ROGER MCGOUGH: The rhythm of life
ROGER McGough, whom fellow poet Carol Ann Duffy famously described as “the patron saint of poetry”, fell in love with poems in unusual circumstances: he was in physics class at his Christian Brothers School in Crosby, a town outside Liverpool.
“When I was in school, we used to have English lessons, and it was a case of, ‘Now we’re doing poetry today. Open your Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and turn to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’.’ Yawn. But then we had quite a fierce brother, called Brother Ryan, who taught us physics. We were terrified of him.
“I remember, sometimes, he would come in and, halfway through a physics lesson, he’d put down the leather strap, and he’d gaze out the window, and go, ‘Ah, to hell with it’, and he’d recite a poem off the top of his head; sometimes a Yeats poem, sometimes a poem in Irish. We were entranced.
“Then, he’d come out of it and go back to being a physics teacher,” McGough says.
“But those recited poems, delivered out of context, sparked the imagination in a way they didn’t in an English lesson. I’ve always thought that poetry — the way you look at the world, the way you find words — is everywhere in a sense. It just doesn’t belong in the book or in the library.”
One of the hallmarks of McGough’s poetry is his accessibility. ‘Let Me Die a Young Man’s Death’ was one of the first poems to be selected by the BBC, as part of an anthology of the nation’s favourite 100 poems.
His poems use everyday language. They delve into dark corners and can be irreverent, like his imagined tryst with the queen in ‘Summer With the Monarch’: “She told me next morning/I’ll never love another/I’ve always fancied weirdos/I appoint you Royal lover.”
McGough was born on the outskirts of Liverpool in November, 1937. Both sides of his family, including his mother’s 12 McGarry siblings, were Irish Liverpudlian.
He has vivid memories of the shelling during the Second World War.
“I remember being taken out of bed, in my pyjamas, and told to put on my dressing gown and being carried on my dad’s shoulders to the air-raid shelter. There used to be one at the bottom of every street.
“We were evacuated for a short time — my sister and I, with my mother. I could draw and recognise enemy bombers, like a Messerschmitt. We used to find the fins of incendiary bombs amongst the debris on the streets after a house had been blown up.
“If there wasn’t time to get to the shelter, we used to go under the stairs, where there was a cupboard in the hall. My dad would put us down on a mattress, already there, with me and my sister on the bottom, my mum on top of us, and my dad on top of the three of us, and then wait for the sirens to stop, and we’d go back to bed — hopeless, really, if a bomb fell on us.
“I was too young to know the fear my mum and dad must have gone through, which stayed with them all through their lives, I suppose, and maybe some nervousness was passed onto me, in a way, without me knowing it. It must have had an effect.
“One of the poems in my new book is about running across a minefield, past the barbed wire, when I was about three years of age; I was rescued by my auntie, who was then a teenager. In my imagination, when I think about this, I was chasing a red ball. It turns out — from talking to my auntie not that long ago — I was chasing a dog, and the dog blew up in front of me. I’ve no recollection of it. All I’ve got is the memory of chasing a red ball. How the mind covers up.”
McGough started writing poetry while studying French at the University of Hull, where Philip Larkin was a librarian. McGough was too shy to talk shop with the great poet, but sent him a sheaf of poems in the post. Larkin responded with mixed praise: “You walk an impressionistic tightrope and sometimes it’s a success and sometimes you fall off.”
McGough taught French for a few years, before his career in performance poetry took off. Penguin published an anthology called The Mersey Sound in 1967. It featured McGough and two other Liverpudlians, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri. The collection, which cashed in on the pop fever that was gripping Merseyside, sold 500,000 copies.
McGough also topped the charts with the pop group, The Scaffold, penning their No. 1 hit, ‘Lily the Pink’ in 1968. The group, which included the poet Mike McGear, a brother of Paul McCartney, morphed from being a type of Fringe theatre troupe into a music group, when The Beatles’s manager, Brian Epstein, briefly took over their management.
McGough knew the Beatles and helped write the script for the film, Yellow Submarine. His first wife, Thelma, dated Paul McCartney and she went to art college with John Lennon. “They were that bit younger,” he says. “I was a teacher when they were in Hamburg, coming back wearing flashy leather gear. I was wearing long, corduroy jackets and swotting away in a comprehensive school, so there was jealousy there. John had a dark sense of humour. He used put-downs. Paul’s comedy was jollier. Some people liked John, but I found him a bit cruel.”
McGough, who has been given a CBE and the Freedom of the City of Liverpool, has knocked across many of the 20th century’s showbiz icons in his travels, including Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and, onetime in a nightclub, Marlon Brando.
“I was with Mike McGear — Mike McCartney. I had become manager of three Liverpool girls and was going to make them into The Supremes, but they couldn’t sing, unfortunately, which was detrimental to their career, but they were all great, lively girls.
“Mike and I were down in a club, The Speakeasy. One of the girls came up and said, ‘Roger, Mike, come here. I want you to meet this actor.’ So we walked across the floor and there was Marlon Brando.
“She said, ‘Oh, Marlon, this is Roger McGough, a poet, and this is Michael McCartney,’ and she whispered to Marlon Brando, ‘He’s Paul McCartney’s brother.’ And then she turned and said, ‘This is Marlon Brando. He’s an actor’.”
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