Willie Becket
I'm involved in quite a few things actually, there is the Psycho Surgeons which takes up a lot of my time, also solo poetry gigs as "Wild Willi Becket" and I also run literature festivals with Nick Toczek. We used to do Cabaret nights at the Spotted House on Manningham Lane for a couple of years until we reached the point where we had got the audience as big as we could in Bradford. It was getting to be the same week after week so i went on to doing literature, bringing in writers from all over Europe, the sort of thing you wouldn't see at the run of the mill English show. It's totally poetry and prose, you see poetry is not particularly a popular subject in England, but on the continent it's massive. We have people from all over coming to Bradford to do these shows and when they go back to their countries they talk about Bradford, which is all boosting the City's image. It's all to boost the image of the City. I think if you can do that and have a bit of fun at the same time then that's a worthwhile exercise. You get these images of places, and so people who don't know Bradford think it's all cloth caps and cowheel pie, which of course it's not. It's a City in its own right with a lot of interesting things going on and a lot of people with a lot to say and do. If people see me and recognise me as the singer with the Surgeons and then associate the Surgeons with Bradford, It's a good idea. I always make the point when we play a show anywhere that we are the Psycho Surgeons from Bradford.