Mothers, lock up your sons, Dosh Luckwell’s Sex Poems are getting ready to seduce the world.
Spoken word is hitting new heights this month when Luckwell releases his debut CD, a narrative art jaunt that fuses a plethora of musical stylings with poetry. And what makes the release so darn sexy is Luckwell’s deep and delicious dulcet tones. His smooth baritone seduces the ear, ignites the loins and gets the blood thrumming.
‘For ease I use the term spoken word artist,’ Luckwell said when asked by OUTinPerth how he defines what he does.
‘On the album itself instead of singing I speak and each poem relates to a different sexual encounter with an erotic other. The music is really multi-genre so you’ve got some pop, some blues and funk and stuff like that.
‘Musically it’s really varied and the spoken word is the thing that gives it its continuous thread. I am wondering though if I now add musician to the list. I don’t really play an instrument but I’ve composed all this music for the bands to learn and stuff like that.
The album is an orgy of musical styles. Luckwell has brought together 14 West Australian musicians to add oomph to his already loaded lyrics: tracks like Wesley recount in dripping detail a late night tryst in nothing more than a parked car and tube socks.
‘I think Big Girl Porn Music is a bit of a highlight. That one and another song called Heterosexuality (Is No Good For Me), they’re the two hits I think, and they are the more upbeat ones.’
Big Girl Porn Music itself is of particular significance, with Luckwell stepping beyond his own voice to explore the magnitude of female sexuality and the eroticism of room service. Or should that be room servicing?
‘The idea with Big Girl Porn Music is that it is the only time I’ve played character that is not myself. I play Big Girl and I’m seducing the room service man over the phone, so there are a lot of sexual food puns and on the surface it’s a real dirty, funny spoken word piece.
‘But on deeper readings it relates to these neo-Freudian ideas of regression and wanting to go back to your mother and go back inside her womb because it’s safe and you don’t have to deal with the struggles of being a man in this big bad world. A lot of the poems have that duel reading, the easy reading and the deeper reading.’
Performance poetry itself is only starting to gain the recognition it deserves in Australia, with one local publishing house in particular just last month commencing work on creating an anthology to detail this emerging artform.
As such, Sex Poems puts Luckwell firmly at the forefront of this genre.
‘Spoken word isn’t part of the music arena as such and it’d be good to have spoken word as a viable option in contemporary music and that it’s something that might have a place in contemporary music in the future. I’d love to walk into a CD shop and see a spoken word section.’
Dosh Luckwell’s Sex Poems launches at The Bakery on Thursday May 19 at 8pm.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
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