TRAMWAY, GLASGOW (FOR GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL 2026) 

I PLIED MY POESY

June 13th 2026.

 

I Plied My Poesy was a live event which closed a two-day screening of Defiling Rain in Tramway’s T1 theatre. On stage were Richy Carey on bass guitar, Liam Chapman on drums and percussion, Ross Taylor on keys, and Jamie Crewe on vocals and speech. A table by Jamie's side supported three of their sketchbooks, spanning three years of work: a camera up in the rafters of the theatre was trained on these, and its live feed was projected onto a large screen behind the band.

Modelled loosely after Lena Horne’s Broadway revue The Lady and Her Music (1981), this event wove together performances of songs from Defiling Rain and discussion of its themes, inspirations, struggles, and mysteries. The Lady and Her Music flows from anecdote to song in a chronological portrait of Lena Horne’s career: I Plied My Poesy moved in fits and starts, with hanging endings and non sequiturs. The event showed Jamie's first notes on the idea of Defiling Rain (bracketed on the page by quotes from Bruce Boone and Robert Glück’s La Fontaine (1981), and two milkmaids collaged from the packaging of “Les Petites Fermieres” fontana cheese) before launching into a song about a bird with an oversized head it can’t support. Jamie pointed to a drawing of Mock Beggar’s Mansion, a rock formation located near her hometown in the Peak District, while explaining how both its name and its form illuminated the making of Defiling Rain (silhouetted against the sunset, it could be mistaken for a grand hall, emptied of relevence, infused with a politic), before Ross and Jamie played a bruised song about a rooster cuckolded by a gemstone.

The event ended with a song about a mouse who moves into a ruined city to live a life of violence. The meat of the song is done in fifteen seconds, but it has a coda in which the mouse sings “I am lost” over and over again, atop two poignant chords. For this performance, the coda was extended: the band improvised around this theme, and Jamie allowed their voice to splinter, leap, scream, and decompose. Ross left the stage, abandoning his keyboard, and soon Richy did the same, leaving Liam’s drums and Jamie delicate head-voice sputterings. Jamie left the stage, still singing, and Liam’s soft rhythm played across the emptied stage.

I Plied My Poesy takes its title from a recurring phrase in the “fox fables” of Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan (a 13th century French Jewish philosopher, grammarian and fable-writer). Before launching into morals in verse, Berechiah declares “I plied my poesy”; his fables, which elsewhere he compares to enriching herbs and spices, are offered as charming lessons. Both Defiling Rain and this event explore the matter of fables when lessons are neutered, arrested, or removed. As such, Jamie's poesy offers gaps, emptiness, and bewilderment. Within this is the protean ambiguity of experience: speechless horror, unincorporated desire, and unprayed-for hope.

 

A link to view a recording of I Plied My Poesy, filmed and edited by Jen Martin, is available on request.