Roger's brilliant, which we all know...

Photo: Colin Clarke ARPS

Roger McGough - poet extraordinaire

Roger McGough at Oldham Coliseum
Chronicle Online review by Norman Warwick
OLDHAM Library Service has been running its annual Bookmark festival from April 18 and even by the second day there was a real buzz around town.

The buzz became murmurs of recognition, deep sighs of appreciation of cleverly contrived lines and machine-gun bursts of laughter as Roger McGough read from his new collection of poetry, “As Far As I Know”.

As far as I know that title might have been dreamed up by a marketing strategist, but it’s a phrase that carries more gravitas as the title of a book. It compels us to consider whether what we know can actually be measured quantatively. Or perhaps if it was simply employed for want of something better...

Given that he has been one of our leading poets for more than 40 years, it is fair to assume McGough knows a fair amount. He came to public attention as a Mersey poet and member of the Scaffold, which also featured Paul McCartney’s brother Mike, and which had two Sixties hits with Lily the Pink and Thank You Very Much.

So it was no idle exercise in name-dropping when McGough spoke of his dealings with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, though his tongue-in-cheek claim to have persuaded Hendrix to quit his ukulele lessons and take up the guitar wasn’t true. Well, as far as I know.

He also recounted a long conversation with a young Bob Dylan in which he gave Dylan career advice that with hindsight came to fruition, he reveals. His poem ended brilliantly with McGough’s final piece of advice to the departing young troubadour: “don’t forget to write”, to which McGough added the sotto voce and rather forlorn, “but he never did”.

This was a perfect example of McGough’s ability to deliver phrases, open to a multitude of interpretations, that move us to laughter or tears.

He later paid tribute to poets such as Dylan Thomas, praising him in a tweet of not quite 140 characters, and offered a hilarious suggestion of how some of Thomas’s amazing language and phraseology was picked up by regulars in his local pub.

McGough himself seems to have led the colourful life that must be some sort of job requirement for all famous poets. He recalled an encounter with a “Mersey Mafia” that surely didn’t exist, as far as I know. His family was peopled with colourful characters like his Uncle Eno, a sumo wrestler; Uncle Malcolm, a shot-putter; Uncle Pat, a failed cricketer, and Uncle Jed who raced pigeons but never beat them. Cousin Nell was a frogman and Cousin Daisy a street-corner solicitor. As far as I know, it’s not compulsory for a poet to have a family full of such characters, but it must help.

This was a joyous evening and rightly played to a huge early evening poetry audience. Not only did fans fill the Coliseum stalls, but nearly all of them joined him in the bar for a signing event for his new book afterwards.

He signed my copy “To Norm, Roger McGough”. At least he did as far as I know. The scrawl might actually say “For Norm”, which makes a difference...