Loud Music Makes You Drive Faster

Loud Music Makes you Drive Faster is Mark’s first collection of poetry, an anthology of his spoken word performances. Surreal, playful and sometimes tender, these poems sit in the tradition of spoken word pioneered by Roger McGough, John Cooper Clarke and Hollie McNish. Robot train inspectors, static caravans and museum statues all get a voice, as well as Lionel Richie songs that didn’t chart, a poem written backwards and the historical revelation that at Waterloo, Napoleon did not surrender. Along the way, there are musings on ageing, travelling, fatherhood, falling in love and falling out of love.

Mark Blayney has won the Somerset Maugham Prize for Two Kinds of Silence. His second book Conversations with Magic Stones was profiled on BBC4 and his third book Doppelgangers is also published by Parthian. A regular performance poet and MC, Mark has been longlisted for the National Poetry Prize, is a National Poetry Slam finalist and a Johny Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry finalist.