Antony Szmierek: 'There was always a slight element of danger, which is odd for spoken word'

With a tailwind of publicity, the album, which sets Szmierek’s spoken word to polished dancebeats, is one of this year’s most eagerly anticipated releases.

He says that by the end of his time in the classroom, his pupils had got wind of his musical acitivities in any case. “They knew what was going on – every two seconds a mad email would come in and I’d try to pretend to carry on teaching but I’d just be staring into space thinking things like, I’ve got to meet Jools Holland in two weeks,” he says. “But in taking a risk like that, the danger of it makes to even more determined, knowing I’ve got to pay the rent, I’ve got to do something.”

Szmierek had been writing for years before he plucked up the courage to start performing on the spoken word circuit. “I was always listening with a critical way,” he says of the music and films that inspired his early work. But at the school he went to in Hyde, Greater Manchester, he “never thought it was a possibility” to be a writer or performer. “I know people say ‘I really wanted to be a musician or I really wanted to be a poet but there wasn’t an opportunity’, but (in Hyde) it didn’t cross anyone’s mind, it was you had to get a job and then that’s it.”

He became an English teacher after studying at the University of Huddersfield. Spoken word events “became a thing to do on a Wednesday night” as a distraction from the pressures of teaching. “They were all quite rowdy the poetry things I did,” he recalls. “It was in Hulme, which is quite a rough area and if you were rubbish you’d know.

“So there was always a slight element of danger, which is odd for spoken word, but you need to see it as a literary thing, but I really enjoyed the performance element, I liked showing off, I liked the delivery of it and I think I’d learned loads of it from teaching. There’s nothing scarier than 30 Year 11 kids who don’t want to be there.”

Through making “these tiny steps” his name got around and “one domino led to another”. Although at one stage he even penned a couple of novels, he found he preferred the immediacy of live performance. “I think the dream for a novel would be what if there’s a famous quote that everyone says, but it was like, why am I writing 120,000 words when there’s only one phrase that’s remembered,” he says.

“An easier way of doing that was poems. They’re both very different practices, but there’s a lot of fun to be had and there’s a lot of playful stuff you can do with words in a poem. The restrictions of how short it has to be or fitting it to music make for really fun accidents. It’s like my Sudoku – people have these other elements of the brain where they can do stuff to relax. To me, if I’ve got a sentence, knocking it around and moving words is like a puzzle for me that I quite enjoy.”

Though Service Station at the End of the Universe is dominated by dance beats, Szmierek’s first musical love was for indie guitar bands such Radiohead and Arctic Monkeys. “That was the catalyst when I was at school – hearing a similar accent, I really related to (Alex Turner) when I was growing up,” he says. When he met Arctic Monkeys’ producer James Ford at the end of last year, he says, he was “trying to play it cool...but I was trying not to sound like an idiot”.

The title of the album and another track, Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Fallacy alludes to the late Douglas Adams, whose books made a major impression on Szmierek. “I remember reading the first page of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy when I was 12, I was on a caravan holiday in Wales, that was the first adult book I had,” he remembers. “I’d done the Harry Potter books and then I was into sci-fi.

“Even then, his tone and his humour, it was all about these huge, grand ideas about the universe and here we are, these massive concepts that he explains in an accessible and fun, and sometimes sad and miserable British way. I still do adore it, I still re-read. If you dig into and read the lyrics of my sort of stuff, it’s nowhere near as good but it’s knocking on the door of Douglas Adams all the time.

“I’m always trying to talk about these huge concepts. Even the tune The Great Pyramid of Stockport, it’s not about the Stockport Pyramid (a former Co-op building on the M60), it’s about legacy and why we’re here and how long will we be here but through a humorous lens – that’s kind of what Douglas Adams always did.

“I’ll probably stop with the Douglas Adams references for album two, but he felt like a weird companion (for this one).”

Service Station at the End of the Universe is out now. Antony Szmierek plays at The Leadmill, Sheffield on March 6 and Leeds University Stylus on March 7​​​​​​​, as well as Leeds Festival on August 22. ​​​​​​​https://www.antonyszmierek.co.uk/