Jack Marshall is a master's student, a musician, a singer-songwriter, a busker, and a poet. He explained that his interest in music goes as far back as primary school, “My earliest memories of performing a musical instrument were in primary six, but music really only became a part of my life in my fourth year of secondary school. I then obviously went on to study music at university and it was through the LGBTQ+ night Fruit Salad that I came into contact with poetry and performance.”
He is a creative person well immersed in the performing arts scene in Aberdeen, although he only began performing spoken word poetry this year.
In his first year of secondary school, Jack joined the junior choir and was a member of it and the senior choir throughout his high school experience. He believes this is where his interest in performing truly originated.
His musical performance was enhanced further when he joined the Youth Music Theatre United Kingdom Musical Theatre for All project which was sponsored by Shell. The aim of the project was to develop performance skills in young people from deprived areas of Scotland. This included performing an original musical theatre piece with 45 school children aged from 12-17.
When speaking about poetry Jack describes his writing as being designed and written for the page. However, he has been working on producing more poetry for the spoken word scene.
He was inspired to start writing poetry again, something he hadn’t done since his sixth year of high school, after experiencing and interacting with Fruit Salad and Speakin’ Weird - both of which are spoken word and performance events in Aberdeen.
“Speakin’ Weird has definitely had a big part in this and has created a safe space for me to perform - my wonderful friends have also listened to me perform over and over again before taking anything to the stage.
“Using my phone to record myself has also helped a lot in refining my performance. My experience in musical theatre has definitely helped with the theatrical side of performance as well as busking and gigging.”
Recently, he has been taking part in a 30-day writing challenge which meant he was writing from prompts. Jack explained that this was the first time he had done so for such a consistent period of time, “I tend to experience things very emotionally in a visceral way. For me, a feeling or emotion is rather physical and poetry is a way for me to describe that feeling or thought."
For Jack, writing poetry and music are two different processes, although he said, “I think one complements the other because it’s your structuring of words and language and themes and ideas so they definitely have parts that interlink but I suppose I’ve never written a poem and thought ‘oh this should have been a song’, for me I write little bits of words and music at the same time and it sort of comes from that.”
He performs his poetry at Speakin’ Weird and performs music at Fruit Salad events too. Jack takes part in musical events and gigs across the city as his main source of income and tries to busk when he has time in between his gigs and studying.
He describes the Aberdeen spoken word community as supportive and encouraging, however, explains that performers have to work hard to get a reaction from the Aberdonian audience, "if you get them to laugh or clap you know you have something special. You have to work hard - however, if your performance is on the ball and you're saying the right things then you get a well-deserved reaction. So it can sometimes be a little discouraging. However, it is a very good training ground for aspiring performers as you are rewarded for hard work."
Although he has busked in London and Edinburgh Jack has only performed his poetry in Aberdeen and once in London at an open mic night. When asked if he had performed spoken word in other cities he said, “This is something I would love to do, but I don’t feel I have quite honed my craft enough yet to take it outside of Aberdeen.”
You can listen to two pieces of his poetry Wonderland and (Untitled) here.
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