...after receiving their kidnapperās ransom...

Mass-Alien-Abduction - a concept which materialises as you walk through the city centre of Liverpool in the early evening hours. The centre: a desolate shopping mall - no humanoids in sight.

Before you can formulate any thoughts on the infrastructure of this industrial harbour monument of a city you suddenly stumble of the empty shopping arenas. You reach the first belt around the centre; barricaded red brick estates of former industrial splendour. If you find yourself on Duke Street make sure it is the last Wednesday of the month. If that's the case, you have to get off the street and into The Pit, 122 Duke Street. Attention: Alien Abduction.

Poets Get Paid is performance / sound / rhythm - a free fall between event and gig. For this one day of each month inside The Pit the walls are glowing. The black, decaying backdrops of this ship are covered with multi-tasking DJs and technicians. While you are adjusting to the low gravity field, tune into the subsonic speech acts of the truly comfortable audience, you will rest in physical proximity to "...an ancestral shrine in memory of the living spirit of a deceased poet". Next door the speakers transmit the 'City Zen Poet Band Radio' narrowcast and the willingly abducted start gathering around the stage.

Freshly landed, the group Imaginary Selves are gradually building up rhythm and speed, tuning into the pulse of the spoken word. Backed up with live DJs, Levi Tafari, Muhammad Khalil Eugene Lange, Franciso Carrasco and Martin Daws take their time to make sure things will be just right. The fine tuning of this "Grand Allegorical Polyphony" is conducted by Wes Wilkay on flute. Towards the end of a long mesmerising evening Rapper TL from Liverpool's Order & Chaos joins in to tie up the loose ends which have been left unsolved in the suggestive paths of a truly specific score.

The series of events materialised naturally: "Poets Get Paid began with a poem and now its a club", explains Martin Daws, who organises the events (when off-stage). "It's all about the lyrics. Our project is to take poetry off the page and pump it through the speakers. This is the way things seem to be going: bringing literature and music together as a lyrical force." The highly politicised poems merge casually with the beats and make a clear statement towards the aged and institutionalised 'Slam Poetry' readings. On the 27th of May Rapper TL will pick up the microphone where he dropped it, being one of the core performers of the event.

The gig is very much rooted within the location, the city, the culture. Turning the tables of the underground from outer space, Poets Get Paid circulate in a low orbit at high speed. But the periphery remains the centre of desire and we can easily avoid the cultural vacuum of the shopping mall culture of Liverpool today.

On the 17th of June, Liverpool's Somali community will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush. This ship brought over 600 men and women from the Caribbean into Merseyside. It is clear what will be celebrated, the culture which came with and after the Windrush ö fundamentally unique, in the UK and in Liverpool. Recontextualised, this abduction has borne a new culture with multifaceted references, mutated authenticities and powerful realities.

For info on Poets Get Paid, contact Martin Daws' pager: 01426 228759 or e-mail: martinjdaws@hotmail.com

Micz Flor [micz@yourserver.co.uk]