Monthly column on the arts: bad news from Liverpool

When news arrived of the death of Adrian Henri, Liverpool poet, painter and sixties icon, one of my first thoughts was that for most of the past 25 years, a self-portrait of him has hung close to my bed.

It wasn't an intentional act of homage - the painting was found abandoned in a flat that I and Tricia rented in Liverpool in the early 1970s, and the bedroom was the only place we had space to put it - but there's no doubt that Adrian was part of the landscape of Merseyside in those heady days, as much as the cathedral, docks and Toxteth landscape that he made into poetry. For me, he defined Liverpool in those days.

He was a neighbour when I lived in Liverpool 8, and we sometimes appeared on poetry-reading programmes together, though by then he was in a much more glittering orbit than I was and was only rarely able to fit in local readings. When I knew him he was already very well known from being published in the Penguin Modern Poets series, in a best-selling collection with Roger McGough and Brian Patten. Patten was the lyrical one, McGough the adroit wordsmith. Adrian was different again; he drew from a European background and also from American culture, so his poems were full of allusions to European surrealists, American Beat Poets, continental Absurd Theatre and more; all obscure to me, but doorways to a fascinating world.

Liverpool imagery

Alongside those allusions his work was steeped in Liverpool imagery, place-names, landscapes and mythology. Rarely can different worlds have encountered each other with such success as they did in his poems. He was an impressionist, creating long sequences of shreds of description, evocations of sounds and music, sometimes with no verbs at all; and like Dylan Thomas, he read his own work best. Some of his work with his backing band, The Liverpool Scene, exists on long-forgotten record labels. I played them recently to my youngest daughter, who is as up-to-the-minute in her music tastes as anyone I know. The magic still worked, even though the music was really pretty bad most of the time and Adrian wasn't always rocking at the same tempo as the band.

There was always a surrealist tinge to Adrian's life. I once called on him when he was working on his prize-winning entry for the John Moore's Painting Competition. It was a still-life study of flowers and raw meat - a typical Henri theme. He was painting really quickly, he told me, because the meat was rotting and soon it would be too unpleasant to work with.

God's creativity

It was a strange environment in which to be a Christian. It would have been much easier if one could have rejected all the poetry, music and art of that time as satanic. But common grace operates as much in our neighbours as in the examples in theology textbooks, and the beauty of Brian Patten's language, the sheer truth of much of Roger McGough's perceptions and the excitement of Adrian's work still seem to me to be part of God's creativity, not a blot upon it. They certainly influenced a whole generation of Christian poets. Even today, judging poetry competitions or reading poems people send me, I can hear the Liverpool style enshrined in a new generation.

Why were some Christians so impressed? After all, the free-love, pro-drugs climate of that culture was hardly the evangelical heartland. Part of it, I suspect, was a utilitarian desire to mimic what was currently the fashion and use it to evangelise. Christians have often done this, and there are some appalling Christian rock records to prove it - people who didn't understand the music at all but knew that this was what the kids like to listen to. The problem was, the kids didn't like to listen to the Christian rip-off.

But some of it, I am sure, is the result of people listening to the qualities of what was done in those days and realising that here was a new way of seeing things, and a new way of describing them to others. Some of the best Christian poetry of the past two decades has built on what the Liverpool poets achieved - using contemporary everyday images to present truth, shocking people with skilled words and sharp metaphors, bringing the uncomfortable gospel into the world of the known, the familiar and the loved.

I wrote the entry on Adrian not long ago for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature. I made all the appropriate academic critical noises of approval. I wish I could have expanded on the kindliness of the man, and his willingness to listen patiently to one young and rather shy poet who wanted to talk about Christianity to him.

Fortunately John Peel, who produced several of those early LPs, covered his kindliness in a generous tribute in the Radio Times. He concluded simply, 'We should make a fuss of our friends.' Yes, indeed.

Monthly column on the arts: bad news from Liverpool

Remembering Adrian Henri, Liverpool poet and painter

Liverpool imagery

God's creativity

David Porter

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