While a student at St Martin’s School of Art, Ridley performed both poetry and monologues. This Live Art was an integral aspect of his work as an artist and would ultimately lead to him writing his first stage play, The Pitchfork Disney.

The sequence of poems, now collectively known as Love Songs For Extinct Creatures, was first performed in 1987, touring art galleries and clubs in both England and the rest of Europe. The sequence itself is in constant evolution, with new poems being added and old ones either revised or removed. The story of the sequence, however, remains the same. It tells of someone wanting to find love, finding love, the joy of love, the betrayal of that love, the grief of abandonment.

One critic has described Love Songs For Extinct Creatures as Ridley’s ‘most humane and accessible work to date.’ And, for those people who are only aware of the more shocking and controversial aspects of Ridley’s oeuvre, they can come as something of a surprise. This is the writer, don’t forget, whose stage plays are routinely described as ‘as nasty as it gets’ with calls for them to be ‘burnt by the public executioner.’

But Ridley has always described his plays as being primarily about love. Albeit a love that has be glimpsed through broken glass. Here, in these poems, that broken glass has gone. What we have left is a writer’s heart fully exposed and vulnerable. And to hear such a writer read this work for the first time in over a decade is an experience not to be missed.