Crabtree - Tom Jenks

"Crabtree reads like a cross between Mercian Hymns and Viz, as if Barry MacSweeney’s Ranter has saddled up with Johnny Vegas for a night at the end of Blackpool Pier. Crabtree is a thumbnail guide to a very contemporary England: we never drive far through these umbrous hills before coming to a Travelodge. As the audience delights in the frolics, Jenks, Albion’s greatest surrealist, is found finetuning his metrical gifts : at least that was his excuse for taking longer in the shower. Through the humour of the sequence the shadiness of our times is revealed. I’ll carry mine as a pocket-sized Magna Carta to swat back the saturation of all extraneous data"
Chris McCabe