Stay Greasy Baby
25th April 2025
On her quest for the eternal spirit of poetry, Sam Burcher meets the Mancunian poet and spoken word performer Stephen Belowsky in West Hollywood.
Stephen and I bond over a shared dislike of over-chlorinated swimming pools, which is true in the case of our Sunset hotel pool. Stephen’s eyes are red and sore and he’s a worried man. Later that day, I see him on the Strip; sunglasses on, almost as if in a trance, picking up the stories and energies on this world renowned street. I know better than to interrupt his flow.
The next day he bounces into the discrete nook on the hotel’s sun balcony. He flicks up his sunglasses to show me his clear eyes are healed after the application of eyedrops prescribed by the chemist. He announces he’s just had breakfast with Neil Sedaka and flashes a selfie. I’m aware of the iconic tunes of singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, but who is Stephen Belowsky?
Turns out, he is the only two times winner of the Western Australia Poetry Slam and twice an Australian Poetry Championship finalist. Originally from Manchester, his family emigrated to Australia when he was a youngster. But Belowsky couldn’t settle, bouncing between Manchester, Perth, New York and LA. He was the in-house poet at the Standard Hotel, where Creation Records founder Alan McGee, who released Stephen’s single 2020 Ball Drop on his Creation 23 label during lockdown, was the sometime DJ.
How do you write your poems?
“Every poem’s got a story, there’s always a reason,” Stephen said. Stay Greasy Baby is about when he had a HairBear Bunch afro combed style. And, because he was losing his hair, he smoothed it down into a slick greased back pony tail. He was hanging out with the actor Steven Seagal, known for an extraordinarily slick hairstyle.
“Stay greasy baby, ‘cause it’s a long slide down, I don’t mean slicking it back with L’Oreal, ‘cause I’m worth worth it, or slicking it back like Steven Seagal, Just stay greasy baby, stay greasy on that long slide down.”
West LA Gypsy of the Nineties is another of Stephen’s poems that, “just made itself.” Inspiration flowed at the Insomnia Cafe, a quirky hangout on Beverley Boulevard, in the early 1990’s. Thewriters coming in and out included the scriptwriters of Friends. One young woman often came in wearing her shades. She once said to him, “Tell me what you think of these sunglasses?”and that’s how the line came about. The scenes of Los Angeles just hung around in that poem, he recalls.
A gateway into live performance came from Steve Issacs, one of the first Video Jockeys (VJs) on MTV, who hosted a spoken poetry
night at The Mad Hatter on Pico Boulevard. Stephen quickly gained recognition for The Frosty Flake Surfer, a surreal dream of a poem about escaping the challenges of life on the minimum wage. His residency at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York provided another pivotal opportunity for Belowsky to hone his stagecraft.
Earlier this year, he performed in London for Plaster Magazine at their artsy Store on Great Chapel Street,Soho (right).The enthusiastic crowd clearly loved the high octane delivery, and chanted his name in appreciation. His encore, The Race to End the 21st Century, is a dystopian, but hilarious recitation in which Stephen is the verbally dexterous commentator on a horserace with runners named Deadly Virus, Climate Change, Thermo Nuclear War and other threats to the human race.
How do you remember your poems?
Stephen shares his masterful insights into the art of good recitation with me. He said, “You can’t fake it, but you become it. It’s a mindset, you can’t force it. It has to come to you. It’s there, you can become it. And, the only way to become it is by letting go of your limitations and letting go of what’s pinning you down, basically. It’s like, open your wings.”
His sagacity aligns with the finest directives of Poet Laureates and the best teachers of speech in the world. Stephen makes the distinction between the writer, as a poet, reading from the page and the poet reciting from memory, which he does ever so well. Both can fall prey to reciting the poem like a parrot. “But”, he says, “with a truly great poem, knowing it or feeling it, you can access it anywhere. It’s in here,” he gestures towards the core of his body, “You’re not reciting it, it’s part of you, it’s living thing.”
For Stephen the architecture of a poem is simple, but magical. ‘If you take two bits of string and you tape one to the roof and you put one on the floor and then you cut it, the string would stay up, it would be animated. That’s exactly what doing rhyming poetry is and performing spoken word is. It’s that piece of string that becomes elevated, it hangs in the air on its own. It doesn’t need to be taped to the ceiling or the floor you can cut the strings and it will hang……” he tails off. I offer the word “suspended.” “Exactly,” he enthused, “Suspended. It will be there, you can’t fake it and you will find it, it will be there within you. The poem will be there and never disappear…”
Why is spoken word poetry important?
Quick as a flash, Stephen has the answer. Because it reflects our times and where we are at, he replies. For instance, during the pandemic,I didn’t just moan, “Oh, everything’s closed down, I’m at artist what am I gonna do? Well, that’s what art is about, it’s expressing what’s happening now. We’re a newsreel of where we are in life. A contemporary artist, poet or musician reflects where we are in life at the time.
Are poets made or born?
According to Stephen, you could say poets are born. But, you could also says poets are made. And he should know, he was born dyslexic. He couldn’t read or write through school, then one day he was hit by poetry and that was it. For the first 15 years of his life, he was into soccer. “I was about as thick as a brick as you could find. I was so fucking stupid. I didn’t leave school with one anything. I was bottom of the class at everything, I didn’t even get a report card, that’s how thick I was.”
I am struck by his honesty and mindful of yet another casualty of our formal education system. But it’s all behind him. There is a rebirth in his work right now. Script developments for a movie based on Stay Greasy Baby are in progress, hence his trip to LA. And, at home in Perth where he lives by the ocean, his screenplay “The Kid from Harvest Road” about the 17 year Bon Scot, a lauded, but short lived singer in Australia’s mega rock band AC/DC, who was raised in nearby Freemantle, is in pre-production,
Poems or songs?
He references his breakfast buddy Neil Sedaka, who wrote 200 songs and wonders, how did he write so many? Sedaka wrote the classics Oh Carol and Breaking Up Is Hard To Do. ‘But it’s not what he says,” Stephen reckons, maintaining his poetic instincts, “it’s the way he says it. Cause he feels it. Or Chuck Berry says Johnny Be Good, he can’t fake it. And, John Lennon says Watching the Wheels Go Round and Round.”
Tom Jones once asked him, “Belowsky, what makes a great poem?” He answered Tom’s question with, “What makes a great song? Take Tom’s hits, Deliah or What’s new Pussy Cat? If you turned them into poems, they would be awful, right? Or, you take a poem that I do and transfer it into a song and it doesn’t work either. It goes both ways, they are both different art forms, and they are both as important as each other.”
We discuss the merits of a poem called Chlorine Eyes. But joking apart, loss is a great motivator for poetry, which leads to great discovery. My quest is driven by my grandmother, a spoken word champion at Oxford University in the 1920’s. Acknowledging her loss stimulated my desire to discover how this craft, which requires phenomenal contact with presence and access to, dare I say it, a mysterious “field” of creativity, lives on.
For me, poetry is behind everything; every story, vision, or dream, every culture, and every human being. Stephen Belowsky beautifully sums it up, “Take a look around you.There’s always things to write about, and all poets will find it in the end.”
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