In Cod We Trust: Roger McGough At Square Chapel

You can still hear, in the tentative, kindly, and slightly breathless tone of Roger McGough’s readings, the intimations of a very brief career he embarked upon on leaving Hull University nearly sixty years ago. The poet famously lacking an ‘O’ Level in English Literature taught French, before being plucked from relative obscurity by the BBC to make up one third of the comedy showgroup, The Scaffold.

Shamelessly engineered to ride the commercial tide of the Liverpool pop-cultural revolution, The Scaffold’s absurdist hits – ‘Lily the Pink’, and ‘Thank you very much’ – put the ‘Fab Three’ of McGough, Gorman and McGear in the groove of the Fab Four for a time in the late sixties.

Penguin’s subsequent publishing of the work of Roger McGough, the poet, alongside Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, under the generic, and misleading, banner of ‘The Mersey Sound’, tapped into a similar Zeitgeist. And seminally significant though the book became, the apparent populist mandate of the poetics – plain, comedic, direct and simply moving – alienated the contemporary academic elite, who equated plain speaking with a dereliction of poetic depth.

That McGough’s poetry is not obscure or solipsistic continues to work against him as an evaluative tool; he has never been taken into the bosom of academe. And it was that very directness that no doubt appealed to Philip Larkin, who once wrote to McGough to grudgingly concede that the latter’s books in the university library were invariably more well-thumbed and dog-eared than his own.

McGough has an undoubted common touch, and it never fails him. The spry octogenarian who bounded onto the stage at Halifax’s fabulous Square Chapel on Saturday night made his audience believe that academia’s loss is everyone else’s gain.

His poetics takes a distinct world view: flitting, bird-like, from theme to theme, McGough’s delivery has been honed over many decades of performance, so that his style is measured, thoughtful, pause-conscious and at ease in any guise. He raids the hinterlands of his past, and our present, with grace and with the skill of a Tragi-comic actor.

The poet’s instinct for repetition hammers home his sense of purpose: it would be hard not to be moved by the gradual fading to silence of his, very current, depiction of one more child rendered fatherless by gang violence, or by the profoundly affecting images of his mother, which draw her into a circle of memory as warm and vital as if she was present.

Comedy is never very far away, of course. A bedroom in the blackout during Liverpool’s wartime blitz is lit by blazing factories and crashing Messerschmitts, but authentic illumination is yielded in the love of mother for son. McGough’s simple declarations of early love are suspended, as if in time, by his photographically detailed homages. His neat description of the family’s fish and chip shop of choice in nineteen forties Litherland is conflated with embryonic yearnings for the proprietor’s daughter. Only ever vouchsafed a view of the top half of her body – the lower portions being obscured by the fish frying range – he imagines her in the hilarious guise of a mermaid; half glistening siren, half haddock.

And it is this propensity for combining the comic with the poignant, often in one line, that marks Roger McGough as a masterful exponent of his art. Packing a sudden punch, and throwing the listener off-balance, seems as effortless as breathing, not least when describing meeting a notorious gangster in a Liverpool restaurant, whose scarred and phrenologically-criminal head was pierced, a fortnight later, by two fatal bullets.

It would be tempting to describe Keith Hutson as McGough’s ‘warm-up’ man, such is the former’s affiliation with all things Music Hall and stage comedy. Opening for the main ‘turn’, Hutson gave a sterling and declamatory rendering of poems from his recently published collection Troupers, whose homage to entertainment is borne out of a genuine affection for, and instinctive empathy with, its exponents.

The effervescent goodwill of Hutson’s presence – he could be a ‘stand-up’ in different circumstances – is blindsided by the moving and entirely thought-provoking nature of many of his poems. Comedy is offset by tragedy; the stage surreal – think acrobatic infants, Xylophone skulls and Sponge Dancers – often compelled by crushing necessity.

But most, for Roger McGough as much as for Keith Hutson, we remember the poignant vignettes. Hutson’s sardonic rendering of that most notorious graveyard for showbusiness reputations, the Glasgow Empire, and the outrageous, lunatic loneliness of Hylda Baker, are object lessons in stoicism.

Which is how poets, like comedians, endure.