Episode 26 — World Poetry Day Special! Robin Ince, conch baths and BRIAN BLESSED (kind of)
World Poetry Day gets gloriously noisy. Comedian and author Robin Ince joins Steve for poems, playful sonic experiments and a live dip into conch‑bath territory (conch trumpets included). We spiral from Wilton’s and bookshops to big voices and bigger physics — yes, BRIAN BLESSED (kind of) and Brian Cox get cameos.
What we cover
Poetry that wants to be heard — Robin reads, riffs and argues for poems as living performance — not just ink on a page.
Conch baths & sonic curiosity — What happens when you treat a room like a resonant body? Shells, drones and shared listening (conch instruments).
Stages & spaces — From bookshops to Wilton’s Music Hall, how venues shape words, laughter and the weird, good hush between them.
Big voices, bigger cosmos — A playful detour past Brian Blessed (kind of) and a nod to Brian Cox — how science talk and stagecraft cross‑pollinate.
Further reading & links
Support: Extras and behind‑the‑scenes live clips are on Patreon. Join the mailing list for upcoming live shows and podcast news.
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability. No wording changes have been made.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, composer and performer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways.Hello, everyone, how are you doing? I know, back in your podcast feed, more often than promised. How often does that happen?It's normally the other way around, isn't it? But I am dropping a very special, quick mini episode, sub-episode today, because it is World Poetry Day, and I realized that I have some poetry stuff in the archive that I thought might be suitable for today. And I'm not sure where I will put it on the podcast feed if I don't run it today, so here we are.And that's because I have the brilliant Robin Ince recorded. We recorded a show at Wilton's Music Hall back in November, and Robin was one of the guests there. And as well as doing some other bits and talking about music quite a lot, Robin also did some of his brilliant poetry.He and I have been working on doing some stuff together with it, writing some music to it, and doing some performances, hopefully more later this year. But meanwhile, I thought it would be a good chance to play out some stuff that's not going to get used in the regular feed otherwise. So Robin is kind of a polymath, really.He's a fantastic comedian, that's how I know him, first of all, but also an amazing science communicator, of course. He talks here about some of his work with Brian Cox and so many other brilliant scientists that he's worked with over the years, and he's done so much to transform many people's understanding of science and does it with such a brilliant light touch and all the rest of it. But today he's doing poetry, so I thought it would be a fun opportunity to play some stuff.So it's got a few of Robin's poems that I'm going to play out from the Wilton show. And the first one, after the first one, I also am going to play a little excerpt of the conch bath that he talks about, because he wrote a poem inspired by watching me at a ALSO Festival back in last July, July 2024. And so I thought I would play a little excerpt of that set after that first poem.And then there's a few more poems, and the last one ends with a bit of music as well underneath Robin's poem. So I'm not going to beat around the bush too much more, other than to say that this whole, firstly, the whole conch bath set that you can hear an excerpt of here is available on my YouTube or will be available very shortly on my YouTube channel. So if you like this little taster of the weird and wonderful sound of conch process through some cutting edge electronics, then you can go and check that out.And I've got some more gigs coming up, believe it or not, doing conch stuff. So yeah, more about that soon. And also, once again, this is a video episode again today.From now on, as I mentioned before, we're going to be doing video episodes. Still, of course, audio first. So if you're just listening, that's fine.But you can also see Robin performing at Wilton's. You can see me performing on that floating stage in the Lake ALSO Festival. And you can see me now if you're watching the video in my studio at the bottom of the garden.Yes, so do check out the video feed. As always, there is lots more on my Patreon and on my mailing list. So if you go to originofthepieces.com, you can find links to both of those.On my Patreon is also a special discount offer code for my Wilton show coming up in April, the 30th, 2025, so do head over there and sign up. I think even for free, if you sign up for Patreon for free, you can still get that offer code. So yeah, that would be great to have your support.Thanks so much and I'm going to hand over to Robin and let Robin play the episode out as well. I'll be back soon. The evolution is very well underway and I'm really excited about what's to come when we relaunch later in April.So anyway, meanwhile, I might be dropping the odd bits and bobs here like this. So stay tuned for that and on my social media and all that. Anyway, over to Robin Ince back in November in Wilton's Music Hall.Start straight off with, I started writing poet. Well, I've done a couple of poems a few years ago, which I did when I was touring with Brian Cox. And then in May, I just started writing poetry and I couldn't stop.And so I write like kind of five or six a day. And this is one that I've only ever performed live once before because it is about Steve. And I was at the, that's not because it's about, sorry, I made that sound bad.Like I did it and everyone went, not a poem about Steve, do one about Jane Goodall. I've got one of those as well. So what happened was we were doing the ALSO Festival, beautiful festival near Leamington Spa.And I wrote a poem about every single thing that I saw. And this is the poem that I wrote about Steve doing one of his conch baths right by this fantastic lake and the woods as well. Being specky faced and piggy shaped, a conch bath can seem like a threat, imminent death for the odd boy.Proudest moment ever, I played Leeds Arena, and it was 7,000 people, and someone went backstage, and backstage at Leeds Arena has one great big mistake, which is it has the one button that says reset Wi-Fi, and next to it has a button that says turn the arena off. And someone went to reset the Wi-Fi while I was on stage, and the whole stage just went black, and everything disappeared, and there was no amplification, and the stage manager came up and said, Robin, you can come off stage, should we get it repaired? I went, no!I want to see if they can hear me at the back.And so I told this story about when Brian Cox and I first met Brian Blessed, and, do you two ever go mountaineering? You should, you must, but never camp below the French. Dirty bastards.And the next day I was in Farsley, and a woman came out of Tesco's Metro and saw me and went, hello, we were in the back row. Hello, we heard you. So anyway, the...This is a poem that I wrote in anger. Not many of them are really, some of them are in anger. I read the most amazing book by Lucia Osborne Crowley, all about the Jelaine Maxwell trial, and I was also thinking about Trump and all these things that are going on now, and in terms of the rise of, you know, misogyny and Andrew Taits and all of these other people.And that book, by the way, The Lasting Harm, I really recommend to everyone. And then sometimes when you mention things like this, people go, yeah, but come on, not all men. So this is a poem called Not All Men.Not all men, sure, but oh so many men. And as one, negligibly, some very male males may say, I cannot comprehend how so many abuses never end. The man whose legs spring open like misogynistic secateurs as he takes the train seat by your side, blurs the boundaries both ambivalent to your existence and yet the knee rub is persistent.Checking out the territory, a woman smiling at a stranger should not be something that leads to danger and yet friendliness is so often deformed into an offer. All that late night threat so often dismissed as just a joke or don't be so stupid, you're so woke. In Washington, a house awaits to open gates on a relentless predator.While previous presidents were pleased to cajole, fellatio and then post-priapism turned their flirtatious face into angry denial. That woman, that woman. A comment on a stranger's breast and all the rest should surely, surely, surely be confined into a past.But still, not yet. If we truly wish to be not all men, if we wish to prove Solanas wrong, then we will show that to be truly strong, a man won't stand in silence as his sisters fight alone.And this is one that I don't think I've, I think I've only ever read out aloud once in Your Shed. This was one that, this is on a similar subject. It's called Creation Envy.Who would envy a penis, a temperamental appendage, paranoid flesh, sighs obsessed, shriveling when least desired in the heat of the fire, no seat of power, a compass needle that so often leads to where you should not go. Is this a Vienna Couch distraction from the true envy, the envy of creation? You may build a bridge or a tower, a rocket or a barricade, but can you build a life?Can you hold within you two hearts beating for a moment? Can you contemplate holding such weight, such potential? Dismiss your dick, be connected to the fragile, drop the macho pose, the angry humour that comes from fear of dysfunction?Then maybe what we build will be less a brag and more of an embrace. Imagine, imagine for a moment another heart within you.Listen. Can you hear it? The wash and the waves of the embryo.Listen.This is a poem that I originally wrote when Timbuk Taylor died. I was very lucky. I worked with Timbuk Taylor from the Gooders on a few occasions, and I worked with him.It would have been probably his penultimate gig, and then COVID began, and then Tim died. And it reminded me of how lucky I've been that I've worked with a lot of people who really changed my life and made my life better when I was both a child and an adult. And the older I get, the more I try not to hold back, saying, oh, by the way, I love your work.And so this is just thinking about him and Neil Linneas and my friend Gina and various others. Let me celebrate you now as you stand before me. Well, you can still hear the cheer.Don't let me wait until you're gone to be fond. Don't let fear of embarrassment stifle my delight. How the worry of impending shame leads us to talk about love only when there can be no response.We fumble and blush when praised or when praising, waiting to be caught out, rejected. I love their mind, I love their voice, I love them, past tense. It's hard not to fear the present.It's hard to be present. It's hard not to bend under a cynic stare, but keep the volume of things unsaid, the regrets of silence as thin as they can be. Let them take up little space on the shelf in your head.Don't be afraid of joy. Don't hide your love for so long that it turns to ash. And all of this, I said in my head as you walked by, but not anymore, not anymore, I love the bones of you.