Everything about Roger Mcgough totally explained
Roger Joseph McGough CBE (born
November 9,
1937) is a well-known
English performance poet. He presents the
BBC Radio 4 programme
Poetry Please and records
voice-overs for
commercials, as well as performing his own
poetry regularly. He is a Fellow of
Liverpool John Moores University and a member of the Executive Council of the
Poetry Society.
Life and work
McGough was born in
Litherland in north
Liverpool, a city with which he's firmly associated according to most people. He was educated at the
University of Hull at a time when the chief librarian was
Philip Larkin. Returning to
Merseyside in the early
1960s, he met
Mike McGear and
John Gorman, both multi-talented entertainers; together they formed a comedy group called
The Scaffold, reaching
number one in the
UK Singles Chart in
1968 with their
version of "
Lily The Pink". McGough also co-wrote many of their
songs.
McGough was also responsible for much of the humorous dialogue in
The Beatles' animated
film,
Yellow Submarine, although he didn't receive an on-screen credit for it.
With
Adrian Henri and
Brian Patten, he published two best-selling volumes of
verse entitled
The Mersey Sound, and came to prominence as one of the "
Liverpool poets" of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Mersey Sound, first written and published in 1967, was revised in 1983, and then again 2007.
In 1978, McGough appeared in
All You Need Is Cash, a
mockumentary detailing the career of a Beatles-like group called
The Rutles; in McGough's scene, his introduction takes so long that he's only asked one question ('Did you know the Rutles?' to which McGough cheerfully responds 'Oh yes') before the documentary is forced to move along to other events.
One of McGough's more unusual compositions was created in 1981, when he co-wrote an "electronic poem" called
Now Press Return with the programmer Richard Warner for inclusion with the
Welcome Tape of the
BBC Micro home computer.
(External Link
) Now Press Return incorporated several novel themes, including user-defined elements to the poem, lines which changed their order (and meaning) every few seconds, and text which wrote itself in a spiral around the screen.
(External Link)
McGough won a
Cholmondeley Award in 1998, and was awarded the
CBE in June 2004. He holds an honorary
MA from Nene College of Further Education; was awarded an
honorary degree from
Roehampton University in 2006; as well as an
honorary doctorate from the
University of Liverpool on
3 July 2006. He was Fellow of Poetry at the
Loughborough University (1973-5) and Honorary Professor at
Thames Valley University (1993).
Most recently, he appeared on an episode of the
BBC Television quiz show,
QI - (Series 'D', episode 11).
Books
- Summer With Monika (1967) (in record form, 1978])
- Out Of Sequence (1972)
- Sporting Relations (1974)
- "Lucky" (1993)
- Defying Gravity (1993)
- The Way Things Are (1999)
- Everyday Eclipses (2002)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Roger Mcgough'.
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