Live review #3: Oliver James Lomax

The Beats and the beats blended almost seamlessly in a poetic soirée that spanned Mumbles, Manhattan and Manchester

Oliver James Lomax and Jeff Towns, Portico Library, Manchester, February 25th, 2023

‘I’M 39,’ interjects one young poet to a veteran bookseller eulogising a legendary dead poet. It clicks with rising writer Oliver James Lomax that he is the very same age – so young! – that Dylan Thomas had attained by the time he pressed the self-destruct button on that long journey into the New York night back in the winter of 1953.

It is a poignant, telling moment in an early evening gathering in the stunning Portico Library, a Greco-Roman tribute, a Cottonopolis homage, built when Manchester was on the way to its satanic-mills apex and strident, statement-making columns began to appear on its streets almost as often as those in the city’s daily Guardian newspaper.

Today, the Portico is one of those reclaimed urban spaces where a functional pub operates below yet above, in the upper rafters, an ancient book hoard survives and provides a brilliant room – high ceiling, ornate glass roof and a towering square of ascending bookcases – for poetry and music to find common purpose.

In fact, while the setting was atmospheric and attention grabbing, the occasion was also one of the more unusual live events I’ve ever attended: an early evening start before even Saturday’s football games were even over and a bill that featured both presentation and some conversation and a performed a set of poems with band.

The content stretched over 70 years and more. Jeff Towns, co-author of the quirkily fascinating The Two Dylans – a shared tribute to Thomas and Zimmerman – was first to speak with an engaging wander through the Welsh wizard’s engagement with multiple icons of midcentury America, from Charlie Chaplin to Igor Stravinsky and Marilyn Monroe, but also a particularly enjoyable dissection of that writer’s connection to, and influence on, yes Bob Dylan, but also the Beat Generation clan more generally.

Pictured above: Jeff Towns discusses Dylan Thomas

Towns, a collector and long-standing vintage book trader, is a bibliophile first and a businessman second. He almost drooled with love and pride as he showed us Allen Ginsberg’s very own signed copy Dylan Thomas Collected Poems, discovered, as with many speculative finds, in a random pile of much less promising titles.

Perhaps most intriguing was Towns’ detective work on a tale that linked Thomas with William Burroughs, a noir anecdote with two very distinct chapters. In the mid-1940s, Burroughs had faked a prescription for a heroin substitute and was arrested. A crooked doctor called Dr Milton Feltenstein agreed to claim ownership of the signature and one of the century’s most notorious narcotic addicts was thus sprung from custody.

Less than a decade later, as Thomas was reeling from the impact of seriously ill health exacerbated by a massive intake of alcohol, Feltenstein was called to treat the poet as he lay on the precarious brink. Yet it was probably the gram and a half of morphine injected into his system to ease his desperate condition that probably led to his actual demise.

Pictured above: Ginsberg’s own signed copy of a Dylan Thomas collection

Oliver Lomax, as headliner, brought us into the present. His poems have been making waves in the city – he’s from Greater Manchester town of Bolton – and nationally – he has even read at 10 Downing Street as part of a National Poetry Day, a happening he relates with a wry cynicism – over the last couple of years and he favours both the printed page and spoken word tradition to share his work.

Last year, Lomax, after a number of slim verse collections, recorded and released his first album on vinyl. Here, with full group in tow, he showcased the whole of that new record, the significantly named Working Class Love Poem, a vivid cycle of autobiographical stanzas reflecting on family history alongside his own more recent experiences.

Pictured above: Oliver Lomax and band at the Portico Library

This rising scribe once taught sculpture at the same Liverpool College of Art where Lennon reluctantly learnt the skills of the calligrapher. Now Lomax chips away at the stone of his own memories to produce warm-blooded portraits of much-loved and missed relatives, heartfelt sketches that provide the bedrock of most of his word painting.

He goes back to the meeting of his grandparents – the grandfather has been a ‘Desert Rat’ fighting at El Alamein – and the fact the de-mobbed returnee takes the war-time clerical role of the woman he will soon meet again on the dancefloor and then marry. Nana appears in a further piece, by now suffering from dementia yet singing the words of Doris Day’s ‘Secret Love’ impeccably and unerringly to her visiting grandson.

The grandmother appears in yet another story. Lomax is a very young boy who has secured his first-ever record, a flexidisc sold with a box of Frosties breakfast cereal. The single is De La Soul’s ‘Three is the Magic Number’ and the poet recalls that same elderly woman gamely, indeed joyfully, dancing to the hip hop tune he so admires.

Yet it is not all domestic nostalgia. Lomax cleverly, acutely, takes us deep into pandemic territory when he recalls his regular visits to an Altrincham cemetery, a quiet place he can escape to, think and write in the depths of Covid. He encounters a homeless man, a vagrant whose heartbreaking accoutrements tell their own tale: amid the rumpled sleeping bag are the ‘shoelace tourniquet’ and ‘wine in a Lucozade bottle’.

Accompanying all of these touching, frequently kitchen sink recollections are Northangerland, a refined four-piece ensemble, their soundtrack beautifully, deliciously, splashed across every line, underpinning yet never distracting.

Guitarist Pual Hesketh delivers fragmented arpeggios, Tom Sumnall’s bass is laidback, almost languid, composer/producer Mark Kyriacou’s keys breathe cool washes of sound and Ian ‘Budgie’ Jones caresses his drums in the most restrained manner: brushes, soft beaters, tapping out the gentlest of codes.

The sonic backdrop has elements of deepest Mancunia: hints of Marr on the fret figures, suggestions of 808 State on the subtle electronic swells. But it is necessarily, inevitably, that the words of privileged and Lomax delivers them with meaning yet also a quietly confident nonchalance.

To close, we are taken on a customised space trip, a fanciful dip into the wild cosmos, called ‘Last Poem before Mars’. This extra terrestrial episode celebrates the poet’s own influences – Picasso, Larkin, Bacon, Dickens, Berryman, Wolfe, London among them – but Lomax saves the final line for a surprising gang of musical heroes: ‘Me, I’m just a roadie for the Grateful Dead’.

See also: ‘Lomax song haul meets double Dylan’, February 20th, 2023; ‘Book review #9: The Two Dylans’, August 27th, 2022