly what we want. She said, We do not want to create a piece of art which just says, Oh, the Commonwealth's great. Glorifies when we know there are so many people who don't feel like that. They said, We also don't want to create a piece of art that says we should all feel negative because it's about a sporting event. We want to talk about sport, we want to talk about pride that these people come to the Commonwealth Games to represent their own.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:35

And do you think that's why they came to you? Because you have that ability to find the balance that we've talked about.

Advice To 15‑Year‑Old Self And Closing

SPEAKER_01 1:29:40

Yeah, yeah. And so down that note, I says, okay, yeah, it's poem. And so what I didn't want to write, and people might not like this, but it's a reality. If I'd have written whatever I'd written, and loads of people have said to me, Yeah, this makes me really proud of Britain and the Commonwealth, I would have felt like I'd missed mama. What's actually happened is some people have reached out to me and said that's like a really challenging thing to say. Well done. Some people have disagreed with me. Wicked. That's perfect. Some people have said, you know, I never thought about that. There's a line in the poem, I don't know if I remember it exactly. But it's and it only came to me while I was writing this poem. It's again why I love commissions, because things like fall into place. You know, that at the time there was a whole controversy around the Benin bronzes where people have said these bronzes should not be displayed in England, they're from the West Africa. And so what the gallery did is they put them in storage. They said, Yeah, maybe we shouldn't display them. Them. They didn't send them back. They just hit the And I was like, what? And so there's a line in the poem which says we're telling people to let go of the past whilst we're literally holding on to it. We're saying you should let go of it. And we are literally physically holding on to it. And somebody DM'd me and they says, saying let go of the past whilst holding on to it. Like exclamation mark. And three months later, this person emailed me. And I won't go, it's like a bit of a there's elements of this which are not public knowledge, but they come back to me and said, I'm working at this gallery and and I facilitated the repatriation of loads of this stuff. And they sent me this presentation slide. And the start of the slide is telling people let go of the past whilst literally holding on to it, Casey Bailey. And they were like, I can stand in a room and say to people, how can we say to people, get over it? But we'll keep it, but you need to let it go. And then I was like, that's why I wrote it. And then the I suppose as Thailand was the vice-chancellor of the University of Worcester, where I went, he reached out to me and said that he wanted to tell me that the university was very proud of me because he saw an article. I'm gonna say Daily Mail could have been one of them other newspapers like that. And it said that my poem was left-wing doggrove. Uh it was probably the Daily Mail. Eddie just said, I saw a really horrible thing in this paper. I want you to know we're really proud of you. I hadn't seen it, no one had shared it with me or anything. So I went looked and looked it up and I was like, Oh, brilliant. And I replied to him, Hi David, I'm really disappointed to find that you read the Daily Mail. I said, other than that, I'm fine. Thank you so much for your kind words and support, blah blah blah blah. That's fair. But yeah, I was like, good, because if I'm making the Daily Mail happy, I'm doing something horribly wrong. Yeah, like that to me was it was a great opportunity to take that platform. You know, we have the Commonwealth games every four years, and it's easy to then whitewash history with this parade of Yeah, good. So to have that platform to go, let's not forget this, let's keep our eye on that. And the poem was called Under a Banner, and because somebody had said in the build-up, this many countries under a banner, and what I later, I guess, returned to was this idea they were under the banner, they they held them down. Yeah, I was really happy.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:51

So again, an amazing opportunity and a chance for you to express quite freely on a huge platform, really, which originally you probably weren't well with the original no, that's not what we were looking for. Yeah, yeah. And kudos to you for turning it down, yeah, first and foremost.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:07

As I say, you know, I couldn't do something you didn't believe in that I don't that I don't believe in. Somebody asked me, would I do the Tory party conference? And I was just mad. I was actually so mad because I was like, I was like, do you actually have no idea like who I am and what I do? Or do you know who I am and what I do? And you genuinely think that what I would do is the Tory. I was fuming. I was like, I I said to my wife, I said, I feel like I need to self-reflect. Like, why has somebody seen my work and thought I would do the Tory Party conference? What the hell is going on? What am I saying? Am I saying what I think I'm saying? Are they hearing what I'm saying? Do you know what?

SPEAKER_02 1:33:42

Knowing how I know PR people like that, they probably even haven't deemed that much. So Burmian poetry. We were in Birmingham, he's the most famous.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:50

Never looked at your work, probably is one let's get. And then they were saying to me, Oh, but you could use it as an opportunity to say that I said, Listen, I can't. If you're not going to say what I'm saying, I'm not trying to get up there and be cute and veil it in a metaphor. You know what I mean? When I finish saying, I say, they're not gonna pay me my money, I'd say that for a start. They're not gonna honor that invoice. And then they were like, and you know, but you haven't asked them what the fee is. I said, I promise you, I promise you, you do not have enough money. Promise. I put that on my heart, you ain't got enough money. Wow, the Tory Party conference. Yeah, and they said, Would you like me to go and explore the fee? And I said, Please, if you ever want to speak to me again, never speak to me about Tory Boy. Yeah, and please don't speak to me for a while because you've really made me mad.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:30

I was mad at the person couldn't we talk about some more positive opportunities, shall we? Yeah, why not? You've written books, you've got a doctorate in education of all your work, but theatre production, talk to me about Grime Boy.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:42

Grime Boy, Grime Boy is my baby, I do love Grime Boy. So Grime Boy is it's a play that I wrote, it features uh like four characters, but two of them quite prominently, who are boys in the mid-2000 in inner city Birmingham who want to be the best Grime MC. I wonder where this story goes. Wow, you know, I dreamt it. So it is very much it started not fully autobiographical in the sense of like a documentary, like factual thing. Well, it started as a piece I was writing about growing up wanting to be a Grime MC, and it was about me. And now it's not about me, it's about Grime Boy, who some would argue is potentially an art or ego, yeah, and it yeah, I don't wanna I don't wanna spoil the plays.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:23

No, don't tell us the premise, but obviously you've gone from music originally, poetry, now into production, theatre production, which I'm guessing is in script writing, uh writing the story, but also music within that.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:36

Yeah, so there's and I I hesitated a bit earlier when I said I haven't written anything that I would say is negative, because in grime boy, I've written some lyrics that if I just said them out loud, you'd be like, Well, but that's because it's it's part of a broader context. But yeah, so I wrote a load of grime music. First of all, just lyrics for performance as part of the play. Then the year after the play went on, there was Festival 23 in Birmingham, and so we I wrote a Grime Boy concert, which was just the actors from the play performing a whole new set of new songs that I'd written, which was cool, which I enjoyed writing again. But there, the play is it started out as this thing I was writing, like a poem with some grime in it, and then I got into a programme called The Poetic Theatre Makers at the Birmingham Rep, set up by Apples and Snakes. And I've I was planning to write a one-person theatre show, so it was mainly just me doing poems, little bit of engagement with the audience, some grime M scene, but literally like a one-person stand-up microphone. You know, it was not gonna be a clean theatre production. And then throughout this process, there were people saying to me, It's Malia Seaton, who was one of the mentors on the programme, and there was a guy called Chris Thorpe, who's just a phenomenal theatre maker, and they were like, write a bit of dialogue. I was like, I'd write a dialogue with who's just gonna be me on stage. What do you mean, dialogue? No, what would happen if this was rather than you telling this story? What would happen if we were seeing the scene? So I'd write a bit of dialogue and some of it I liked and some of it I hated. And they were like, don't think about what it's gonna be. When we meet next week, bring me five pages of the conversation between Grimeboy and his best friend. Bring me five pages of the conversation between Grimeboy and his producer, bring me five pages of the conversation between Grimeboy and the guy who hates them most in the world. And it started to take shape as this story. There's so much more of Grimeboy that was written will be seen because I'm just writing it and going and don't like it, or layer on with the director, the director's going, is this pushing the story forward, or is it just a nice thing to watch? We were up there for 75 minutes. If we don't push the story forward, it doesn't have any place in it. And it's like the difference between writing a TV series and writing a film. You got an hour and a half compared to you've got 10 episodes or writing a poem where I might write their two-minute poem, you know, so it's that different levels of what's relevant and what's significant to the story. And then we came to this play, and something that's really funny is when you say something and everything changes, but somehow someone held on to something you said before. So I remember when people were telling me to write dialogue and stuff, I say it's not there's no dialogue, it's Casey Bailey on stage, Grindboy. And the director thought I wanted to act in the play. So when we'd written it as a play now, she's like, Are you committed to the idea of playing Grime Boy? I said, What do you mean? Do you feel like that's what you want to do? And she's I'm thinking about your time commitment, she's being very diplomatic. And I was like, Oh no, I think we need to get an actor. She goes, Dang, God, how does that feel? Um, and it was like because the wires had got crossed, and over time everyone was saying, But he wants to be in it, he wants to be in it, he wants to be in it, in the background. But that was based on something I said before when I didn't think it was going to be a play at all. When you thought it was gonna be a play, I didn't want to be in the play. I wanted to beat Casey Bailey in the Casey Bailey show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And so she was like, Oh, yeah, thank God for that. And that director, Maddy, is really she set me down an amazing path of collaboration because as a poet and as a rapper, I often go into a little room on my own, I come up with what I come up with, and then I bring you out. And sometimes I'll seek guidance, sometimes I won't. Even though I seek guidance, if you ask one person what they think of your poem, whether they say, not in a not to be unfair around people who give you feedback or critique, whether they say long term essentially doesn't matter to them. When you're talking to the director of your play, this play is written by Casey Bailey, directed by Madeline Cluget at the Birmingham Record. If the play's not good, that is not good for her. This is your play. When the eyes of anyone who's come to see this play from a perspective, oh, it's directed by Maddy, this is your play. So if it's not good, that's representative, yeah. So when she's saying to me, I don't think this tells us, she can't say to me, Oh yeah, Casey's great. If she thinks it's not great because it's her play, it's my play, it's her play, it's everyone's play who's involved. So she will be so honest and say the things that I wrote, so there's a whole like monologue that I wrote that ended up in one of my poetry books. And because we spoke about it, and she was like, I really don't want you to get rid of this writing. I think it's really good. I don't think we have four minutes in the play for this. It's not moving the play, it's not helping the play. But yeah, there were those moments where she would just say, and we started, and she was very subtle because you don't know what people are like, and everyone's got egos, and probably used to deal with people like that's how it should be or whatever. And she'd be like, and she'd be like, Are you like, how confident are you with this or whatever? And I'd be like, Mary Time, what do you think? And there were like periods where she might say like this, and it you realize yourself what's important and what you're really happy with when someone says, I don't know about this scene, and I go, cut it. And then another time she'll say, I don't know about this sentence, and I'd be like, That sentence has to stay. And like, you could cut this much, and you could cut this much, but this bit here that has to stay, and that sometimes she'll go, she'd really push and go, Yeah, but it's confusing. If I was in the audience, I'd think you're saying this, but it's not what you're trying to say. Right. And I'd be like, I get you, but this has this is what has to be said. Because if I was in the audience, I would need to hear that. And it and it's that push and pull of what does it mean for the whole audience? What does it mean for one person in the audience? Are you willing to say something that will offend the person who this story is meant to serve the most to help everyone understand, or are you willing to say something that will offend all of them to make sure she feels seen right there on the front? And it's that whole thing. But that was it, it was such a great experience for me. And I always say, as much as I love Grimeboy, and as much as anybody who knows me and knows my story can see that Grimeboy is erupted out of my chest. It's our play. There's Maddie who worked on the play, there's my guy Corey Weeks, who worked on the play, who he ended up being in the play, but we would be in rehearsal. When you're writing loads, you can lose sight of nuance sometimes, and it'd say, bro, no one would say that. And you go back through and be like, and no, I don't know why I wrote. And it's 30-year-old Casey misinterpreting 15-year-old Casey's understanding, and you need someone to look at it and go, Yeah, you need someone to look at it and go, Would a 15-year-old Casey actually say that? Yeah, and then you've got like Kieran Hamilton Amos who did the movement, and then up starring his grind boy, my guy Orden Allen, who did all the music, all the sound of the play, soundscape of the play. So what you then see on stage, the writing is mine, but the way that story comes to life is all about the movement that Kieran came on. The questions that Corey has the direction from Maddy to say, actually, when you say that, there are lines that I wrote that I thought would be funny, and she'd be like, try it like this, and it's totally not funny, and you watch it and go, that actually communicates what I wanted to communicate. And maybe I'm playing it off as funny because as a 15-year-old, that might have been how I played it off, but it wouldn't have been how I felt. That's how I would have felt. That's what needs to be said. Wow. And it was just a blessing, real blessing.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:58

That's not your only venture into theatre, is it? You've done another play called Please Do Not Touch, and that and Grindboy, am I right in thinking that they're both going out on tour?

SPEAKER_01 1:43:07

That's the plan, yeah. We're finalising details, but yeah, please do not touch was we went on at the Belgrade September 2024. I was in the thick of working on them both quite side by side, and then Grimeboy became the focus, and then Please Do Not Touch got some funding and came back into like after Grimeboy was had finished its runs. We really locked in on Please Do Not Touch. And what is Please Do Not Touch about? So there's a whole journey of Please Do Not Touch because Please Do Not Touch is a poetry collection that I wrote. It came out in 2021, and it deals with the idea that if you go to a like a heritage house, a museum, an art gallery, you're gonna have this sign that says please do not touch. And almost always it's on a thing that was taken from China, India. Going back to what we were saying in Nigeria, yeah, holding Andes. Yeah, and it's the idea of like, how dare you tell me not to touch this when you shouldn't have touched it in the first place? And that the hypocrisy that's tied up in that please do not touch. And so the collection deals with that. And the play started off as an adaptation of the collection, but it sits very separately to it now. Is about a boy who is in jail. He has been into a heritage house and taken an Afro cone, which led to a problem, which led to him being in jail. Yeah, it looks at the kind of parallels between the systems of colonialism and how power is used to hold some people down and lift some people up and fuel some people's lives while sucking everything out of somebody else's, and then what that looks like for a boy in jail in a system which is again made to oppress, in many cases, still reflects an unfair society that we live in. And as well as those two things sit in parallel to each other, also like the vertical line that runs between who are the people who are living in poverty and who end up in the jaws of criminality and being viewed this way, and who are the people who never have those problems because of a wealth that was originally inherited from this system of take from everywhere. So the people where you're from got everything took from them, and the people where you're from took everything, and now you're still struggling with poverty in this system because that's what happened. And so the jail system in the play is meant to represent the broader systems of inequality that we experience while this boy is appealing whether he should be in jail or not, and and it's his journey and his growth and his understanding around what that means, what he what it means to be him, but also what this whole conversation means. Another poignant topic, then. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. And they're both going out on tour this year. Yeah, so 2026, a little bit of like funding and final details pending. There will be a please do not touch tour in the spring and a grind boy tour in the autumn. So please do not touch will. We'll look to start its run of the Birmingham Hippodrome, which I'm really excited about. I love the hippodrome, and then take itself off around the pantry. And Grime Boy will start its run with a week at the Birmingham, which for me, thinking about the Poetic Theatre Makers programme and where my journey into theatre started with Maddy, who is the director, who I feel like booting open these doors of what theatre could be for me. I'm really excited about that starting there, and then again going off and coming to a theatre near you, wherever you are.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:28

But you're also back to music again now. Um indeed. Which is quite a nice return, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:46:34

Yeah, and I and it's weird because I never really stopped make making music. And I was talking to a friend of mine who's a rapper, but he said he was going through his Spotify and my Spotify and looking at our releases, and he says he always thinks of me as not releasing and thinks of himself as quite active. But when he went back through the releases, we've probably released a similar amount. And he said he thinks the difference is because I do all this other stuff. If I do a song and then in between that song and the next song, there are three poems a play and whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:01

Yeah, it's like poetry festival in Hay or wherever.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:04

Right, yeah, it's it feels like a sidebar, like a little side note.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:08

Would you consider yourself a poet that that does music, or would you consider yourself a musician?

SPEAKER_01 1:47:15

I think if I had to pick one, I'd probably say a poet who does music, although I like it the least, because I think I love music, I have a real passion for music, and I often think other things that I do detract from that conversation, I guess. If people talk about rappers, they don't talk about me. But if you say to somebody in that same conversation, oh do you think that person's as good as Casey Bailey, they'll probably go, Oh yeah, no, Casey's up there. But I don't naturally pop into that conversation, and I think that is in part because I've done so many different things, like I detach myself from a lot of those, whereas that doesn't happen with poetry because people see me as a poet. But I hate the idea of a musician who does poetry, and of course, everything that I do is driven by the words anyway. So even as a lyricist, I'm a poet, I am writing that. And uh there's a poet called Adcore, who I went on a like a retreat with, and he said to me, I was speaking to him about how I write music and how I write poetry because they're very different. I don't write things down when I write songs, I just come up with them. Interesting. Um and he was challenging me to really try to write a lyric with the exact same approach I would use to write a poem. And the lyric that I came up with was very, very different to a lyrical number, I was very happy with it, but it felt different, it felt weird. So yeah, I do think that I bring all of the stuff that I've learned about poetry, about writing, about storytelling, about expression, that I've only really delved into because of poetry that always comes back into the music and makes the music ritual for it. So I guess about to take on, I take poet who does music. But I guess we are a product of all the inputs that we take in. And it's a funny thing about creativity because I guess the same thing happens with theatre making. People say to me, Do you think of yourself as a poet who writes theatre? But no one says to me, Do you think of yourself as a poet who teaches? Do you think of yourself as a teacher who writes poetry? Because we draw those lines. That's one thing, and this is creativity. But once you step into the realm of creativity, is do you think of yourself as a videographer who takes photos? Or do you think of yourself as a painter who does sculpture? Like there's something about the label, isn't that?

SPEAKER_02 1:49:24

People want to well, we we we want to be able to package it that way, yeah. As long as we know what box, they're a photographer, they're a poet, they're a musician.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:34

Which is why my song viral, they're asking me what's my specialty, but I find the box detrimental. Bruce Lee said flow like water. So I'm in and out of the vessel.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:44

Brilliant. Yeah. Okay. One more question, I think, because we've spoken about a lot. With the result of all your inputs, all your experiences up to now, what would you say to a 15-year-old you?

SPEAKER_01 1:49:57

Yeah. See, I've this a kind of question I've been asked before, and I always say the same thing. I think what I often say is just keep doing what you're doing. I think the question is an interesting one because if I met the 15-year-old me, I would say keep doing everything because I firmly believe every step that we take has led us to where we are. I think if I met somebody who was 15 and was exactly like me and was in the exact same position I was in, but was not me, I would have a lot to say to them. Because the reality is there are lots of elements of my life that are real fortune, absolute luck. For example, something we haven't really spoken about, and I very rarely speak about, is the girl who I who I met at college and followers university is my wife. She's the mother of my children, she's the most important person in my life. How long have you been together? Gosh, 20 years. Wow. Yeah. What's the secret to that? She's great and she's clearly very patient.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:52

Yeah. Yeah, let's give it all credit due to her. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:55

No, yeah, she's when I met her, when I was 16 years old and I met her, I was chasing her almost literally. And in many ways, I feel like I still am, which is great. Great. Because she's the person I want to spend my life with. And she and yeah, she puts up with me. I don't know. I got it's hard to I know what I see in her, it's hard to know what she sees in me. It's like cheesy, and people don't want to say it. I love her.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:15

Like, you know, like beyond that, when you've got a partner in your life, a friend in your life, uh family member, tell that person you love them, tell them how much they inspire you, tell them how thankful you are for all that.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:28

100% you've got it. Uh and so if I'd have gone to a different college and I never met that girl, lots of the decisions I made that changed my life were like but genuinely is like I was doing things and I tell them, is this fair on her that I'm gonna go out and put myself into problem and bother? When I got stabbed, my wife was on my girlfriend was on holiday, and I never told her. And she came back and I told her, and I could to me, it's gonna sound like a weird thing to say, but to me, it was like people do get stabbed, so I wasn't like it was bad, obviously it's horrendous, but it wasn't like oh, it was like it's Mina, you know what I mean? It's happened to Mina. But for her, it was like Yeah, mind blowing. What do you mean? And so I think if I'd have told her at the time that guy that I know got stabbed, it would have been more impactful for her than for me, me getting stabbed, at least outwardly, because as I said, it sent my world into a bit of a spiral, but I didn't feel that at the time, it just evolved. So I think those moments, those choices of change were because I knew that there was someone in my life who I wanted to do better with and do better for. Be a better. There's also moments in my life where literally there are very small margins between life and death. And so I couldn't, with any good conscience, say to a 15-year-old in that situation, just keep doing what Casey did, because Casey is some dumb stuff. I would say focus on the things that bring you joy, that bring you genuine joy. I would say, as we often do at that kind of age, to young people who don't believe us, lots of the people who are around you now won't be around you forever. And that doesn't mean they're bad or you're good or anything like that. It's just a natural channel of life. I would say something that my dad has said to me since I was a kid, and it infuriates me how he's been about it. Lots of the stuff you believe now you won't believe in five years' time. So whilst it's okay to believe it, some of the decisions that you make, you don't have to make very permanent decisions on quite flexible thoughts.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:27

Strong beliefs loosely held. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because someone will always come along and go, Oh, yeah, but you haven't thought about this. And we say this a lot on the podcast. We all know enough to know why we're right, but not enough most of the time to know why we're wrong. 100%, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 1:53:40

And there are some things that are quite pointedly right or wrong, or they feel like they are, and that's okay, and you can speak on them and you can act on them. But there are points in my life where I think I would have genuinely risked dying for things that today are not only do I not feel like that about some of the things I find them repugnant now. I'm infuriated by them, and I feel more likely to die to stop them than I would to continue them. And but at the time, that's where I was at. And so that you're a different man than now, you've got a family, three chosen your priorities. And that's what you'd have to say to 15-year-old Casey is you're not gonna be 15-year-old Casey forever. Yeah, so it's lots of the freedom that comes with being a kid changes to responsibility, but that's not a negative thing. Yeah, I get it.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:27

It's difficult. You if you hadn't lived your story, you wouldn't be where you were. I wouldn't be you can't tell 15-year-old Casey, don't do that, because then you potentially butterfly effect wouldn't be where you are. But I understand what you're saying. A 15-year-old who is perhaps in that similar situation.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:41

I would tell them read your books. Yeah, stay in your house.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:45

Stay out of trouble. Stay in your house and read your books, to which is my advice to 36-year-old, 37-year-old case, stay in your house and read your books. It's safer that way, right? So, yeah, I think a good question, isn't it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:58

I think we've spoken about a lot there, mate. I'd agree. Thank you again for being on the podcast. We do have a bit of a closing tradition where I asked the guest to give us a quote that has somehow sits with them, resonates, or inspires you, but also someone else in your network that you think could be a great guest to come and share their story on the Creative Noel Land podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:19

I think the quote for me is the one that I said that Leon shared with me, which is that idea that the writer, or we'll call it the creative, who creates purely for themselves has no audience, and the writer who writes only for their audience loses himself. And it's that balance that we should be trying to find.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:39

And on a podcast where creativity is at the crux of it, I think a lot of people need to find that balance for themselves.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:45

Yeah, I think so. And we're always struggling for it, and sometimes being self-service and some self-serving, and sometimes being too audience-serving, and about putting that there. Who do I think would be good to be on the podcast? I think there is an artistic director of the Belgrade Theatre, is a man called Corey Campbell. He's a good friend of mine, but his perspective and his approach to his work and to his life are to me both like inspiring, really challenging, really thought-provoking. So he's the kind of person who, when he speaks, I try to listen. And so I think people would would benefit from hearing.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:22

Well, that'd be amazing, as what we're trying to do with the Creative Noel on podcast is just inspire people to do the stuff that inspires them. And Casey, you are I've wrote down writer, educator, performer, but I've also written down inspirer. So thank you for all the work you're doing, inspiring the young people coming up. We appreciate you being on the podcast. Appreciate you having me. Thank you for being part of the crew. Amazing, thank you. Thanks for listening to the Creative Noeland Podcast. If you found anything in this episode useful or inspiring, please consider subscribing or sharing it with a friend. You can also help the podcast by clicking the support the show link in the show notes or by grabbing yourself something from the Creative Noeland shop. And here's the bonus when you join the community through our website, you'll get a special discount code that gives you free shipping on all orders. So, before you buy anything, be sure to join the community. Every bit of support helps us keep sharing these inspiring stories. So, thanks again for listening, and until next time, explore, inspire, and create.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:34

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question. What do I decide?