On 05/11, at The Stables MK, Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires offered not so much a performance as a beautifully stitched tapestry of syllables and sound waves – poet and indie-pop band meeting in a perfect creative handshake. This wasn’t simply spoken word set to melody, nor music with a poet bolted on, it was a true collaboration, a conversation between verse and harmony, where each line and chord seemed written to anticipate the other. Their joint album Sounds Made by Humans came alive in full bloom: poetry and song not merely co-existing but orbiting each other, equal partners in a dance of wit, warmth, and wonder.

 

Bilston’s solo spoken-word interludes were masterclasses in comedic precision, his timing so sharp you could slice paper with it. Dry, outrageous, clever humour delivered with a gentle shrug, heartbreak smuggled inside punchlines, language treated at once as playground and cathedral. An incredible wordsmith, he teased meaning from mishearing, wrung tenderness from the absurd and made the everyday extraordinary with nothing but breath and vowels.

 

Then the full band stepped in, The Catenary Wires, guiding the poems into melody as though the music had always been waiting for them, quietly humming under the page margins. A riff of rock here, a blast of punk there, soft melancholy threaded through roaring fun. Songs rose and dipped like emotional topographies: sometimes reflective and delicate, sometimes bright, boisterous, and all gloriously toe-tapping, music to laugh to, cry to, dance to, or possibly all at once.

 

And at the centre of it all, Bilston himself: something of a reluctant rock star, if such a creature can exist. At ease but never exaggerated, joyful without winking at his own charm, playful without reaching for sole attention. He carried the stage the way some poets carry notebooks, lightly and curiously with open pockets for wonder.

 Offstage, he was warm, sincere, and quietly luminous, the sort of person you are grateful to discover is exactly as lovely to speak to as you hoped he would be.

 

A touch of audience participation wove a gentle thread of connection with a few backing vocals invited, a playful moment or two with those delightfully dubious shopping items, handled with twinkling humour rather than performance demands. Engaging, warm, and gently playful.

 

Personal highlights:

The eggcorn poem, a celebration of delicious linguistic wrongness.

Every Song on the Radio Reminds Me of You, bittersweet with a knowing smile.

She’d Dance, achingly tender, like holding your breath in the middle of a memory.

The funeral poem with options, hilariously pragmatic and completely deeply human.

 

This was no “bloke reading poems.” This was an artist sculpting language into feeling, a storyteller playing hopscotch between comedy and poignancy, prose and rhythm and rhyme stepping into the spotlight hand-in-hand. A performance that was unusual, unique, delightful and, quite simply, beautiful. 

Poetry and music in perfect alignment. And I, for one, couldn’t agree more.