User Profile

This Livejournal is presently inactive, and is likely to remain so unless I can think of a really good reason to start documenting everything I do again. The fun has worn off for now. But you can now find me at the following places:

http://www.myspace.com/davebryantpoetry (even has a regularly updated blog)
http://www.left-and-to-the-back.blogspot.com (music blog focussing on weird curios and lost gems)

“About me”? What about me?

The problem with filling in these descriptive passages is that you inevitably either end up sounding ridiculously self-important, overly self-deprecating, or an utter whacky idiot, therefore I’ll try to be as concise and bland as I can.

I was born in Ilford in 1973, being the fourth and youngest sprog in my family. I had to vocally compete for attention with my elder brothers (who are identical twins) and my sister in a tiny prefabricated council house in the area (“Are you trying to show off your ‘authentic’ roots here?” – a voice) which is probably why I don’t talk as much as I should in public and spend far too much time waffling away expressing my thoughts on paper. Or then again, maybe this has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Ask Freud.

In 1983 my parents moved to Southend, a shift I will hold against them for the rest of their lives, and I didn’t get released from that broken down seaside town – where Morrissey appropriately shot the video for “Everyday is Like Sunday” - until I went to university in Portsmouth in 93. That particular navy city seemed like such a thriving metropolis in comparison that for some reason I didn’t properly get around to moving to London until the beginning of 2000 (and even then, I almost considered Harrow instead).

Since then I’ve had a few interesting jobs in the media, but ultimately have become something of a serial administrator in recent years. Perhaps more importantly though, I just about qualify as being a published poet as a result of having some work produced in the “Company Of Poets” anthology in 2003, a book published to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Torriano Meeting House, one of the oldest performance poetry nights in London. I’m not holding my breath for another publisher to express an interest any time soon, however, least of all in the current climate. (UPDATE: This is actually incorrect, and I have since been published in a number of magazines and periodicals, and have more irons in the fire too.) I continue to write and do live readings around the capital, though.

I also went travelling round Australia, New Zealand and Canada in 2004 (there’s a travel journal of sorts here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/23daves) and got married to my Canadian partner Amanda on a beach in Fiji in January 2005. What next? Oh, I don’t know. Good things, hopefully. A confusing cocktail of good and bad things, more likely. The future is an open book, and I remain forever hopeful that the book in question isn’t “The Journal of the Plague Year”, and that I’m not sitting on one of the pages immediately prior to the first outbreak of some suspicious looking pox.

Oh, and I have no problem with being added to the friends list of strangers - you need not feel that you are intruding, nothing goes on this journal that I wouldn't be happy mentioning to someone face to face if I met them in a bar (at least, not unfiltered). So please don't feel the need to ask or lurk anonymously. God knows why you'd find my life interesting, but clearly a number of random people have so far... whatever gets you through the night, I suppose.

And... another place I can be found is on Audioscrobbler: http://www.last.fm/user/23Daves/

This week, it tells me I have mostly been listening to:



And if you really want to soundstalk me, here's the last ten tracks I listened to:

Friends (61):

Mutual Friends (49):

Also Friend of (2):