Something to really Bragg about

Oct 6 2007 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

40 years on, the best-selling book of verse has been relaunched. Emma Pinch talks to the Mersey Poets

THE long hair, flowers and Beatles hysteria may have faded into the pages of history, but the verses of Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri remain as sharp as the day they were written.

Forty years after they stood before the mini-skirts and mop tops of young crowds at the Everyman, armed with only a sheet of poems, their anthology, The Mersey Sound, has been reissued and this Sunday ITV’s South Bank show celebrates their work as the best-selling book of verse of all time.

It also kicks off an anniversary tour which will see two sell-out dates performed at the Everyman, bringing them back where they started in the basement of what was then Hope Hall.

The 128-page anthology was published in 1967 and includes Tonight At Noon (Henri), Let Me Die a Young Man’s Death (McGough) and Little Johnny’s Confession (Patten).

McGough, Patten and Henri were regarded as the British answer to America’s Beat Poets. Their work marked a welcome break from the type of poetry their audiences had pored over at school, thanks to its immediacy, wry humour and familiar references to urban life – such as bus conductors and plastic daffodils – while dealing with issues spanning love, death and, daringly, politics.

Their Bohemian act emerged from the excitingly creative enclave of L8 and they earned their stripes performing at pubs and clubs from town to town.

Sadly, Adrian Henri died seven years ago, but his two pals will be taking turns to read some of his irreverent and razor sharp verses when on their new tour, which starts at London’s South Bank centre.

None imagined at the time of penning the works that they would still be being celebrated and reissued 40 years on – from under the banner of Penguin Modern Poets to Penguin Classic.

“You don’t think of it,” says Roger, who is 70 next month. “We were just so delighted to be published by Penguin and as part of that series. We had made it. Most of the poets in that series were famous, like Allen Ginsburg and the European poets. It was top drawer. But we mistrusted what we were in it for, maybe it was because of The Beatles or something.

“We all had our own books coming out the same year, so it felt like it was all the start of something. We didn't think beyond that.”

Their success brought little in the way of material gain.

“We were paid very little and a small percentage – 2½%. It didn’t change our way of living, it wasn’t like with records. You got an advance but it was nothing like what you get for a voice-over or a record.

“What it did was bring us the fame and popularity. People invited you to readings, so it was a leg up.”

The trio met at Streats coffee bar in 1961, when Brian was just 15 but already writing verse.

Their lifestyle contrasted with that of artistic contemporaries, The Beatles, arguably another collaboration of poets, who had catapulted them into, according to US writer Allen Ginsburg, “the centre of consciousness of the human universe”.

“Living in Liverpool in L8, teaching at the art college, that was good and very buzzy,” remembers McGough. “In a way, everyone had a lot of enthusiasm for things. We had Radio Merseyside beginning in 1967, which was something local and very good, and we were all on the up.

“It probably wasn’t swinging living in Seaforth, if you didn’t go to town very much. A lot of people didn't notice what was going on. How much swinging Liverpool was to a small group in the centre of town, I don’t know.”

Liverpool’s artistic community was tight-knit and, in an era rich with innovative new talent, the paths of future legends would regularly cross.

“My first wife was at college with John so he used to hang around the flat, as did Paul,” recalls McGough. “They would be at the Kardomah café wearing very expensive suede coats and . . . I was just a teacher.

“They were successful young men on their way to being rich and famous, so we regarded them with a bit of jealousy, really. We were pleased for them because they were putting Liverpool on the map. But they were in a very different world. It was like you admire great footballers. You can’t be one and don’t want to be one. We were doing something else.”

Patten, whose careers teacher at Sefton Park Secondary Modern told him he couldn’t be a writer because he would never pass any exams, found release in poetry from a young age.

“I grew up in a house with people who didn’t express themselves easily. Somehow I had been able to, and I tried to express the anger and pain and feelings of myself and people around me. I used the simplest words I could because I grew up in that environment and left school at 14.”

He adds: “I think we were aware of trying to write something different. It was a matter of cleaning the s--- out of the rabbit hutch.”

When McGough returned to Liverpool from Hull University in the early ’60s, he formed comedy group The Scaffold, with John Gorman and Mike McCartney, and in ’67-68 enjoyed a taste of pop stardom with Lily the Pink and Thank U Very Much.

His successful foray into the music world highlighted to him how it overlapped with the sort of poetry they were writing.

“We were doing Top of the Pops, then the Late Night Line-up with Joan Bakewell. I couldn’t get my head round the two things. We didn’t see it as high art and low art, they were just what we did, really. It was probably a good thing as poetry is something that should be entertaining and accessible, and people didn’t see that, and even today still argue that it should be very difficult.”

McGough and Patten are prodigious writers, having both been published dozens of times as solo writers since and still going. Both have been made Freemen of the City of Liverpool, and McGough has been made a CBE.

They are typically down to earth about their success. “You never feel you’ve achieved anything,” says Brian. “I don’t think people do deep inside.”

What are their hopes for The Mersey Sound for the next 40 years?

“I hope a few lodge into the brain and people pass them along,” says Roger. Best poem? “My next one.”

* THE South Bank Show screens on ITV1 tomorrow at 10.45pm. Roger McGough’s and Brian Patten’s show, 40 Love, is at the Everyman, October 19-20. The Mersey Sound (Penguin Classics, £9.99) is out now.

emma.pinch@dailypost.co.uk