World slam poetry champion Harry Baker is Unashamed on his latest tour

Since rising to the top of the UK’s rap battle scene as he has becoming a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2’s Pause For Thought, featured on The Russell Howard Hour as part of the UK’s leading comedy-rap-jazz duo Harry and Chris, and more recently appeared on the Bafta-winning Sky TV show Life and Rhymes alongside Benjamin Zephaniah.

Harry is now out on tour with his latest show, Unashamed, which coincides with the release of his second collection of poetry, also called Unashamed, featuring poems from this and Harry’s previous show I am 10,000, which celebrated the crossover of maths and poetry.

Harry took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe last summer, and has been relishing the opportunity to get back in front of a live audience. Following a year of trying to do things online, and then ‘the weird in-between of last year, where you could be back in these spaces, but people were wearing masks so you couldn't see if they were enjoying themselves’, the current tour has been more ‘normal.’

Looking back on those first shows post-lockdown, he says: ‘There was something, and it was better than nothing, but without that base level of a group, collective experience it's hard to have that same connection.

‘Whatever it was, I was going to be grateful to be out there, but doing this show where it feels like such a celebration of both the lightness and the silliness we can have as humans, but also the more... honest, vulnerable side of how tough things have been. To be able to hold all of that in a space and to share it with people and have them respond, just feels so incredible.’

And of course, Covid has had an effect on the kind of material Harry’s been writing. ‘During that time I wrote stuff that felt a lot more reflective. To write stuff that you can just put out there and let it hang, that felt more appropriate.

‘Now being back, I love that it's a mix of the two – there's a lot of audience interaction and fun silly stuff, that's a genuine celebration of being in that space, but having written stuff that feels a bit heavier during that time, it's really nice to be able to acknowledge that and share that, and not just ignore what we've all been through.’

He adds with a laugh: ‘My dream scenario is to make people laugh for most of it, and then have a little cry. It's such a cathartic thing, I really appreciate poetry for that, that you can celebrate this whole range of emotions.’

While Baker’s work is often funny, he is careful to draw a line between stand-up and poetry.

‘When I went up to the Fringe, I've done stuff under stand-up comedy before, and there is still plenty of that in there, but I wanted to put it under spoken word so I can share these heavier moments and not feel like I had to apologise for them or wrap it up necessarily in the same polished way, but to celebrate that whole range of emotion.

‘There will always be elements of both in what I do, whether you call it comedy or spoken word, it's either surprisingly funny or surprisingly poignant. And what I love is that people are willing to come through the door – they can have that whole mix of it.’

As a youngster growing up in west London, hip-hop was Harry’s gateway into poetry, but as a self-confessed nerd, his subject matter was a million miles from the gangster-rap staples.

‘When I started out, working with language and lyrics and especially with rhythm and rhyme, I listened to loads of hip-hop and rap stuff and would write things that would work as lyrics, but would then it was by going to poetry open mic nights and performing them without music, that it felt like there was space for the audience to take in all of the wordplay, and also as a teenager, I wasn't a great rapper! It was better doing it as poetry, and that was partly down to my level of experience and confidence.

‘When I started performing poems I realised I could put my whole self into it, so as well as the clever wordplay and technicality of language I could also put in my sense of humour, and my philosophical beliefs on the world, and there was space for all of that. You can be fast and impressive, but you can also slow down.’

However, music remains part of what he does, and not just in his work as musical comedy duo Harry and Chris, with guitarist Chris Read. ‘That’s still going, and that's a natural place for funnier ideas, or stuff that has two people you can bounce off. There's a moment where we were doing more of that, and anything funny would get channeled to that, and I was left with the poems, which were the more heavy stuff.

‘What I love about this new show is that it's both of those things. It's partly just the practicality of living in different places in lockdown, we weren't able to do as much stuff together, but I have loved the chance to put some of that stuff back in to my solo show as well.’

Harry first came to national and international prominence after being crowned World Poetry Slam Champion. The slam poetry movement began in the US in the 1980s as a form of competitive spoken word ‘battles’.

‘It started out as a way of purely making it more exciting for the audience, so people would take it in turns to perform a poem, then the audience would vote for their favourite. There were no rules for what it had to be about, or what style it had to be in – you just had a three minute time limit. That meant there's an emphasis on connecting with people in the room, so a lot of people did that by either being funny or emotional or politically hard-hitting.

‘It started almost as an alternative to this idea that poetry only existed in journals that you could only understand if you'd studied for years.

‘There were no rules, but the stuff that tended to do well and what excited me, was the stuff that could either make you laugh or cry – it would connect with you there and then. And I loved that the audience was always the judge – on any two nights it would go differently.’

It is that perception of poetry as something confined to dusty old tomes you were forced to study at school, which Harry is trying to change.

‘I still get people coming to my show saying afterwards: “I didn't think I liked poetry, but I really enjoyed that!” It's partly to do with people's experiences of poetry. I'm lucky, I get to go into schools and perform and show an alternative. But if you've only experienced one particular type of poetry, it's easy to believe that's all there is. For me, having lived in it and dedicated my life to it, I know that there's loads out there and I believe that there's something for everyone. But if you're not necessarily exposed to it in that way, or you're only exposed to it because you have to study it for an exam, that's not a fun way to come across anything.’

He also goes into schools to perform and deliver workshops.

‘I love sharing my work and showing teenagers that it's something they can do, running workshops and giving them a chance to be creative and write their own stuff that isn't going to be marked or doesn't feel highly pressured.

‘More recently I've also started going into primary schools as well, and that's just really fun. They're happy to enjoy it and join in. When you're performing to a bunch of 15-year-olds at 9am, no matter how much they're enjoying it, they're not going to show it on their faces,’ he chuckles. ‘As a performer it became a good way to learn how to perform without getting much response! Afterwards they'd tell their teacher they enjoyed it, and their teacher would tell me later that by their standards that was euphoric.’

At university Harry studied maths and considered poetry something he did ‘for fun on the side.’

‘Like so many people, I told myself it was a separate thing – I liked the maths because of the satisfaction of the definite answers and I liked the poetry because it felt like an escape from that.’

While many people with an interest in either maths or poetry sit firmly on one side or the other, Harry delighted in their common elements: ‘They're both about patterns and connection, and trying to make sense of the world. When I'm writing a poem or lyrics and it slots together, that feels like you've solved some kind of equation you didn't know existed.

‘Where it comes in particularly is in terms of the technicality and the wordplay, that feels really intricate, and that attention to detail can be quite a mathematical thing. It's not as simple as there being a formula for how you write, but in both maths and poetry what I think is lost on a lot of people is that you have to have a sense of playfulness. If you're trying to figure out a problem, you have to give yourself permission to muck around and see what happens.

‘In the show, even among the weightier stuff, it's just reminding myself and other people that you've got to have sense that of playfulness and wonder. That's what I loved about maths early on – when it clicks, when it makes sense, it genuinely felt exciting.’

One thing he notes both poetry and maths have in common though, ‘is that people say: “I didn't think that was for me.” Maybe I've just found a way to alienate even more people!

‘The sweet spot is people who like both, but if people like one or the other, that's often enough to be curious. And if people don't like either and come along and still enjoy the show, then that's a win.’

Harry Baker performs Unashamed in two shows at Komedia in Brighton on Thursday, January 19, doors at 5.30pm and 8pm. Go to komedia.co.uk.