In the summer of 1967, Tony Richardson of Penguin Books took a chance. Then Penguin’s poetry editor, he devoted number ten of the highly prestigious Penguin Modern Poets series to three unknown and relatively unpublished young writers from Liverpool. The book, featuring Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, would have its own generic title,The Mersey Sound, and be something of a leap in the dark. It would also be a big break for the three writers. The print run, as large as 20,000, would guarantee status, and steady sales were expected over the next ten years. Within three...

To understand the sixties is to understand the period that provoked them. As described in Ian MacDonald’s account of the Beatles’ music,Revolution in the Head, ‘any domestic film of the fifties conveys the genteel, class-segregated staidness of British society at that time. The braying upper-class voices on newsreels, the tired nostalgia for the war, all of which conspired to breed unrest among the young.’ John Lennon, in particular, loathed the decade’s stiff and pompous soullessness, which may have been relatively comfortable for the generation that had endured the war, but was for the newly termed ‘teenagers’ a stifling time...

Less than a mile north of Bootle, Liverpool’s most lugubrious outreach, the arid suburban plain of Seaforth spreads monotonously along Bridge Road, heading northwards to Waterloo, before reaching the more desirable expanses of Litherland and Crosby. Bordered by the drab waters of the Liverpool–Leeds canal, it was in this distinctly unpromising location that on 9 November 1937 Roger McGough was born in a three-up three-down at 11 Ruthven Road, close to, but the wrong side of, ‘posher parts over the hill’.

The sounds of tugs’ foghorns on the Mersey were early memories. They also stimulated images and ideas that...

The island of Mauritius is a remote dot in the Indian Ocean. Famous as the home of the dodo and two renowned stamps, the 1847 Penny Red and the Twopenny Blue, it had long impressed travellers and writers. One was Charles Baudelaire, who saw the seductive beaches in ‘Parfum Exotique’ as a place where

nature gives

Peculiar trees and tasty fruits.

Men whose bodies are slim and strong

And women whose eye is astonishing in its frankness.

It was here that Louis Ernest Henri Celine was born in 1854. The son of a Master Mariner, a natural traveller and adventurer,...

In the 1950s, with the exception of Soho, the only place for any aspirational painter, poet, musician, bohemian or ‘bon viveur’ on a tight budget was Liverpool 8. The area was described by George Melly inThe Observeras a ‘multi-racial slum waiting in raddled beauty for the planners’ bulldozers’, and more positively in Adrian Henri’s prose-poem ‘Liverpool 8’ as a place ‘where you play out after tea … Back doors and walls / with names, kisses scrawled or painted … A new cathedral at the end of Hope Street …Wind / blowing inland from Pierhead bringing the smell of...

Born on 7 February 1946 at 100 Wavertree Vale into a family with quite a name in the local criminal fraternity, Brian Patten was an only child, withdrawn, dark-haired, with dark eyes that cautiously appraised the world right from the start.

I never knew my father. My mother married him but they were separated before I remember. I was brought up in this really tiny house with this crippled grandmother – and she and my grandfather never spoke. It was a very small, frightening, claustrophobic space. And there was an auntie who sat in a chair – lived sitting in...

Brian Patten’s own first reading took place on 2 November, four days before meeting McGough, who introduced him to Adrian Henri on 9 November. Michael Horovitz remembers taking a troupe of musicians to Liverpool to do a jazz-poetry event at the Crane Theatre in Hanover Street: ‘At the party afterwards, Adrian Henri, who was the host, said, “Oh this poetry stuff is alright, I think I’m gonna start doing it”’. Henri himself has no such recollection: ‘I was never much of a fan of poetry-and-jazz – certainly not the Horovitz brand, it just didn’t seem to gel’.

Horovitz refers to...

During 1968 the comparisons between Patten, McGough and Henri were at their widest. McGough had become a regular on ABC’sThe Eleventh Hourand was gigging extensively with the revitalized and more musically orientated Scaffold. Their stage humour was very different from their songs. ‘Our songs certainly brought financial success and made us household names’, McGough acknowledges, ‘but it also misled audiences. Mums and dads came along and we weren’t providing what they wanted. We were never a musical knockabout act like the Grumbleweeds, but that was what so many people thought we were.’

Mike McGear has other regrets.

The...

The sixties are sometimes described as ‘three guys having the best party in the world, and everyone else trying to find out the address’. January 1970 sat there like the guest who had discovered it all that little bit too late. The carnival was over. All that remained was detritus for those whom the celebrations had left out. There were violent anti-war protests in Whitehall when B-52s bombed Ho Chi Minh’s trail in South Vietnam. In America, US police had to intervene to stop ‘bussed’ black children being attacked by whites. In Britain Rolf Harris was top of the charts...

In Britain, only pre-dawn travellers immediately heard the BBC Overseas Service’s announcement that John Lennon had been shot outside his New York apartment. Two hours earlier, Mark David Chapman surrendered his signed autograph book and his .38 calibre revolver, and was taken into custody. The shock, when the rest of the country awoke on Saturday 9 December 1980, had the effect of releasing a vast simultaneous emotion for the many still in thrall to the Beatles’ music. There was suddenly something very urgent to talk about for anybody who still held those times as a refuge from the recent decade...

Brian Patten began the new decade with a worthy follow-up toGargling With Jelly, the equally praised and more subversiveThawing Frozen Frogs. Also published by Puffin, the same length as its predecessor, and again illustrated by David Mostyn, it contains such reflective gems as ‘The River’, ‘Hideaway Sam’, ‘Spider Apples’ and ‘You Can’t Be That’. There is the mischievously plausible ‘Dear Mum’ and one of the best and funniest poems in the language for children (read fast), the show-stopping ‘The Race to Get to Sleep’ (‘It’s Matthew! It’s Penny! It’s Penny! It’s Matthew!’). Using his comic powers to their...

In 1999 Adrian Henri gave a reading at the Plough Art Centre in Torrington, North Devon. He was having a new lease of life. There were publications afoot and a prestigious gallery in Cologne was exhibiting some of his paintings. In short, a lot to look forward to for a sixty-seven-year-old man whose customary enthusiasm for life – the sheer possibility of it all – was completely undimmed. On the Saturday morning prior to the reading, Henri was asked to drop in on a children’s writing group and listen to some of their work. ‘He couldn’t have been better’, Arts...