Artwork which advertised SAMPO

It’s one of the year’s most revered and celebrated masterpieces of live poetry in the North East… and yet that’s exactly where it could stay.

That was the realisation recently facing published Teesside poets Bob Beagrie, 42, and Andy Willoughby, 44, when Arts Council England turned down funding for SAMPO: Heading Further North, boasting the vocals of both Beagrie and Willoughby and local band Gobbleracket, to be taken on a national tour.

SAMPO has already been performed at such local venues as Stockton’s Arc, Saltburn’s Profile Gallery and Teesside University, and the widespread enthusiastic reception of the piece has only strengthened the resolve of Beagrie and Willoughby to challenge the Arts Council’s hand.

Beagrie, a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University, revealed to Tside: “We have performed SAMPO across the North East, from Newcastle down to York – and each gig has received amazing responses from audiences. The most common has been ‘Amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it before!’

“We have had quite a lot of Arts Council funding over the years, but it is much harder to get at the moment. We were given a grant to research and write it, then to record it and run a pilot tour in the region.”

The poets’ hope of extracting the council’s funding rely on SAMPO’s successful nomination for Best Performance in the Newcastle Journal’s 2009 Culture Awards – with a Facebook event page recently set up to meet this end.

The Facebook page, entitled ‘SAMPO: Heading Further North with a nomination for Award’, encourages browsers to nominate the piece through the provided web link, http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/culture-awards-2008 — with the deadline date for nominations falling on 31 December 2009.

Beagrie asserts, “SAMPO is a truly unique piece of spoken word and music that needs attention. The only reason it hasn’t so far is because it has come out of Teesside, which is a periphery of a periphery.”

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