Poet Lucas Jones On Live Culture: ‘It’s Everything.’

Poet Lucas Jones performed his poetry to a live audience for the first time ever today, to a sold-out crowd at the Saatchi Gallery during the inaugural Chelsea Arts Festival. Jones read his poems to a soundtrack of classical music played by a live orchestra, the perfect backdrop to his emotive, personal work. He was visibly moved as he told the room “in this day and age it’s easy to forget that there are real people out there,” before asking members of the audience to shout out their names, in isolation and then in unison. His reading included new works along with some of his most popular poems, including I Will Teach My Boys To Be Dangerous Men, with the violinist dropping to a diminuendo as he uttered the line “I will teach my boys to be light when they can, and know in the darkness to reach for my hand”. 

Lucas’ poems, while spanning politics and love and masculinity, carry the common thread of deep human emotion, and the packed Saatchi gallery crowd was completely still as he read. He finished his performance by encouraging the crowd to sing along with him, while he spoke his last few bars of poetry. 

Speaking after his show, Lucas told us what live culture events like this one mean, in a world where online content is king. “It’s everything,” he said. “I remember the first time I saw a play. I saw Blood Brothers live, and to this day, that’s the reason I do this, trying to chase that feeling, that emotion. It’s life or death to me, it’s everything.”

Following his poetry reading, Jones gave a Q&A, where members of the audience asked him about his inspiration, and shared the impact of his poetry. One audience member revealed that her 18-year-old son followed Lucas on TikTok, asking him about his themes of youth and masculinity. “We must teach boys it’s cooler to be nice to people,” he said, referencing the alternate male ‘role models’ in the digital sphere, such as right-wing influencer Andrew Tate. “We must teach them to be respectful, they resonate with that. If you bully the bully, you make fun of the people who bully, you can do that and create a better world.”

Given that Jones has built his poetry career via online platforms, he revealed that he has a complicated relationship with the social media landscape that he’s found fame on. “The idea that one of my poems is a ‘flop’, if it doesn’t get certain stats, I hate it. It makes me question the authenticity of it all,” he says. Authenticity, though, is something Jones has in abundance, and his success is as hard-earned as any ‘overnight sensation’, and has required a thick skin. “When I put my work online there was nothing but hate for the first 3 months,’ he reveals. ‘Nothing but death threats. You learn not to take it at face value. You think ‘that person must be in such pain’. For them to take that time in the day to say such cruel things.”

The generosity Lucas extends to his trolls is also well-informed, as his works explore works of depression and suicide that attracts feedback from some of social media’s most vulnerable users. “Someone messaged me, about to jump off a bridge,” he told the audience. “And as he stood there, he scrolled on his phone and found one of my poems. He didn’t jump and afterwards he got in touch to tell me my work had that impact. That message meant that whatever negativity it took to get to that point was worth it. My work has value.”

This value is undeniable and far-reaching, his first ever live show, at the Chelsea Arts Festival, an instant sell-out: the embodiment of his online impact. A school teacher in the audience implored Lucas to consider visiting schools to bring poetry to life for GCSE students, having seen the inspirational impact his account has had on her students. 

The most captivating thing about Lucas and his poems, is the way they spill out of him. He frequently creates reactive political and current affairs works, emotional and unapologetic. Risky, perhaps, in this current climate, but a risk that is more than paying off for one of Britain’s brightest poetry talents. 

Perhaps it’s because for Jones, the greater risk would be to stay quiet. “I overcame the vulnerability [of putting my work out there] by realising that if you don’t do it, you’re worse off. If you don’t say the thing, express yourself authentically, if you hide away from your desire to express yourself, you’re actually far worse off,” he told us afterwards. “Criticism is funny, we can handle that. We can’t handle not being authentic and not expressing what your purpose is.”  

 

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Find out what’s still to come at the Chelsea Arts Festival 2025 here.