Whereas the shows at Hope Hall tended to be just that, ‘Shows’, with music and comedy as well as poetry, the readings in Sampson & Barlow’s tended to be more experimentally poetic, where Adrian in particular would involve the audience in Dadaesque word games like Exquisite Corpses, or simply get everybody to write down a word or a sentence, to be collected during the interval and read out at the end. His series of ‘Silent Poems’ consisted of him holding up to the crowd a number of empty picture frames for them to gape at in awe and wonder (or, chuckle, as they usually did). To a first-time visitor, some of these ideas may have seemed arty-farty, but humour and self-mockery were very much part of it. Audience involvement was an essential element of what we were all trying to do at the time, to break down the barrier between them and us.
These early experiments led Adrian to be the prime mover in organising a series of ‘Events’ or ‘Happenings’ using mime, dance, poetry, painting and music, inspired by similar events taking place in small art galleries in New York, where artists such as Jim Dine and Robert Rauschenberg assembled intrinsically worthless junk as material for painting and sculpture. In 1962, when Adrian was a tutor at the Manchester College of Art, he set up an ‘Event’ at the Whitworth Institute in Openshaw, where a critic (art? drama? football?) dropped by and, puzzled by the whole affair, wrote a two-column review for the Guardian dated 12 December:
In a room hung with advertising posters, among the bus tickets, the mangled prams and step ladders there was poetry, spoken by Mr McGough, a Liverpool teacher in corduroy jacket and jeans, the first five minutes of which were intentionally inaudible beneath the tape-recorded jazz. The spotlight fixed on a girl in a black sweat-suit, immobile beneath the step ladder. ‘Manchester,’ read Mr McGough, ‘the city with the soft centre.’ The girl got up and did a snaky dance.
As a result of this rave review we were invited into BBC TV studios in Manchester the next day to film a three-minute excerpt that Cliff Michelmore introduced from the London studio during the six o’clock news the same evening. ‘Look what the bearded weirdos are up to now …’ sort of thing. Our filmed insert consisted of me perched on top of a stepladder reading inaudibly, while Carole Mason writhed and snaked beneath, Mike Evans played a saxophone and Adrian threw paint all over us. It was truly ground-breaking.
John Willett, the biographer of Bertolt Brecht and a distinguished art historian, however, was more impressed by our forays into the theatre of the absurd. He was working in Liverpool at the time, researching his subsequent book Art in the City and during a visit to the upstairs theatre in the Hope Hall in 1963 he witnessed Nightblues: ‘It was spontaneous, unpretentious, I thought, and above all, indigenous. It seemed to meet the demands of a young and attractive audience, who later packed out the club downstairs.’
As John Willett observed, our audiences, comprised mainly of sixth-form schoolgirls and art students, was indeed a young and attractive one, which, in retrospect, may go some way towards explaining our mission to break down the barriers between ‘them’ and ‘us’. ‘Us’ being very keen to get in there among ‘them’.
He also observed that McG, now beardless and devoid of corduroy, might have a career outside the classroom and very kindly recommended me to his own literary agent, Hope Leresche. Three weeks later I was having lunch at Choy’s restaurant on the King’s Road in Chelsea with my new agent, and if the moon is one of those round paper Chinese lampshades, I was over it.