Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Bob Cobbing at The Voice Box
Cobbing opened with good humour... leaning on the lectern, growling sequences of synonyms that
would have warmed [Stefan] Themerson’s heart in his semantic poetry mode...
Another time he was off round the room. I’m sure it’s a nice dais and I’m sure it cost a lot of
money, but it throws sound back up and into the microphone.
Cobbing approaching the dais, looks frail; at the lectern, he’s in control; later he turns the frailty on
and off.
He went off round the room, performing, getting to the end of his text, from memory, at the
riverside/west end corner of the room, whereupon he crept up on the picture on the wall and
began to perform it—wide gestures tracing out its markings—a rather fine impromptu sound
composition.
As musicians often return to the same piece from different angles, Ellington say, Cobbing here did
a most extraordinary soma haoma. I used really not to like it, though I remember backing up Clive
Fencott 20 years ago when he said Cobbing could have a No 1 with it. “Tha’’s righ’”, I said and had
another drink. But maybe he could have. I didn’t like it because at that stage I had a very odd
feeling that Cobbing might just offer to give everyone Holy Communion in the middle, deep
sonorous chanting, repetition, and the whole thing being Hymn to the Sacred Mushroom and at one
time subtitled ‘which promotes health and well-being’, or something like that.
Since then, it has returned, by being performed without the Hammer film DIY religion trappings
(What would Top of the Pops have done with it?), to being one of his many permutational poems.
Today’s was an astonishing performance: breathy, breathy as if he were gasping for breath,
though he wasn’t, sometimes quite loud, loud enough to be heard, loud enough to make one turn
round if it had been a social gathering, sometimes fading out like someone falling asleep or fading
away, and both within the same phrases; and there was also a quality of forgetfulness, like
someone saying their prayers by rote; yet all the time one could hear the permutational patterns
rolling through like an undercurrent, an under rhythm he seemed to ignore, determining the basis
of his utterance, the written text he was recalling.
A freeze frame of the encounter at the picture. Cobbing, lurching his right arm rightwards along a
bold line uttering it loudly; the Voice Box warder, uniformed, staring straight ahead, no emotion;
and then, unfreeze, Cobbing shuffling past her, daiswards, Prisoner Group H, without her
acknowledging anything. People looking in at the room through the closed door. Art in progress. Do
not disturb.
Sort of sub-vocal recitative from Cobbing till he gets to the dais and then he leans forward, and
then arm reach lengthening over his whisky and then over his beer, towards his drum,
lengthening, cantilevering himself, slower and slower and nearer, but it’s going to be a close run
thing—will he make it? Will he give up? Will he give up and go round? Will he fall? And if he falls
is it appropriate to help a person in performance—stand back please; is there a theoretician here,