Roger McGough

Roger McGough CBE (born November 9, 1937 in Liverpool , Merseyside ) is a British poet , playwright , musician , comedian and performance artist .

biography

Sculpture with poems by Roger McGough on the subject of water in Liverpool (2004)

After attending school, he studied at the University of Hull and then worked as a teacher and lecturer at an art school .

In the early 1960s he founded the comedian group The Scaffold with John Gorman and Mike McGear , which was also successfully placed in the charts with several music titles at the end of the 1960s. The most successful of these titles, along with “Thank U Very Much”, “Do You Remember”, “Gin Gan Goolie” and “Liverpool Lou”, was certainly “ Lily the Pink ”, which was in the British charts for 24 weeks and four weeks of that number. one hit . He shared the dark, self-deprecating jokes and puns with the slightly pubescent desire to shock, which John Lennon also used in interviews with The Beatles . The album released in 1968 McGough and McGear was from Paul McCartney produced .

His first poems appeared in 1967 together with works by Brian Patten and Adrian Henri in the extraordinarily successful tenth volume of Penguin Modern Poets 10 under the title The Mersey Sound and belonged to the so-called "Liverpool Poets" alongside Henri and Patten. The volume was so successful that it appeared in 1974 and 1983 in expanded new editions.

Unlike Patten and Henri, however, he was more of a “street poet” who used the rhythm of language in a curious, subversive way. This spelling was first used in the novels Frinck, A Life in the Day of and Summer with Monika, which were expanded to include poems in 1967 , and later in the anthologies Gig (1973), In the Glassroom (1976) and Waving At Trains (1982). His poem "Icarus Allsorts" is a best-known work about the mythological figure of Icarus in popular culture .

From 1972 he was with John Gorman, Andy Roberts, Mike McGear, Neil Innes and Vivian Stanshall part of the comedy troupe and band Grimms , where the name was composed of the first letters of the six surnames.

McGough has also written numerous plays , often including music. After another novel called Defying Gravity (1992), he also published a number of children's books such as The Magic Fountain (1995), Until I met Dudley (1997) and The Way Things Are (1999).

In 1997 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services to British literature and culture . In 1998 he was one of the recipients of the Society of Authors ' Cholmondeley Award . In 2004 he became Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In addition to a fellowship at Liverpool John Moores University , he later also became Vice President of the Poetry Society .

swell

• Chambers Biographical Dictionary , pp. 972, Edinburgh 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2

Web links

• Literature by and about Roger McGough in the catalog of the German National Library