James Massiah

Summer solstice in Paris is something very special. The city takes the longest day of the year as the perfect opportunity to celebrate live music, and “la fête de la musique” duly takes over town with bands on every street corner. Amateur DJs play sets from their third floor balconies to revellers in the street below, while noise complaints are effectively banned. And so it should be that James Massiah, one of London’s protean talents and most effervescent musicians, should find himself in Paris on such a fortuitous occasion.

He is, however, in town for more personal reasons. At Vie Projects, Semaine’s sister gallery at 55 Boulevard Beaumarchais named after Life the same way the magazine is named after our seven day spans, Massiah is launching the very first Paris edition of Adult Entertainment, a poetry-cum-dance event which he began in London years ago.

The setup is simple: people of all ages (although it naturally skewers towards the young and beautiful) cram into a room to listen to poets and rappers before a DJ takes to the decks and the dancing begins. Its founder once called it the “Attitude Era of poetry nights”. The Paris edition gives the whole thing an oh-so-French makeover, doubling down as an art opening with original work by Massiah himself.

Massiah has been a fixture of London’s creative scene for years. I say creative as opposed to anything more specific—artistic, literary, musical—because he is all of these. His Instagram bio brands him a dub poet and dancehall selector, which is to grossly minimise his impact. He’s released three EPs, including 2019’s Natural Born Killers (Ride For Me), and collaborated on projects with Massive Attack and Daniel Avery.

He’s performed on Boiler Room and BBC 1Xtra; in the Tate Modern and Westminster Abbey; and at Glastonbury alongside Neneh Cherry in 2023. He’s been hosting poetry events since 2012, of which Adult Entertainment is the latest iteration. The last London event before the Paris edition took place at We’re at Flute, a bar in The Broadwick Hotel in Soho, and was co-hosted by Adwoa Aboah (“she’s wicked,” Massiah gushes). Conceived as a literary salon and, per British Vogue, resolutely not a club night, it nonetheless tippled into a party. How could it not?

Turning “serious events” into looser ones is a talent Massiah has honed into an art form, although one which he hopes he’ll eventually grow out of. “The party’s over,” he tells me today. But is it really? The beauty of his events is precisely how they blur the line between entertainment and education. It’s a place for writers to flex and improve their craft, and for all to let their hair down.

Massiah is twice late to the recordings we have scheduled together. His promotional schedule, I’ve been warned, is gruelling. It seems, however, that there’s more than just work on his mind. “I’m looking to buy a flat,” he tells me, “around North or East [London]. I really like Highbury.” I mention that is where I live, and that if we end up as neighbours then we must pay a visit to Theo James’ new Italian trattoria together. He seems to like the idea.

Right now, he’s back at his parents’ house in Mitcham, South London, where he grew up. He attended local schools, where he discovered his love of English and drama: passions which he’d soon enough channel into his career. At age 35, Massiah has been putting out work for close to 15 years, coming up the ranks in his early twenties before breaking through at the turn of the decade. “Now closer to 50 than I am to 15”, he’s ready for a new chapter.

Massiah is, by his own admission, someone who says yes to everything. On this, he’s trying to cut back. “I’ve enjoyed the trappings of the life of an artist,” he says, “but now I’m wanting to really knuckle down… and have as big an impact as possible… to impress as many people as possible.” Afraid of sounding arrogant, he adds hastily: “I say ‘impress’ in the true sense of the word—to impress people—but also to impress upon people the meaning I’m trying to convey.” The very notion of meaning is at the heart of Massiah’s show. “It’s about making sense,” he tells me: fitting in an era of chaos where the world seems every day to turn on its axis.

On saying yes: are there any poets he regrets giving the go-ahead to, whose performances at Adult Entertainment nights have proven underwhelming? He gives a big whoop of laughter.

“No hard regrets,” he clarifies. “I’ve had moments where people haven’t read as well… or haven’t performed as well as I’d hoped they would.” Spotting true talent in the multihyphenate era can be hard. Many are the pretendants eager to ape Massiah’s kaleidoscopic abilities—though of course, few can. The rise of social media and particularly Substack are singled out by Massiah as a huge help. “There’s less of a need to be discovered through an open mic event,” he explains. “Which is good because there’s more quality control afforded [to you].” His role as a curator extends to that of a tastemaker. Particularly strong editions of Adult Entertainment set something of a benchmark. Since the advent of Massiah’s series, many have launched their own versions of a literary salon: Geist Talks, Soho Reading Series and The Toe Rag being just some of them.

Paris has long been viewed as a more literary city than London: an image popularised by the romance of American writers there in the 1920s, and more recently by the intellectual scene of St Germain in the 1950s. It’s also somewhere where the word “poetry” isn’t sneered at quite so much as it is here. Indeed, the last ten years of softboy culture have given the genre a bad rep: a fact of which Massiah is all too aware.

Although Massiah says it would be wrong to gatekeep poetry, he also acknowledges that opening it up to everyone inevitably means more bad poems as well as more good ones. He tells me people often come up to him at parties and flash their iPhone notes as if to offer a sample of their work, catching him at an auspicious time so that he will say yes. “You get super wasted… you’re in the smoking area…” He throws up his hands.

The most exciting aspect of Adult Entertainment is how many of the poems turn into raps (“all rappers are poets but not all poets are rappers”). We name check a few of our favourites (Azealia Banks, he says, is “wicked” although he refuses to defend her politics). The British creative scene still suffers from segregation, he notes, although this is more along the lines of class than it is race. “People tend to move in tribes,” he says. “You think of people in literature and you picture a certain kind of person… you think of people in music and picture a different kind of person.” It’s clear what he means by this.

His Paris show, titled ‘Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin’, is named after an Aramaic phrase lifted from the Biblical story of Balthazaar, whom God scolded for throwing too many parties in Babylon.

The phrase roughly translates to “The Kingdom’s Days Are Numbered”, which is precisely how Massiah feels about the kingdom he’s built around himself. Does that make him Balthazaar?

Perhaps. Massiah left the Church at age 18 and has since worked through what he refers to as an “atheist stage”, shouting down any mention of God as if he were Richard Dawkins. He’s since opted for a more “live and let live” approach, he says. “I’m into something called amoral egoism… which I think we need to rebrand as absolute empathy. The idea is that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, and everyone is motivated by the same drive—which is doing something that is good for themselves. We should all be able to empathise with that. It’s not necessarily a way to act or to behave, but it’s a view of the world that’s close to my heart.”

Back to Christian morals, though, for the sake of the show. Judging by his career decisions, Massiah did not take warmly to the moral in Balthazar’s cautionary tale, to which he returned time and again during childhood when his Christian parents would make him watch cartoons about the stories in the Old Testament. One was Hanna-Barbera’s Daniel and the Lion’s Den, in which the parable of Balthazaar unfolds and God’s warning (‘Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin’) is spelt out in a special font which has been specially reproduced by a friend of Massiah’s for the Paris show. Large-scale screen prints of his poetry in these bespoke letters form the core of the exhibition, while the audience is invited to compose their own poems from a selection of 100 words provided by Massiah, which will then be packaged into a fridge magnet to take home as a keepsake.

When discussing his own role at the opening and the general sequence of events, Massiah reveals he has choice words for the art scene.

“It’s funny art openings, innit…,” he begins. “I almost feel like there should be a bit more sanctity in the gallery space.” He manages to keep his cool and articulates a more diplomatic argument than the one bubbling beneath the surface. “Someone has taken the time to put this together, and people are just going around not really taking it in, and drinking champagne… It’s like, we’re not here for the art, are we, really?” What he wants is more “appreciation” and “respect… for another human being’s expression.”

He receives a call midway through our recording which he accidentally takes, having meant to hang up and, he tells me, get back to them later. “That was the person I was telling you about.” Massiah had earlier described his romantic status to me as “up in the air”. “I see lots of people… I was back and forth with one particular person recently, [asking] whether or not we should become partners… But I don’t think I’m cut out for it. I don’t think that’s really me.”

“I collect people,” he goes on. “I really enjoy having a lot of people to speak to and catch up with… because I glean so much from them creatively and energetically. I’m a very curious person, and no doubt they are too… but I think my curiosity is stronger than theirs.” Perhaps unfortunately, I do fear his is stronger than everyone’s.

By William Hosie for Semaine.
Photography by Laurie Lynch.