The Listening Zone

On 'Car Sales', one of the funniest and most successful pieces on Underground Station, Dunlop portrays a Jewish-American salesman who sounds something like Billy Crystal, anxious to sell a big gas-guzzling car but confronted by a customer who wants something small and economical. He tries to make the bigger cars seem more attractive by telling stories about them: a red 1957 Stingray "actually belonged to an animal trainer who lived in Rhode Island... The only time he drove it was to deliver a chimpanzee to a friend of his in LA, so that he could go around the world on a cruise...'. When questioned more closely about these stories, he has to invent wilder and wilder lies to sustain them. Why does the '57 Stingray only have 300 miles on the clock if it was used to drive a chimpanzee from Rhode Island to LA?

The wobbliness of these lies, the feeling that they are being made up on the spur of the moment and may be about to collapse into incoherence, is something Dunlop does particularly well.

What this recording demonstrates is that in the hands of someone like Dunlop, performance poetry can encompass a whole range of different styles, and crowd-pleasing entertainment is only one of them. Not all the material here is equally successful, but it displays an encouraging willingness to experiment, both in terms of writing techniques and of engaging with new media; and there are several pieces which deserve and repay close attention and repeated listening.

To read the full review by Edward Picot, founder of The Hyperliterature Exchange, see http://hyperex.co.uk/reviewmacdunlop.php.