There are two Roger McGoughs. This is not a metaphor. When I turn up at his house in south-west London, the poet is beside himself. He has one arm cheerfully thrown round the shoulder of another Roger McGough – a younger man with a stern expression, hands on hips, clearly having none of it.
The older Roger is a riot of colour: matching mauve turtleneck and socks, neat white beard and gold earring, scarlet handkerchief peeking from a dark blue breast pocket. He cuts an impish figure at 86, funny, spry and thin as a leaf. But young Roger is black-and-white and even thinner, since he’s a life-size cardboard cutout of an old monochrome photo.
Cardboard Roger’s lace shirt, oversized glasses and shaggy sideburns place him squarely in the late 1960s. Perhaps 1967, the year McGough’s poems appeared in The Mersey Sound, a slim paperback introducing three young Liverpudlian writers (the others being Adrian Henri and Brian Patten) whose unpretentious work seemed to capture the spirit of the age. All three hated the title, and the cover, but it remains – according to Penguin – “the bestselling poetry anthology of all time”. A year later, the shy poet suddenly found himself a pop star, top of the charts with his group the Scaffold’s novelty hit Lily the Pink.
“One day you’re a geography teacher, next thing you’re in a rehearsal room with Jimi Hendrix, Graham Nash, Keith Moon…” McGough reminisces, over a beer. What was Hendrix like? “A bit shy, and a bit in awe of people he shouldn’t have been in awe of.” Such as? “Paul, obviously.” That’s Paul McCartney, who was often hanging around, since his younger brother Mike was also in the Scaffold. (The comedian John Gorman completed the trio.) On Paul’s recommendation, the band were picked up by the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, though, says McGough, “he never knew who I was”.
It was a time to be alive. McGough met everyone. He gave encouraging words to a struggling young mime artist called David Bowie, and went drinking with Bob Dylan, who arrived in Liverpool one night buzzing with enthusiasm for the local poetry scene.
As we’re meeting on World Poetry Day, I ask McGough – who has hosted Poetry Please on Radio 4 since 2002 – if there are any other poets writing today whose work excites him. “I don’t get excited very often. No. Um. I mean, I probably wouldn’t go out and listen to poetry, unfortunately. I go to the pub and do gigs, but going to a poetry reading isn’t my idea of fun.” A lot of writing today, he thinks, is “me, me, me, a bit”.
What about the classics – does he have a favourite old poem? “Mine, or someone else’s?” Someone else’s. “Oh, it’s the same old things, really, I don’t know.” I ask him to name just one poem he likes, but he refuses. “All the others will get jealous.”
While we speak, there is another McGough – and this is a metaphor – scattered across his living-room table: the Collected Roger McGough, not looking very collected, just piles of loose pages. He has been scribbling in the margins of these poems that span half a century, from 1959 to today, changing names, tweaking similes, removing the odd swear word before sending the proofs back to Penguin for publication.
Rewriting published work can be divisive, he admits – “Auden got into trouble, didn’t he?” – but he feels some poems need updating. “Sometimes you read a poem which worked well in the ’80s, and people now just don’t know who it’s referring to. You can either explain who it was, or put somebody else in.”
He’s a tireless performer – his Alive and Gigging tour takes him to Glastonbury next weekend – and points out that, in gigs, he has been changing old lines for years, anyway. For the Scaffold’s reunion show last year, for example, he wrote new lyrics for Lily the Pink, bringing in Putin, Truss and the PM. He sings me a verse: “Oh dishy Rishi / how I wish he / could do the job he’s paid to do-oo-oo. / He’ll need more than / medicinal compound / to stop us fallin’ / down the loo…”
It’s not just the names he’s updating. “The other thing, of course, is attitudes,” he says. “Attitudes change, and what then seemed perfectly normal, you look at again and think, erm… would I have said that now?”
He pushes a few pages across the table. “Spot the cuts, spot the cuts!” I pick out a poem from 1969 called “Who Was the Naughty Girl?” and notice she is no longer so naughty. McGough’s pencil has struck through the line “She crossed a prostitute with an orangutan & produced one who swung from lamp-post to lamp-post and did it for peanuts.”
He asks: “It’s a good line – but what would you have done?” I’d probably have kept in lines I thought were good. He shrugs. “Well, there’s other lines.”
He brings up Holiday on Death Row, a sequence of poems “about the breakup of my first marriage”. He was divorced in 1980, and married his second wife, Hilary, in 1986; they still live together. “In the original book, they’re pretty dark, aggressive. I changed those, and have taken out the F-word and the C-word, because at the time I’d throw them about, but they just seem cruel now, and it pushes the reader away.”
That strong language was a snapshot of the pain he felt at the time, wasn’t it? Is rewriting the poems a way of changing his own past? “You’re right, yep, you’ve put your finger on it,” he nods, looking fretful. Young cardboard McGough keeps his cool in the corner. “But as it’s my poem, I think I can do that. If you want the originals, they’re still out there.”
Some poems have vanished entirely. “I’ve actually dropped ‘The Jogger’s Song’, which got me into trouble – people complained about it.” That 1986 poem has been studied in schools, and critics have argued it’s among his best, but it’s also distressing, intentionally so, and couldn’t be further from the wry, gentle persona he adopts in so many of his poems – that avuncular voice familiar from Poetry Please.
Inspired by a news story about a woman raped in a park, “The Jogger’s Song” is a dramatic monologue in the voice of the unrepentant rapist. (“Well, she was asking for it. / Lying there, crying out, / dying for it.”) McGough says he removed it from the new book not because he thought the poem itself was insensitive, but rather because some readers got the wrong end of the stick. “People thought it’s promoting rape, or it’s excusing it.”
When it comes to being misinterpreted, he’s been burnt before. He tells me that in the US, in the 1970s, there were actual book-burnings. A minister’s wife started a campaign against him, after taking offence at his rather tame poem “At Lunchtime”, a wry response to sexual liberation and the Cold War. She thought it was encouraging debauchery; in fact, it meant the reverse.
Sexual intercourse may have begun in 1963, but McGough, like Philip Larkin, had mixed feelings about it. They read each other’s poems. “I always got the feeling he’d nicked one or two of mine – the ambulance poem, I’m sure,” he says, referring to Larkin’s “Ambulances” (1961), only half-joking. They never crossed paths at Hull University, though the older poet was the librarian there when McGough arrived to study French and Geography, aged 17. “I was always the youngest boy in the class – and I still feel that, in a way, wherever I go I’m always the youngest. So if you make mistakes, people forgive you.”
A docker’s son, born in Litherland, Merseyside, in 1937, McGough likes to joke that his first taste of public acclaim was being crowned overall winner of the Bootle & District Bonny Baby Show. “I remember wondering, aged eighteen months / […] if life would be downhill from then on,” he writes in one poem.
He was a shy boy, unconfident about his looks, often told off for “mumbling in Scouse very quickly”. His mother insisted he take elocution lessons. He still speaks quickly, but very precisely, in staccato bursts between pauses, like the “joinedupwriting” of his poems, where words bump into one another (“shockedandsurprised, / and amusedandannoyed”). He entered children’s poetry recitals, and proudly tells me he still has an award hanging on the wall that he won aged 11 for reading Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”.
He feels glad to have grown up in a close-knit Irish Catholic family. His sister Brenda died just before Christmas. She also wrote poetry, and started taking creative-writing classes in middle-age. “Which is very brave at that age, she didn’t know any writers, didn’t know anybody.”
But her poems were excellent. “I said, ‘Brenda, you’ve got it.’ It was sad, she had this gift as well, but things were different: you were a woman, you were married and pushed out. I was the elder boy, mum’s favourite…” Perhaps McGough’s fame made it harder for her to come out as a poet herself? “I’m sure you’re right. Mike [McCartney] had that with Paul all his life.”
Brenda died the same day as Benjamin Zephaniah. “I started a poem called ‘Ben & Bren’… And I couldn’t. Because a funny line came in. Humour, tumour… And then ‘she died of dying’.” He tells me that when they go to scatter her ashes, he plans to read one of Brenda’s poems, rather than one of his own.
Is there life after death? “There’s something, I would say. I still go to church, but I find it difficult to explain the reasons why I believe in God.” He pauses. “Do I believe in God? I’m not sure I do... Going to church about once a week helps me, seems to keep me grounded in a way. But is it any more grounded than going for a jog round the park?” He still jogs, too. He jokes that locals spot him in the park and stop him to ask, “Didn’t you used to be Roger McGough?” For a moment, I think I see cardboard Roger cracking a smile.
The Collected Poems: 1959-2024 by Roger McGough (£25) is published by Viking. He is on tour with Alive and Gigging; rogermcgough.org
