Adrian Henri & The Liverpool Scene

Louis Ernest Henri Celine was a seaman from Mauritius, who sailed into Birkenhead (on the Wirral peninsula of Merseyside) in 1888, and ended up staying. He lost the Celine bit once her arrived - and then established a seaman's mission. His fifth son was injured in the leg in World War I, but was still able to go on to be a dance instructor - and who married a woman from a family with a thespian streak.

Sounds like there would be the makings of an interesting poem in that backstory? Well, their son did become a poet, although I don't know if he ever wrote this particular poem.

Adrian Henri was born right there in Birkenhead in 1932, although his dance instructing dad took a job at Sunnyvale Holiday Camp, in Rhyl, North Wales, when young Henri was six. He would go on to study art at King's College (now Newcastle University), briefly teach at Preston Catholic College, before lecturing at both Manchester and Liverpool Colleges of Art in the early 1960's.

He got picked on at school and art gave him a form of protection, as he noted to his journalist friend Bel Mooney, "I had a knack of drawing aeroplanes, and if anybody was going to bully me I'd offer to draw him a Spitfire or Hurricane (he had watched the blitz over Liverpool from across the water)." His style moved, his association with other artists from the northwest, he found kindred spirits with pop artist Neville Weston and conceptualist Keith Arnott. He would go on to win second place in the prestigious John Moore' s art competition in 1972, for his Meat Painting 11 - In Memorium Rene Magritte.

He would become the President of the Merseyside Arts Association, Liverpool Academy of the Arts and an honorary professor at John Moore's University. Add to that, President of the National Acrylic Painter's Association in the mid-80's, and you can see the regard he was held in as a painter. But we are going to focus on his other strength...

As a poet and performer.

The performance side of things can perhaps be traced back to his stint on the washboard in the Kings College skiffle group in the mid-50's. That grew into his love of live poetry readings, and also the poetry workshops he would hold.

McGough, Henri, Patten

By the mid-60's there was a definite scene in Liverpool. A trio of poets from the city grew to almost rock star status. Henri met Roger McGough and Brian Patten in 1961, and together they forged a new and exciting brand of poetry that was frank, direct, humorous and sensitive - appealing to a wider audience than traditional poets.

The Mersey Sound

Their three-way anthology, The Mersey Sound, published in 1967, took poetry to the relative stratosphere, selling over half a million copies. John Brannigan noted that the three men's poems provided, "accessibility, relevance and a lack of pretention." One of Henri's most famous poems from that book, Tonight At Noon (title taken from a Charlie Mingus LP) dealt with contradictions; "The first daffodils of autumn will appear / when the leaves fall upwards to the trees," but moving towards a poignant ending - "And, you will tell me you love me, Tonight at Noon."

The poems in the book also provided some interplay between the poets. McGough had a six line poem called Vinegar, in which he compares himself to a priest buying fish & chips, who is thinking it would be nice to "buy supper for two." Henri put in the Poem For Roger McGough, about a nun thinking about wanting "to buy groceries for two."

Adrian Henri & Andy Roberts: Tonight At Noon (Audio only - live on John Peel's Radio London show, 1967)

Phil Bowen considers the three men to be as central to their generation as W.H. Auden and his cohort had been to theirs (in the 1930's). This poetry wave emanating from Liverpool was seen to be waking people up to poetry through this accessible verse. The writer Sid Smith would recall, "This small book was impossibly exotic and esoteric.... It made me feel somehow connected to, well, whatever it was that I thought was going on out there in that wider, long-haired world that I intuitively knew I wanted to be a part of."

The Liverpool Scene.

The live poetry readings morphed into something more. McGough and Patten would spend time in London, while Henri resolutely stayed in Liverpool as there was nowhere else he preferred, saying the wind blowing from the Mersey "has fish and chips on its breath."

McGough ventured into the world of music, teaming up with Mike McGear (younger brother of one James Paul McCartney) and John Gorman, to form The Scaffold, who would fuse comedy, poetry and music and have a massive hit with their version of Lilly The Pink.

The Scaffold: Thank U Very Much (Suitably strange foreign tv footage)

Meanwhile, Henri and McGough teamed up with Andy Roberts, singing poetry over Roberts' guitar, creating the album The Incredible New Liverpool Scene. McGough went back off to his other projects, while Henri put together a band to play behind his poetry, which he called The Liverpool Scene.

With Henri and Roberts, was Mike Evans, Mike Hart, Percy Jones and Brian Dodgson - playing a fusion of jazz, folk and rock. There were several more albums over the next few years; 1968's The Amazing Adventures Of...; Bread On The Night; and St. Adrian & Co, Broadway and 3rd. With John Peel already reading bits of poetry from Liverpool poets on his late night Radio London show and then playing tracks off that first Liverpool Scene LP - he was brought in to produce the first full band album (Amazing Adventures), although he pointed out that his input into the recording process was fairly negligible.

The Liverpool Scene: Batpoem (Live on tv, 1969 - with amended wording)

1969 saw the band tour with Led Zeppelin and Blodwyn Pig, which was financially unsuccessful, but did introduce the world to Henri's lively stage presence. As David Bateman noted in his book Adrian Henri: Singer of Meat and Flowers, "[he was] bouncing thunderously and at risk to audience and fellow performers, the stage vibrating out of rhythm beneath him."

Henri described the work and philosophy of the band; "All the jazz and poetry I'd heard seemed to be a battle between the jazz and the words. On the other hand, music expects lyrics. So it seemed logical to a) work with what was to hand (the Beat groups) and b) work in an idiom that was word friendly, rather than word antipathetic. Pop is a vehicle for words."

Roberts later remembered that tour of 1969, which included three months in the U.S. before culminating in an appearance at the legendary Isle Of Wight Festival that year. He simply called it an "absolute disaster!" The problem with the U.S. tour, he said, was that "we suddenly came up against the utter reality of it. With a British audience, given the poetry and a band that were never rehearsed, we got away with it through being so different and our verve and irreverence. None of which worked in America."

Whatever you might think of the music, or the poetry, what The Liverpool Scene did was pave the way for several more generations of performance artists, who would continue to fuse together various music genres with elements of poetry. Think punk poet John Cooper Clarke, Attila the Stockbroker, or Benjamin Zephaniah.

The Liverpool Scene: Gully Foyle (Live on tv, 1969)

Paul Weller was also an admirer of Henri and company, writing a song called Tonight At Noon, named after Henri's poem, and included on The Jam's second LP, This Is The Modern World.

The Jam: Tonight At Noon (Audio only)

He had an interesting personal life. He married Joyce in 1957, which lasted through to 1974. After that he began a ten-year relationship with Carol Ann Duffy (later the Poet Laureate), who at 16 when they started out - he was 39. His love life was crazy - McGough explained; "You'd go in a pub and see his ex-wife chatting to his ex-mistress with the current mistress there too, as well as a girl who would be the next mistress. And they all got on. I mean, that says a lot for Adrian. And for the girls too!" The last fifteen years of his life were spent with French artist, Catherine Marcangeli, born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1967, at the time when Henri was reaching his peak fame on Merseyside. There relationship endured long-distance, first as she got her degree, and then as she taught in various colleges in France and the UK.

In early 1999, he had heart by-pass surgery, before series of strokes made his health even worse. He finally died in December 2000, having not long been told that he had been given the Freedom of the City of Liverpool, for his contribution to the city's culture.

The Liverpool Scene: We'll All Be Spacemen Before We Die (Same 1969 tv show - possibly a partial influence for Public Service Broadcasting's 2005 The Race For Space album?)