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.
David Porter
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.
