Party Like It's 1959

This mash-up celebration recognises some of the most iconic beat pieces of the 1950s (alongside some lost gems that the collective have lovingly restored), and it's been a while in the making for the group. “I've been wanting to do a beat show for about ten years I suppose, and just haven't got around to it or had the right people around me,” says Graham. “But we've been rehearsing for about three months and it's all '50s stuff. It's just incredible material to work with, and I suppose [with] such concise thinking among those writers it really is a movement.”

Graham is clearly having fun with bringing this passion to a live audience, and in keeping to the original pre-rock'n'roll, but true rebel style, the group have put it together by begging, borrowing and stealing from other productions. Graham laughs as he describes doing the talent equivalent of stealing from the stationary cupboard at his day job, “The accounts person at Home and Away is this great photographer, and so she helped, she took these amazing photos, and actually one of the guys in the group holds the boom in Home and Away too, so I'm setting them all free!”

Getting into the content of the work has proved a real oasis too. “At rehearsals what we end up [just] doing is a few poems and then sitting around and going 'Wow, dude – my thinking has expanded'. We get really philosophical,” he says. “There's some stuff that's only recorded, it wasn't written down anywhere, so things that were recorded in '57 and not published until the '80s or so. Or by the time it's been published, it's vastly different, because the recording at that time wasn't great. We just transcribed stuff from old recordings, and we're doing one from a guy who never used to write his work down, he'd just chase cars and scream poetry at them, and his wife would write it down, and so we've managed to find his stuff, and it's great.

In keeping with the original context of the poems, the group will set the performances to music. “[Allen] Ginsberg and [Jack] Kerouac and those guys were all writing to jazz… so we've been extending the vibe of the poems to music, to get the jazz back there, and they're not really that different, poetry and jazz. When you can find the jazz rhythm in the poem and extend it, it just sings,” Graham beams. “And then you get a hold of something like America by Ginsberg that's just amazing. To think about the insight that he had in 1957, talking about name brand society and stuff, that people would have gone, 'What are you on about'? But the blind spiritual push, knowing that they're getting information but not knowing where they're getting it from; the beginning of the revolution, of the age of Aquarius that everyone seemed to get a glimpse of in the '50s and '60s. These guys were really on it, and I don't think the '60s would have happened if these guys weren't doing what [they were] doing. I think they were prophets – when the '60s came along, this work was handed to Dylan and those guys.”