Live review #1: Roger McGough
Liverpool poet? Mersey versifier? British Beat? Rock rhymer? Witty wordsmith turned pop star, now eminence grise of the pithy stanza
Square Chapel Arts Centre, Halifax, West Yorkshire, October 22nd, 2021
FOR A small number of years, Roger McGough was the voice of a series of TV ads for Britain’s poshest supermarket chain Waitrose. Eventually, the commercial appeal of the gentle Merseyside twang waned and he lost a lucrative contract.
Much later, his agent got in touch to say that an East African gambling concern was keen to promote its products and, a little bizarrely, McGough was seen as the perfect voice to set the roulette wheels and fruit machines of Uganda and Kenya a’rolling.
But McGough, arguably England’s best-known and most-loved poet and speaking to a modest 60-strong crowd on a Yorkshire Friday night as the Halifax Festival of Words weekend commenced, could not allow himself to become a tool of an international betting syndicate, the catalyst to draw new generations of young men and women into the fierce snare of cruel chance.
So, he said no, a moral rather than material choice made, a little bit of self-regulation by the unofficial poet laureate of this land, something the British government expects of the booming gambling companies but will probably never see. Yet this little man of the crisp couplet and the large folio definitely demonstrated his own decency by resisting lucre’s often dubious lure.
This personal story he shared amid two half-hour sets of largely new writing seems quite typical of the man: his largely gentle, but always astute, stanzas reveal a love, a care, for the world he sees, a convincing humanity which is touching.
The critical he can do – the management of the pandemic, the blunders of Brexit, attitudes to the old – but the caustic and the scathing are largely beyond his pen. A strength or a weakness?
For me, his lack of cold-eyed cynicism is actually refreshing: the observations are true, often amusing, but they are blissfully devoid of the cruelty of our times. His generally brief sketches from life are actually a soothing antidote to the toxic, 280-character snakebites that poison rather than restore.
A verdict? Beat? Hardly. His poems avoid the scabrous and scatological or indeed the candidly confessional. Angry Young Man? Not that either. The anger is very much contained and youth long gone. But McGough is far from mired in the past.
His latest collection Strength in Numbers featured strongly here and the greatest hits of 1967’s classic The Mersey Sound were out of view. But his extended homage ‘The Ginsberg Skeleton’ reminded us of his original American inspirations.
Based on the US poet’s late-in-life poem ‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’, it is a McGough work that updates Allen Ginsberg’s own home targets and gives the Gothic saga an Anglo flavour – digs at arms salesmen, dope dealers, tobacco vendors, false prophets and even Isis.
It’s a reminder that this best-selling poet, remarkably turned late-60s pop success as a member of the Scaffold with McCartney’s brother Mike, still has some fire in his belly. But the flames are merely warming; they will not burn this particular house down.
Signing up…McGough adds his signature to copies of his latest collection Safety in Numbers