Liverpool Scene: Bread On The Night (RCA)

Liverpool Scene: Bread On The Night

The Liverpool Scene: Winter Poem

From The Liverpool Scene: Bread on the Night (RCA, 1970)

When the Penguin Modern Poets series published its tenth volume, bringing together three young Liverpool poets, there might have been some calculation that poets from the Beatles’ home city might prove a popular choice, but probably few clues as to the mainstream bestseller status that followed. While the contributors continue to be spoken of together, as the Liverpool Poets, the three were all notably different, even in 1967, when The Mersey Sound first appeared. Brian Patten’s work displayed a stumbling but often likeable adolescent sincerity, Roger McGough’s updated older music hall and cabaret traditions, while Adrian Henri’s interests were more underground and bohemian, encompassing jazz, painting and literary modernism.

McGough and Henri both moved into making records that travelled a long way from the idea of merely recording their own poems, and McGough’s trio The Scaffold (with John Gorman and Mike McGear) scored genuine mainstream novelty hits like Lily The Pink alongside occasional pop-psychedelic curiosities, and they continued to work as a cabaret and recording act well into the 1970s. Henri’s The Liverpool Scene – an altogether more volatile outfit that also included the independent song-writing talent of Andy Roberts – is more varied in its blend of music and word, with Roberts’ grasp of folk, blues and jazz idioms meshed into Henri’s knowing (and often satirical) approach to the key bohemian tropes of his time.

The version of Henri’s long poem ‘The Entry Of Christ Into Liverpool’, based on a painting Henri made in the early 1960s, as a homage to James Ensor, unrolls against a backdrop of free jazz and quirky pop, while the Henri-penned instrumental ‘Come Into The Perfumed Garden Maud’, with its Eastern scales and heavy improvisation, seems to anticipate such current cult bands as Voice of the Seven Woods and Six Organs of Admittance, demonstrating that Henri’s input was not always, or even predominantly, on the lyrical side. Even so, perhaps it’s his own ‘Winter Poem’, an effective mood-piece with atmospheric and minimal backings, that comes closest to the mood generated by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s David Cain on The Seasons, his 1969 collaboration with Ronald Duncan, and it’s tempting to wonder if Henri had that BBC recording in mind when recording this track.

The influence of the Liverpool Poets is often spoken of today in terms set largely by knowledge of McGough’s most accessible work, with its honest sentiments, gentle comedy and love of puns, but the recordings of The Liverpool Scene (alongside the best of Henri’s poetry, and such publications as Environments and Happenings, Henri’s 1974 study of installation and performance art) suggest that the phenomenon was both wider ranging and more attuned in significant ways to the traditions of modernism than is usually acknowledged, by either the advocates or detractors, who continue to debate the Liverpool Poets’ continuing influence.

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock (Caedmon, 1955)

The story of spoken word as a recorded medium really begins at the birth of the technology itself, with Thomas Edison reputed to have tested his earliest prototype phonograph cylinders in 1877 with his own recital of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, and the technology was sufficiently advanced by 1890 for Alfred Tennyson to make wax cylinder recordings of around ten poems, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ among them. In the years that followed 78rpm discs featuring Biblical readings and passages from Shakespeare were plentiful, and many examples of interest exist in the richly populated hinterland between music and poetry, the twisted ballads and song-poems of the ‘Old Weird America’ gathered on Harry Smith’s epochal Anthology of American Folk Music and the Red Bird ‘Poetry and Jazz’ sessions of Tony Kinsey and Christopher Logue among them. Despite the riches available even before the full advent of the 12” LP record, however, it seems to be the 1950s that saw spoken word recordings really take off, and the births of such idiosyncratic labels as Caedmon in America and Argo in the UK were particularly significant in creating a commercial market for what were otherwise seen as largely educational and archival artefacts. In the selection that follows, we’ve gathered a mere 17 recordings to represent a cross-section through the many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of possible inclusions, but they hopefully touch on key strands in the development of spoken word as a distinct literary medium, and offer an introductory gesture towards that larger story.

T.S. Eliot Reading Poems and Choruses

The serious-minded Modernism of T.S. Eliot, and the poet’s drily ironic delivery of his own lines on records like this one, are often lazily condemned (in some circles, at least) as the antithesis of the spoken word scene’s more democratic energies. But any reader or listener who can’t see this 1955 reading of his early masterpiece The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock bringing down the house in a live setting with the same riotous force as the poem manages on paper is allowing Eliot’s forbidding reputation to get between the actual words and a more instinctive response to their effect.

The truth is that however dry Eliot’s reading seems, there’s real humour in the play between his high-serious tones and the absurdist doggerel of such iconic couplets as “I grow old, I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo”.

This LP – released as part of the Caedmon Literary Series in 1955 – opens our selection of recordings made between the 1950s and 1970s, all precursors of today’s spoken word scene, and many by poets more closely associated with the page than the stage. It’s partly a draft version of a feature we’re compiling on the Prehistory of Spoken Word for Staple 72: The Music Issue, but also, I hope, an attempt to bridge the gap perceived to exist between the realms of written and performed poetry in the UK. We very deliberately open proceedings with this recording of a man who is in many ways held up as the totemic ‘difficult page poet’ by both his supporters and detractors in the belief that Prufrock – first published in 1917 – unsettles that view at a very fundamental level.

It’s not just my view that Eliot bridges the divide between page and stage approaches, either: the poet’s love of music hall is well known (he even wrote an essay on Marie Lloyd) but perhaps more revealing is that during an interview I did with Linton Kwesi Johnson for The Big Issue in the North in March 2001, the renowned dub-poet mentioned in passing that he had himself recorded a reggae version of Eliot’s poem, to make exactly this point. At the time of writing, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Prufrock remains unreleased, but it would be wonderful, and no doubt transformative, if Eliot’s estate were to one day relent and allow Johnson’s so far unheard dub take on Prufrock to take its place beside Eliot’s own reading.

Perhaps this Youtube mash-up of Eliot and Portishead makes the point well enough, and for other performative takes on Eliot’s lines, these two film-collage and animated responses to Eliot’s text also seem worth a look.