HIP concludes its two part interview/Q & A with, poet and Radio 4’s Poetry Please presenter, Roger McGough. If you missed Part One in
Issue 132 you can read it here 

By John Cornelius

Roger McGough 
PICTURE: supplied by Roger McGough 

JC: You and the other Liverpool Poets, as well as a few others like e e cummings, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Charles Bukowski, plus of course the American beats, opened up poetry and the feasibility of aspiring to write one’s own stuff to people (like me for example) who’d been put off by the looming grey wall of the English Literature Establishment. This seems to have gone into reverse today and once again there is a lot of on-the-page poetry (not so much with performance poetry) that doesn’t invite the reader in at all. If a publisher trumpets that such-and-such a poet has this or that academic seal of approval, it puts me off, whereas if the poet is a taxi driver or a midwife, for example, writing from personal experience, I’d be intrigued. Do you concern yourself with much of what goes on contemporaneously? You’ve said you’re happy just to plough your own furrow. I assume you wear stout boots when you’re doing it…

RM: I have to concern myself with the poetry that is going on around me in my capacity as the presenter of Poetry Please on Radio 4. And what has been interesting this past year has been attempts by the BBC to widen its listenership to include and involve younger poets. ‘Can’t we have more Spoken Word poetry on the programme?’ is often the cry (Strange really, isn’t that what we’ve been doing for 30 years?)
But I know what they mean. Lots of good stuff around, but too
many young poets eager for fame, pushing unrevised poems on YouTube.

JC: Former Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has called you ‘The People’s Poet’ and unlike your original Liverpool contemporaries, which included the Beatles, you don’t mind being uncool enough to admit to being a football fan and also you’ve held onto your Roman Catholic faith. I suppose this is an extension of the previous question but has being ‘just a regular guy’ been a help or a hindrance? And is it true! How many ‘regular guys’ have ‘Poet’ on their passport…

RM: Actually, Carol Ann called me ‘The Patron Saint of Poetry’ which I was happy to sign up to, and I think that my religion has helped keep me ‘umble. My mother always told me I should push myself, otherwise people would take advantage, but I have found that pushiness doesn’t come natural to me. I’m more of a ‘Melting into the Foreground’ kind of guy.

JC: Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney – Lennon and McCartney – you’ve met ‘em all. I wonder who made the biggest impression on you. I’d love to know who the biggest disappointment was too, but I know you’re too tactful to say…

RM: Yes, Bowie, Bob Dylan, Hendrix, Susan Sarandon, Her Majesty, I could go on. And what do they all have in common? They all met me.

JC: I noted that your latest collection joinedupwriting – which, for what it’s worth, I think is your best for years – is structured or arranged much like your solo performance gigs, with some clever, punning crowd-pleasers leading to an increasing number of thoughtful/philosophical pieces, reflecting on life,  death and everything to do with ageing. It’s too late now for you to ‘Die a Young Man’s Death’ as per one of your early ones. Do you find the more solemn ones popping out more frequently these days?

RM: One would expect so, but the solemnity has always been there, although crowded out on occasion. Writing poems for children has been a great source of joy for me, and I believe an important part of what makes me a poet.

JC: You’ve written for theatre – everything from P C Plod, The Wind In The Willows via Yellow Submarine through to translations of Moliere; TV commercial voiceovers, and you’re still doing poetry performance gigs as well as presenting Poetry Please with great success despite being given two Radio 4 graveyard slots – Sunday afternoons and late on Saturday nights – and last time I looked you were President of the Poetry Society. The obvious question is: have you thought about retiring, given that you are now in your eighties? Or is the answer, as I suspect it would be, that this is what you’d do for fun as well as profit: why stop doing something you enjoy. In a way, you’ve spent your life doing stuff that other people promise themselves they’ll do when they retire, although I don’t think you’ve got a Harley Davidson yet. Do they do mobility scooters…?

RM: When I started off as a poet I subscribed to the Romantic image, and reckoned I would sacrifice marriage, children and respectability for the sake of my art. My motto: Live fast and die young. But having failed on both counts I consider myself very lucky. I still need to write poems and I still enjoy performing, but when the writing stops I’ll hang up my touring boots.

JC: Thanks, Roger. So much more to discuss but space forbids. There are plenty of local gigs here and a thriving poetry population, so hope we’ll see you around Hastings sometime soon….

RM: John, It’s been a pleasure.

By John Cornelius

Hastings Independent Press has in a short space of time acquired a formidable reputation for acute arts coverage. John Cornelius has reviewed live performances and books on its Literature pages including work by Pete Brown, Kate Tempest, Clive James, Desmond Morris, John Cooper Clarke, Christie Watson, Roger McGough, Spencer Leigh and Mike Evans.

Here we publish (in two parts) John’s exclusive interview with ‘people’s poet’ Roger McGough.

Roger McGough 
PICTURE: supplied by Roger McGough 

Razor-sharp poet and wit Roger McGough first made his mark well over fifty years ago as a member of Scaffold, a three-man satirical poetry/comedy/performance group comprised of Roger, John Gorman and Mike ‘McGear’ – a futile name change as everyone knew that Mike was Paul McCartney’s brother. Roger had strong associations with the Beatles: he once lent John Lennon two shillings and never got it back. It still rankles. Roger was also once detailed to show the young Bob Dylan around Liverpool after a gig there but got no further than the bar at the Blue  Angel club.

Although their credentials were artsy and theatrical, Scaffold achieved chart success with comedy numbers like ‘Thank U Very Much’ and ‘Lily the Pink’, a reworked version of an old army song which reached Number 1 on the pop charts in 1968. While his Scaffold colleagues seem to have faded from the public eye, Roger has stayed at the forefront as that rare thing, a popular, successful poet who is also respected and indeed loved by fellow poets. He presents Radio 4’s Poetry Please and has published countless books and collections, including his latest, Joinedupwriting (reviewed here in issue 126). Although a born-and-bred scouser, Roger has lived in West London for many years.

JC:  You [and I for that matter] hail originally from an unromantic part of north Liverpool, famously dismissed as a miserable dump by First World War poet and novelist Robert Graves who was barracked there during his army days. Your dad was a docker and you did some holiday work down at the docks. The dockers all had nicknames: a light-fingered chap who cracked open crates of goods ‘by mistake’ was known as the Diesel, because he would say, “Dese’ll do for me Mam and dese’ll do for our kid.” Another fellow was called Guy Fawkes because he came on site every morning and said, “This place wants blowing up.” Do you think that the accident of birth taking place in Liverpool was a help or a hindrance? I think you once said that associations with the Beatles and the pop world was initially an advantage but that later it cost you some literary credibility.

RM: Had I been born and brought up in Hastings for instance, would I still have become a poet? Certainly, but a different kind of poet I assume. I had no cultural ambitions growing up, but I was surrounded by jokers, punsters and shaggy dog story tellers. I couldn’t compete at the time, but wordplay was to become part of my skill-set as a writer. Publishing the anthology with Brian Patten and Adrian Henri in the mid-sixties coincided with the rise of Beatlemania, and the fact that the publisher added the title The Mersey Sound to what would have been Penguin Modern Poets no.10 was a successful marketing ploy. However, Brian and I felt uneasy about the association.

JC:   John Gorman was a very funny guy. Yoko Ono was doing one of her performances at the Bluecoat Chambers in Liverpool, wrapping herself round and round in bandages and toilet paper (as you do) while tied to a chair. Gorman called out, “Yoko, you’re wanted on the phone!” Mike was –  let’s be honest – the only one of the three of you who could sing in tune. Although personally I liked the album of sea shanties Scaffold recorded, especially the lovely Liverpool Lou, the group went through a disastrous phase of playing working men’s clubs and tacky nightspots. Do you still recall those days in horror or was it all grist to the mill, trying to be heard above the clatter and crash of pint glasses and the clucking of chickens-in-a-basket?

RM: The BBC television show The Scaffold Live at the Talk of the Town, transmitted in 1969, was well received by the public and could have led to a series, but we failed to impress the powers-that-be who considered us too wacky and irreverent (with a distinct lack of Oxbridgeness.) As you say, there followed the cabaret circuit, but to be fair, they weren’t ‘tacky nightspots’. The punters who flocked to the Fiesta, Stockton-on Tees and the Dolce Vita, Sheffield for instance, were dressed to the nines and very welcoming. Surreal perhaps, but not a painful experience. 

Sketch by John Cornelius

JC:  You brought out a straight prose autobiography for Century books about 12 years ago I think. Was it hard work, sustaining prose over a full-length book? Or did you take to it OK? I always thought your ‘Complete Poems’ retrospective collection amounted to an autobiography, almost accidentally.

RM: I actually enjoyed writing Said and Done. I received a commission from Random House which bought me the time to concentrate on delving into a past, real or imagined. In many ways it’s a prose poem, although normally when starting a poem I don’t know how it’s going to end, with the memoir I knew it was going to end in 2004. I worked on it for fourteen months and wrote 103,352 words if anybody is interested. 

JC:  The ‘Pop Poet’ tag brought yourself and Adrian Henri in particular a lot of sneering from the poetry establishment. Fellow traveller Brian Patten avoided it all to a large extent by escaping south early on and establishing himself in ‘respectable’ literary circles. You’ve pulled through all that, partly due to sheer staying power and outliving your critics. Good trick, that!  Although you’ve received a couple of gongs, a lot of people must wonder why you’ve never been made Poet Laureate, unlike Adrian’s protégée, Carol Ann Duffy, who I recall pulling pints in Peter Kavanagh’s pub, a.k.a. The Grapes, in Liverpool 8. Have you been overlooked, or, like Ben Zephaniah, have you turned it down? Andrew Motion said he became intellectually paralysed after being made Laureate and couldn’t write anything. I suspect it’s like getting a first class university degree – it makes your family proud but is ultimately meaningless when you’re faced with the blank sheet of paper. Any thoughts?

RM: I certainly wouldn’t have turned it down and assume that I have been regarded as ‘not serious enough.’

• Read part two of this HIP profile here

Q&A with HIP’s local literary correspondent John Cornelius

PART ONE [part two can be read here]

Sketch of Mike Evans by John Cornelius

Mike Evans played alto saxophone in the 1960s ‘Mersey Beat’ band, The Clayton Squares, later joining poet/painter/performer Adrian Henri to form the (still) unique rock-poetry-jazz ensemble, The Liverpool Scene. Later still he became a member of Deaf School, a chaotic art school band credited by none other than Suggs himself as the inspiration for his own band of crazies, Madness. In the intervening years, Mike has lived in Liverpool, London and France, pursuing a career as writer and editor of non-fiction books on subjects ranging from the history of vinyl to Leonard Cohen via Elvis Presley and many other subjects. I was glad to renew my acquaintance with Mike and his fashion designer wife Sue in Hastings recently. They are still very much together after a 50-year marriage, which must be a music biz record in itself.

JC: You’re based in France, you have a lovely cottage there. So what are you doing in Hastings?
ME: Well we’ve been living in a very quiet town in south-west France, in a wonderful house which we both adore, but you can get a bit stir-crazy after a while… especially after the previous forty years in London. So we’re here for a couple of months getting a feel for the area and hopefully house hunting.

JC: I’m sure you and Sue would fit in here; there’s a lively local arts/music scene. Fellow poet and Cream lyricist Pete Brown moved into the town a few years back. Of course you know Pete, going way back…?
ME: I first met Pete on the last day of the Aldermaston ban-the-bomb march, Easter Monday 1961. It was at the Albert Memorial on Hyde Park. I was at college in London, so we’d meet up a lot after that, and Pete introduced me to the sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith who gave me my first (and only!) sax lesson. 

JC:  The south coast seems to be a bit of a magnet for ex-Liverpool musicians, what with Paul McCartney down the road at Peasmarsh and your former Liverpool Scene colleague, guitarist Andy Roberts in Brighton, which is itself a bit of a crazy house these days, not called London-by-the Sea for nothing. If you want rip-offs, grime, and choking traffic you’ve no need to go all the way to London: you’ve got it right there in Brighton….I very well remember your seminal poetry collection, The City and the Slum Goddess and a superb set of poems inspired by the jazz horn-player Eric Dolphy. Does poetry still figure for you?
ME: Not really… my creative output in recent years has been the non-fiction you mention, mainly relating to music…

JC: A classic piece you did with the Liverpool Scene was the extraordinary Tramcar to Frankenstein, featuring the amazing Percy Jones on fretless bass, while you did your John Coltrane number. Sadly key members Adrian Henri, Bryan Dodson and Mike Hart are no longer with us…what’s Percy doing? I heard he was based in New York and still playing avant-garde jazz.
ME: Percy’s been in NYC for many, many years, I try and see him when I’m there, so have kept in touch and had a few beers together over the years. He’s still playing fusion stuff, jazz-rock, and doing sessions of course which I assume pays the bills. Last I heard he was in a reformed version of his old outfit Brand X…

• Part two of this interview will be in HIP Literature issue 128.

STAND UP COMEDIAN
By JOHN CORNELIUS

Just look at him
Always outraged
Always hands on hips
Always a curse
Upon his lips
Oops! He said fuck!
Oops he said shit!
What a wit!
Take a message to the stand-up comedian
From the man at the back with the frown
Tell the stand-up comedian
To shut up and fucking sit down…

(Taken from the chapbook Combing My Hair For The Hangman by John Cornelius)

It’s nothing unusual to walk past a local pub and hear a live band bashing out a couple of 1960s rock classics. What is unusual is to find that the author of those classics is on stage in that pub at that moment and is also a local resident.

Pete Brown sketched by John Cornelius

So it was on Friday night 28th September when Pete Brown and his fluidly staffed band the Hastings All Stars finished a masterly two sets of superb music with the Cream classics ‘White Room’ and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, the lyrics to both of which Pete wrote in collaboration with the late lamented Jack Bruce. He delved deeply into more songs he worked on with Bruce, ‘Scenes from an Imaginary Western’ and the amazing ‘Under the Volcano’ based on the legendary novel by Malcolm Lowry, a beat classic which made those of us who read it feel we were the only ones who had done so.  Pete’s recollections are as he admits sometimes bitter and downbeat but always spiced with a dry sense of humour.

The All Stars outstanding line up of keyboards, guitar, horns, bass and drums were augmented and topped off with the astonishing soaring vocal talents of Leanne Chantelle Duncan, showcased on numbers like ‘Summer In the City’ and the Isleys’ ‘Summer Breeze’, breathing new life into both.

The gig was part of the fringe festival of music in support of the homeless and Pete admitted publicly that it was only the good fortune of having written the aforesaid classics at the right time, now recycled in numerous Cream CDs, that saved him from a precarious bedsit life which is the lot of so many poets.

• For more information visit: facebook.com/officialpetebrown 

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Once you know the history of John Cornelius it’s difficult not to hear his poetry in your head, as you read it, with the deadpan wit, understated emotion and local-accent musicality of the 1960s Liverpool Beat Poets that he hung around with back in the day. That’s no bad thing. Understanding the roots of poetic expression will always bring extra dimensions and depth to words on a page.

Cornelius has been based in Hastings for some years now but first made his mark as a young
poet, lyricist, blues singer/guitarist and fine artist in his native Liverpool. He is well known for sketching the nightlife scene of the bohemian quarter of that famous port in his highly regarded book LIVERPOOL 8.

Combing My Hair For The Hangman, a thirty-six page chapbook of fifty-one poems, was published in 2012 and so I read this first before reviewing Cornelius’ latest collection. Besides, I really like the title, taken from one of the poems therein, which highlights the idea that whatever we do in life may not actually matter that much as (to quote a Tom Waites/Kathleen Brennan lyric) ‘…we’re all going to be just dirt in the ground.’

Trying to make sense of our lives whilst considering its transience, and sometimes seeming futility, is an often-explored theme in both literature and religious or philosophical thought. Many of my favourite writers, such as Celine, Kerouac, Bukowski and the US Beat Poets, have all examined it. Here, in ten short lines, Cornelius has reminded us that sometimes the tiniest of individual actions is not always necessarily that different to the greatest of achievements or most magnificent of deeds – a very Buddhist idea.

This ‘celebration of the ordinary’ crops up a lot in Cornelius’ poems, ‘Curvature’ and ‘Some Achievement’ being two examples. There are nods to people he admires as meaningful because he has noticed a fragility and natural nonchalance within them, as in ‘I Remember Sarah Kennedy’, ‘Daddy’s Girl (Amy Winehouse)’ and ‘Kirsty Wark.’ This latter poem, about the BBC’s Newsnight presenter, celebrates her plain and simple authority, and I’m with him on that.

Exposing the pornography of privilege is another subject Cornelius tackles skilfully, following in the tradition of some of our great protest lyricists and poets of the last fifty or more years. Think of Woody Guthrie and Dylan on the songwriting front, or Heathcote Williams, John Cooper Clarke and Attila the Stockbroker in terms of poetry collections. Examples in Combing My Hair For The Hangman are ‘Judge Ye Not’, ‘Why You Shouldn’t Shoot Birds’ and (my personal favourite for reasons of self-identification) ‘Work Ethic.’

Living In The Mystery, a perfect bound collection of sixty-four poems, was published in 2017 and brings a whole new dimension to Cornelius’ work. The theme of death and rebirth, or what Buddhists may refer to as ‘impermanence’, is revisited here through poems such as ‘Marius The Danish Giraffe’ and ‘Think On Lad’, yet there are also added references to sickness and physical frailty throughout this book.

Knowing little of this writer’s current personal circumstances (which I would not wish to anyway, as my review is based purely on the work) I could not help feeling that this collection looks back to a time when the mechanics of daily life were somewhat easier for him. There are many clues to a compromised physical health, including references to a wheelchair, and most obviously in ‘Hello Old Friend’, with a bracketed elucidation following the title stating “Before I became ill…”

That said; the title poem, which introduces this collection, is a concise and upbeat paean to the open mind. Cornelius is content to observe, dream and feel, without sentimentality or any automatic recourse to whatever we may have been told about the world in which we live. I like that idea as a starting point for poetry. Some of the most enduring poems are born from a perspective of youthful innocence, rejection of conformity, or world-weary rebellion.

Further on we find more autobiographical poems such as ‘What A Life’ detailing childhood reminiscences and emotional revelations, whilst also referencing some of the cultural influences that have shaped and informed this poet’s work. There is a subtext of yearning for his younger years underlying much of this collection and we know Cornelius is at an age (born in 1949) when many of his contemporaries are “…all going down like ninepins”. This is well illustrated in ‘How Am I Supposed To Say Goodbye’, ‘Bongo’ and ‘The Perfect Time Of Life’.

My stand-out favourite poem of Living In The Mystery, however, is the scouse-zen and haiku-like Messiah’s Blues. It was if by some subconscious telepathic arrangement with the author, that I just so happened to read this over the Easter weekend. It felt like perfect timing – poetic philosophy and wit neatly encapsulated into two short and simple lines. As is so often the case in creative expression, less is more.

I enjoyed reading this collection a lot and the variety of the work is refreshing. Here you’ll find everything from droll observations (‘The Hypochondriac’), recollected song fragments, celebrations of our own quirky Hastings (‘Ships In The Sky’ and ‘Winkle On The Stade’), right through to the confessional ‘Dockyard Song’ and the mortality-confronting ‘You Might Well Laugh’. It’s a sobering thought that one day some of us may find ourselves trapped in M & S and shopping hell “…Hiding out in a forest of trousers” (‘Homo Castratus’).

• Both of these collections are well worth their cover prices of £4.99 and £9.95 respectively. Edited by Alan Corkish they are published by and available through the prestigious Liverpool-based erbacce-press. Or if you’re in town pick them up from Bookbusters.

We hope you have enjoyed reading this article from Hastings Independent. The future of this volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.