If London were to elect its own poet laureate then it would be hard to look past East End wordsmith Tim Wells and not just because he’s a big fella.

Wells’s carefully honed verse can appear bold, brash and lewd to the uninitiated or un-listening. But watch the man in action, listen with a pint in your hand or delve into his new collection Everything Crash and you realise that for every bog door joke there is a piece of classical inspiration. And for every mention of a reggae floor-filler there is a crafted observation so acute that you want to steal it as your own.

Judge by appearances and you’ll miss the button-down shirt-attired suedehead verbalist deliver lines in Yiddish, Sylheti, Cockney and Jamaican patois.