‘Life on the road with one of today’s supergroups. What it’s like from the inside. A no-holds-barred story of love-hungry young men and the girls they meet. The lesbians, the plastercasters, the groupies out for thrills. The weirdos, the junkies and the perverts. Gangbangs, orgies in the van. Excitement … Ecstasy … Sexual delinquency … There’s no business like …’ runs the preface of Gig published in 1973, my fourth single collection in six years. Unfortunately, the title was a misnomer as relatively few of the poems were about life in a band, but I was perceived in some quarters as a pop star with pretensions, and several literary critics chose to skip the poems and reviewed only the preface. Transit vans were not allowed to park at the foot of Mount Parnassus, and rock’n’roll was not considered the stuff of poetry. I make no claims for the quality of the verse written on tour, some of which appears more like notes awaiting considered reflection, but there is nothing macho or glitzy here, as the last few lines of the opening poem show, written after a bleak midwinter performance at Huddersfield Polytechnic:
in bed I wear socks and my grey woolly hat,
shiver, and regret not having filled the ‘Kozeeglow’ hot waterbottle
with vindaloo.
At home, lonely and dislocated, I had felt driven to escape, but what did escape offer? A world of cheap hotels where terrifying landladies goose-step down corridors. Where ashtrays are nailed to the mantelpiece and spiders hold their winter sports in icy bathrooms. Humour is never far away from the mildly tragic, but it deflects rather than hides the horrors, when everyday habits, usually so reassuring, are transformed into nightmares. After all, you can’t beat the full monty, the good old English breakfast:
I pick up cold steel talons and tear into the heart of Egg
which bleeds over strips of dead pig marinated in brine.
Grey, shabby Mushrooms squeal as they are hacked to death
slithering in their own sweat.
Like policemen to a motor accident, Toast arrives,
the debris is mopped up. Nothing remains of the slaughter.
On receiving reams of wild paranoia like this, I wonder why my editor at Jonathan Cape didn’t call Social Services, or at least recommend a decent psychiatrist. Here was a guy with a problem. Because she had left the company halfway through publication, I had always felt resentful, but now I can see that revising a manuscript in a tiny office with a deranged psycho was not part of her job description.
Those of you who are keen on astrology will be interested to know that I am a Scorpio, and exhibit all the positive qualities associated with my birth sign: loyalty, generosity, wisdom and raw animal sexuality among them, with none of the vices, particularly the one about harbouring vindictive feelings. Revenge, unlike Lancashire Hotpot, is a dish best served cold, but I have never been troubled by it. This Scorpio does not have a sting in his tail. Although I must confess an inclination towards John Betjeman’s view when he said: ‘Our poems are part of ourselves. They are our children and we do not like them to be made public fools of by strangers.’
In my study I have a paperweight that somebody brought me back from New Mexico. It is a dome of solid glass containing a scorpion, about two inches long with lobsteresque claws and a tail like a curled rattlesnake. I am extremely careful when handling it for fear of dropping it, the glass shattering and the scorpion, free at last after thirty years, panicking and running up my trouser leg. I will never bad-mouth those poets and literary journalists, the critics whom I feel have stuck the knife in, but I have written down their names on a circular piece of gummed paper: seventeen in all, some still hacking a living as nightwatchmen in cemeteries, others now forgotten and unknown. Only one is a woman, a poet whose photograph never appears on the back of her books, and on meeting her recently for the first time I could understand why and it cheered me up no end. But I would get no satisfaction from naming them, for some have passed on and others perhaps may regret their youthful bile. But this is just to let them know that their names can be found beneath the scorpion, weighed down by glass.
Gig is divided into two sections, ‘On the road’ and ‘At the roadside’, and in the second is a poem that took me several months to write called ‘The Identification’. The television news on the evening of 4 March 1972 reported yet another bombing in Belfast, at the Abercorn Restaurant filled at the time with women shoppers and children. And after all the horrific scenes of carnage, there followed an interview with the father of one of the young victims. He was a Presbyterian minister and the dignity of the man almost transcended his grief, as he described the harrowing process of having to identify the body of Stephen, his son. The American poet Robert Lowell seems also to have been moved by the interview because the same incident is described in a collection of his called Notebooks, although in his poem the father recognises the body by a book of ‘toy matches’ in the child’s pocket. In my version there are no matches, but the father is puzzled by a packet of cigarettes:
Cigarettes? Oh this can’t be Stephen,
I don’t allow him to smoke, you see.
He wouldn’t disobey me, not his father.
But that’s his penknife. That’s his alright.
And that’s his key on the keyring
Gran gave him just the other night.
So this must be him.
I think I know what happened … about the cigarettes,
No doubt he was minding them for one of the older boys.
Yes, that’s it.
That’s him.
That’s our Stephen.
I think it’s a poem that works and I rather suspect that the critics at the bottom of my paperweight thought so too, because none of them referred to it in their petulant reviews. I was delighted, then, when last week Izzy, my fourteen-year-old, broke off from her saxophone practice and said,
Oh, by the way, Dad, we did one of your poems in class today.’
‘Which one?’
‘It’s about a father identifying his son.’
‘“The Identification”?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘Ah, well, do you know what happened?’
I explained the political background to the poem, about the interview on television, as well as information I’d gleaned over the years about the father who had since emigrated to Canada. And of how the tragedy had been brought home to me again recently after a reading at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, when I met people who had been at school with Stephen and who spoke warmly of their friend.
Izzy listened with that intent but glazed expression that girls have when grown-ups are banging on: ‘Teacher said it was about a boy who had been in a fire.’
‘Well, there was a fire, but it was a bomb that caused it.’
‘That’s what teacher said.’
‘Never you mind what teacher said, I wrote it.’
‘Whatever,’ said Izzy, going back with some relief to her sax.
It’s hardly surprising that the poem took a long time to write, having less to do with gestation and quiet recollection than being in one place long enough to put pen to paper. John Gorman’s passion for providing Liverpool with an arts centre led to the Scaffold’s funding of the expensive renovation of a building on Renshaw Street. The venture, which would provide performance space, a recording studio and ‘Scaffoscope’, an agency to discover and promote local talent, proved a disaster and in April the Scaffold had been declared bankrupt and the police had issued a warrant for our arrest concerning non-payment of debts. Thelma had found another lover and I was living out of a suitcase. (I had thought of writing ‘battered suitcase’ there, but feared it might conjure up an image of something deep-fried.)
Brian Patten, on the other hand, had struck gold in London. To his small flat near Notting Hill Gate came a procession of young women, the beautiful, the gifted and the wealthy, eager to tame this wild young poet, a burning genius with the looks of a mischievous faun. (He remains to this day untameable, although I entertain high hopes for Lynda Cookson, his partner for the last twelve years.) For most of them it was in one door and out the other, but his relationship with Mary Moore, with whom he lived for four years, was an intense and mutually profitable one and she it was who, taking pity on me dossing in Brian’s spare room, offered me the use of her father’s former studio in NW3.
The Mall Studios had been purpose built for use by artists and I could easily imagine her father Henry Moore chipping away in the bright airy space, or Ben Nicholson before him, painting his geometric abstracts. As well as a kitchen and bathroom on the ground floor, there was an open-plan bedroom built on to a balcony some twenty metres above ground. The whole effect was like inhabiting a white clapboard cathedral and at first I couldn’t believe my luck to be living there. The trouble was that I hardly ever did. I was either on tour or skulking around Liverpool. When I did spend time there the space closed in, mummifying me in its faded whiteness. That’s either the appeal or the worry of poetry, the silence of its creation. Late at night, sitting on one of the long leather sofas, pen and paper to hand, trying to write, I would worry that the room might be suffering from tinnitus and in need of aural distraction. A Mozart piano concerto, the scraping of brush on canvas, the ringing of hammer on metal. Three months later I cast off the winding-sheet, had a farewell drink in the Sir Richard Steele on Haverstock Hill, and caught the train back to Liverpool.
His life like this poem,
out of sequence,
a series of impressions,
unfinished, imperfect.