“It’s a party”: James Massiah’s Adult Entertainment has reinvented London’s poetry scene

“To get a call-up from James Massiah is like getting a shout out from the town crier.”

John Holt, the artist, writer, and founder of LAW magazine, is voicing something that’s been felt by a lot of people who’ve drifted into James Massiah’s orbit over the years.

Massiah is a fixture at London’s best parties. He’s a renowned DJ with an NTS residency. He’s a member of Babyfather, Dean Blunt’s shadowy hip-hop project, and as a solo artist he’s dropped underground anthems like the psychedelic club track Natural Born Killers (Ride For Me) and last year’s relentless rap track Charlie. Massiah has collaborated with Massive Attack and Daniel Avery, performed on Boiler Room, in the Tate Modern, on BBC 1Xtra, the House of Commons and Westminster Abbey.

Above all, he’s a poet. Massiah runs his printed New Poems series and has been throwing poetry shows since at least 2012, the latest version of these being Adult Entertainment. Holt’s most recent appearance there was a special edition which took place at London’s Rally festival last summer – he read his material in the same tent that was packed out by hypey Detroit dance trio HiTech a few hours later.

In the London creative scene, Adult Entertainment has hit a nerve. Maybe that’s because it’s a photo negative of your stereotypical poetry night. There’s no danger of getting tittered at by a man in a cashmere scarf because his delicate allusion to Keats’ Hyperion went over your head. ​“Entertainment” is in the title for a reason – having fun isn’t at odds with the quality of the poetry, it’s part of it. There’s an unpredictability and a sense of theatre that comes from having an open brief — or, technically, no brief at all. People can read whatever feels right, the only connective tissue being Massiah himself. Sydney Lima once read about findom. Amelia Abraham read an A‑Z on open relationships. Rarelyalways rapped about everyday life in East London. Massiah remembers a performance by Adam R‑W, who hosts the storytelling event Storytime London, ​“about paying his landlord in change”. He bursts out laughing. ​“The premise alone…”

And like any good party, it’s busy. ​“You can’t even get up the stairs now when you try and go and see it,” says Laurie Lynch, a filmmaker and poet who’s performed at Adult Entertainment a few times, referring to the East London boozer, The Haggerston, that’s become the event’s spiritual home. ​“It’s bloody small, it’s super hot, and overcrowded, which I like,” says Denisha Anderson, a photographer and filmmaker whose work often centres on creating intimate spaces where her subjects can be unguarded. She performed at Adult Entertainment in the summer of 2024. ​“It’s like an old school shoobs, everyone’s just in one room trying to cut a few shapes without elbowing someone in the face, except, you know, you’re on the mic and sharing your thoughts, feelings, whether they’re bright and lovely or dark and isolated, do you know what I mean?“

Massiah’s first poetry night, titled The A and the E, started at a bar called Alter Ega in Balham, before setting up shop at different venues in Peckham and Shoreditch. During lockdown, when events were off, he kept at the poetry, distributing free-flowing poems to friends on massive sheets of paper he calls Drafts. When restrictions lifted, it was time to start getting together again to read properly. Adult Entertainment was born. ​“We’ve been messing around long enough, you know, it’s like time to get serious!” says Massiah. ​“We’re adults now, we’re adults,” he says, explaining the name. ​“And also,” he smiles, ​“it was a bit cheeky.”

To maintain the Adult Entertainment vibe, it’s important to keep things moving, and the energy high on the night. ​“One of the key tenets of party poetry is that it’s short, succinct, digestible,” he explains. People might come to the mic with a short story, an excerpt from a novel, an essay. That doesn’t matter: within the space, it’s all poetry. ​“Everything that happens there is a poem,” he tells me. ​“We’re gonna keep it through that lens, and we’re gonna keep it short. No one’s gonna read for longer than three to five minutes. It’s a party. We’re having a party.” The Instagram flyers encourage people to acknowledge everyone, arrive early, and accept everything.

Ku-Ro is an experimental musician who performed in October 2024. He remembers a separate performance by stand-up comedian and film director Arnold Chukwu: ​“It was funny. He said ​‘Man’s not hot’,” he laughs, ​“and he played a clarinet. That inspired me in general because I hadn’t seen that before.” When it came to Ku-Ro’s own time to perform, he built on that experience, bringing a saxophone and ending by improvising sax and vocals with a delay effect. ​“I feel like Adult Entertainment is very free.”

Previous poetry Massiah has put on in the past have nodded to pro wrestling, like Monday Night Raw or In Your House. He insists that wrestling can be a rich source of inspiration for poets. He points to Joel Gertner, Road Dogg and Stone Cold Steve Austin as some of his favourite speakers from that world. Laughing, he suggests Adult Entertainment is the adult-oriented ​“Attitude Era of poetry nights”. They’re references that nod to Massiah’s lack of poetic pretension. Nobody’s going to accuse Stone Cold of using too much iambic pentameter, but that doesn’t mean he can’t hold a room.

It’s not a coincidence, by the way, Adult Entertainment starts with the letters A and E or that Attitude Era does. The motif took root years ago, in Massiah’s journey towards defining a personal philosophy after becoming an atheist. While exploring his interest in philosophy, dualism, morality and ethics, the letters A and E came to take on a symbolic value for him, representing contrasts in life like good and evil, dark and light. He started following a hybrid philosophy he cooked up for himself by combining psychological egoism, the idea that humans are motivated by self-interest, and moral nihilism, the idea that an absolute morality doesn’t exist. He named it amoral egoism. If that sounds like a bit of a hard sell, it also has a more palatable side that’s probably more relevant to the way Adult Entertainment is run.

“I have this concept of absolute empathy,” he explains. ​“It’s this idea that if you remove the notion of inherent ethical or moral value and you take on the idea that everyone that exists is operating with the same impetus fundamentally, then you can empathise with anyone and everyone — A and E,” he laughs.

Where does it go from here? Lately, he’s been expanding his remit with a series of special editions co-curated by the artist and poet Tayah Leigh Barrs. Leigh Barrs describes herself as being interested in ​“the cinema of poetry”, with a hyper-visual focus on ​“the intimacies of mundanity”. She brings a lot of art world experience and friends with her: after being art director to the fashion photographer Mario Testino, she opened her own gallery and commissioning platform, Studio_​Leigh.

“I’ve always loved overlaps and bleeding of boundary lines,” she says when we chat over Zoom. She describes the special editions as a ​“tangent” and ​“additional parallel direction” that can exist alongside the Haggerston shows. ​“It became an opportunity to move… what Adult Entertainment was doing in this more framed environment,” she says. There are ongoing conversations with venues about future events, including, potentially, some outside of London.

The most recent Adult Entertainment was a special edition, co-curated by Leigh Barrs, held at Ginny on Frederick gallery in London’s Clerkenwell. It was one of those Sunday afternoons in January that feels dark before it really is. Everything was lucid with cold and there was a pleasantly deserted atmosphere as a crowd began to spill out from the gallery in anticipation.

Laurie Lynch was one of the performers gearing up to speak. ​”Isn’t it bizarre…” he said, remembering the scene at the gallery. ​“A group of people huddled in the cold in this sort of vacant lot in the middle of the butchery district of London, and reading things that come from deep within themselves and are revealing and vulnerable. And I’ve got this knotted feeling that has control of my body… I only ever want to live my life where I’m in situations where life can make me feel something physical like this,” he says.

Fundamentally, it’s a pretty simple affair: a room filled with people, gathered to hear other people say something from the heart. A timeless set up: there’s nothing new about reading poetry, obviously. What makes it feel relevant is the stories these people share, the way they experiment with modern language and the erosion of social boundaries.

This is what Massiah describes as his ​“private mission” underpinning the events. ​“I move in a lot of different social circles and spaces, and I like to think of myself as kind of picking up barnacles along the way, and dumping all of these oysters or clams or whatever into this bucket, and [saying] you’re all gonna meet each other now,” he says. ​“I like to party, and I love getting to the core of a person and just realising that like, ​‘shit, we’re not that different, are we?’”