The Mersey Sound (Tuesday 3rd October 2017)

There was a moment in post-war Britain in the mid-sixties, when someone threw a switch and everything monochrome turned into colour and austerity was banished. The arts, paperbacks, cinema, television, culture and counter culture all somehow blossomed into colour at the same time, and this included poetry.

The first of Penguin's Modern Poets series to have a coloured paperback cover was no. 10: The Mersey Sound, published in 1967, and already in its second reprint in 1968 when I bought the copy shown here for 3/6d (that's 17.5p in new-fangled pretend money), featuring Liverpool poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. Although influenced by fifties beat poets, it was very much a new voice. It was witty, warm, funny and often poignant and it embraced modern art, also exploding at the time, and music: Adrian Henri performed in a group called The Liverpool Scene and I went to see him at the Mothers Club in Birmingham when I was at art school,  whilst McGough could be seen on Top Of The Pops in the Scaffold.

I had been writing Carroll-esque verse and what I called "anti-poems" that sent-up the sort of poetry I'd been made to study at school up to A-level, mostly Victorian verse by the likes of Tennyson or Wordsworth or the occasional "difficult" poet like Emily Dickinson whose dense words were unpacked like crossword clues. The Mersey poets helped me see the light and soon I was writing poems of my own, getting some published and even winning a few poetry competitions.

On this evening, there was a fascinating BBC4 documentary, Sex, Chips And Poetry: 50 Years Of The Mersey Sound  which took me vividly back to those days when the world seemed to be ours for the taking.

L.
4.10.2017 (1952 hr)


Blip #2243 (#2493 including 250 archived blips)
Consecutive Blip #025
Blips/Extras In 2017 #310
Day #2748 (523 gaps from 26 March 2010)
LOTD #1478 (#1604 including 126 on archived blips)

Poetry series
Treasure Trove series
Art series

Taken with Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ60 compact

Lozarhythm Of The Day:
Charles Mingus - Tonight at noon (recorded 13 March 1957, Atlantic Studios, New York NY)
Charles Mingus (bass, piano), Jimmy Knepper (trombone), Shafi Hadi (tenor saxophone), Wade Legge (piano), Dannie Richmond (drums)
This piece inspired a poem of the same name by Adrian Henri, and later a song that Paul Weller wrote for the Jam (possibly via Henri's poem).

One year ago:
Smokey 1401 hr