Luke Wright: 'After seeing John Cooper Clarke on stage, I knew performance poetry was the career for me'
Poet Luke Wright is delving into his own life-story with his most personal show to date. Laura Reid speaks to him before he takes to the stage in Yorkshire.
At the age of 16, Luke Wright walked into Colchester Arts Centre, not knowing that what he was about to witness would go on to shape the course of his life. Performance poets Martin Newell and John Cooper Clarke took to the stage in front of him, joined by Ross Sutherland, then a newbie to the spoken word scene. What they produced left him stoked to his core.
“I just thought they were so cool. I’d never seen anything like it,” Wright remembers. "It was like a combination of being a philosopher, comedian and a frontman of a band all rolled into one show and I thought I want to do this.”
Now 44, Wright himself is an acclaimed poet. He’s been writing and performing for more than 25 years, taking his work to theatres, festivals and pubs all over the world. As well as touring with Cooper Clarke, and being an MC for rock group The Libertines, Wright lays claim to fifteen solo shows, three plays, five poetry collections and six pamphlets.
His latest work is a reflection on his own life-story, delivered with heart and humour. Later Life Letter: A story of family, adoption and love was published at the start of the year and now Wright is on tour with a show based on the book.
“It’s almost like a memoir really. It’s about who I am, where I come from and how I feel about that, how I feel about being adopted (as a baby),” he says. “When I grew up, it wasn’t a big thing to me at all. I had a very stable and loving home life with my wonderful adopted parents.”
"It was only later in life that I began to realise perhaps it did affect me,” he continues. “And this is a result of that, me trying to make sense of it, and in a way try to take back a bit of control. As children, we aren’t really in control of our lives. Adults make decisions for us.
"I think that’s heightened and amplified in the case of someone who’s adopted or has been in the care system. Big decisions are made about your life that completely change your life - I’m a completely different person to what I would have been if I stayed with my biological family. It’s exploring that, the enormity of that.”
Wright’s work takes its name from the letters that social workers write to adopted children. They’re designed to be read once a young person is older, to help them try to make sense of their background and history. Wright was 18 when he opened his. Five years ago, he revisited the letter after witnessing the care that his now-wife, a social worker, put in to the writing of them.
"It made me go back and get out my own letter and I read it again. It started to open up a load of stuff,” says Wright. The following year, during a stint at the Edinburgh Festival, he found himself devising a poem about his wife writing a later life letter. That was the start. “It opened up this way of writing about myself,” he reflects. “I think it’s been a cathartic experience.”
Later Life Letter unpicks Wright’s adoption and explores the complexities of belonging and the experiences that make us who we are. “Whilst it’s an emotional show, there’s also quite funny and fun stuff as well,” he says. “I think it was all there, just bursting to come out. It was quite a rewarding experience and made me feel more powerful and competent as a writer.”
Wright, who is based in North Suffolk, has been honing the art since his late teens, inspired, of course, by that Colchester gig. Having already been experimenting with writing song lyrics, within a month of the show, he’d turned his hand to poetry and it wasn’t long before he secured his first performance on stage with Sutherland, who was just a couple of years his senior.
He went on to study English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where he and Sutherland set up a poetry night and established the performance collective Aisle16. After finishing their degrees, they began to pick up more gigs. “But we never thought it would work out really,” says Wright. “We thought it was a bit pie in the sky. Ross and I thought we were building memories for when we’re ‘old’. The fact we both now make a living through our work, I feel we’re very blessed.”
Wright has also done many a show with Cooper Clarke. One of his first gigs as a poet was supporting the Bard of Salford and since 2012, he’s joined Cooper Clarke on a number of his tours. On the back of one performance, Wright says he was approached by a co-manager of The Libertines and was invited to work as an MC with the group. “I thought it was a wind-up at first,” he admits.
Wright has also become a regular voice on BBC Radio 4, with plans for a documentary on the channel about Later Life Letter. “Ultimately, Later Life Letter grew out of a need to understand where I came from, and why the idea of belonging still preoccupies me well into middle age,” Wright muses. “I’ve always known I was adopted, but only recently started to explore what that really means — not just for me, but for anyone trying to piece together a sense of self from incomplete stories.
"The show blends poetry, memoir, and stand-up to tell a story about family, privilege, and love in modern Britain. It’s about how we edit our pasts to make our presents bearable — and what happens when the old stories no longer fit.”
"There’s a real variety (in poetry),” he adds. “Even in this show I will have you laughing and probably have you crying as well. A genre that can do all of that, take you on an emotional rollercoaster, is really powerful.”
Luke Wright performs his show Later Life Letter at Old Woollen, Leeds on March 25, The Trades Club in Hebden Bridge on March 26, The Bluebird Bakery, York on May 21 and Otley Courthouse on October 25. For tickets, visit www.lukewright.co.uk/gigs