Artists and Comedians
Rory Motion
The last thirty years as a poet, singer/songwriter, comedian, and tree impressionist have established Rory Motion as one of the most popular and innovative performers on the national circuit. Born in 1956, the son of a simple Yorkshire sales executive, Rory has delighted both natives and foreigners alike with his deceptively laid-back style, keen intelligence and quirky wit.
Rory honed his stage skills on the stand-up comedy circuit in the late 80´s and early 90´s, being described by Time Out as a “a post-Hippie comic“, which by way of cheerful response is how he described Time Out. Finding the increasingly gladiatorial nature of the stand-up world too limiting, he decided in 1992, following a successful national tour with Frank Skinner, to move to Bwlch y Cibau, a small village in Powys.
Rory´s instinct for poetry, song and story found nurture in the bard-friendly hills and soon he was extending his engagements to include folk and literature festivals. A regular contributor to national radio, he has appeared on comedy shows, the literature panel game ´Booked´ with Roger McGough and Miles Kington, and written and presented his own programmes on Radios 4 and 5. In 2001, Rory and fellow poet Matt Harvey created a series of programmes called ´One Night Stanza´ which, in a victory for poetry lovers everywhere, made the coveted 6:30 Radio 4 comedy slot. In the same year Cassells published Rory´s collection of poems, ´Neither is the Horse´.
Rory´s fascination and evident facility with language has led him to perform in other tongues. In his French-speaking persona, Raymond Bizarre, Rory enjoyed a network radio hit in France with his epic homage to Eric Cantona, and in a triumphant accolade for the Englishman abroad, the disc was played before international matches at the Parc de Princes on several occasions.
In 2004 he travelled to the remote shores of Lake Malawi, in Mozambique, and performed to different villages in the local language of Chi Nyanja, an offshoot of Swahili. The results of this remarkable adventure were recorded in a half-hour programme called ´Hi Nyanja´, for Radio 4 (listen to it in the videos section)
Rory performed at every Glastonbury Festival from 1989 up until 2008, when sadly the festival was taken over by an American multi-national corporation called Live Nation, and hippies were banned from attending. His unique blend of wit and wisdom appeals to a wide range of generations and political leanings. In the space of one week in the nineties, Rory appeared on radios 2 and 4, performed at an anthroposophical conference, and followed a benefit gig for the anarchist magazine Squall by being guest speaker for the Harrogate Rotarians.
Rory also paints landscapes, interiors and text-pieces and in 2007 exhibited at the Peter Pears gallery in Aldeburgh, in conjunction with a reading at the Aldeburgh poetry festival.
Rory is a huge fan of the late Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band and in 2013 and 2014 had the pleasure of supporting the Magic Band at the York Duchess. In 2015, at the Ilkley Literature festival, Rory gave an entertaining, and apparently very successful, practical tutorial on the mysteries of solving cryptic crosswords.
