Roger McGough

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

Biography

After 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 with John Gorman and Mike McGear the comedian group The Scaffold, which was successfully launched in the late 1960s with several songs in the charts. The most successful of these titles was next to " Thank U Very Much ", " Do You Remember ", " Gin Gan Goolie " and " Liverpool Lou" certainly " Lily the Pink", in 1968 24 weeks in the UK charts and number them four weeks - was one hit. He told to shock the gloomy self-deprecating jokes and puns with the slightly pubescent lust, the used John Lennon in interviews with The Beatles. The 1968 released album McGough and McGear was produced by Paul McCartney.

His first poems appeared in 1967, along 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, making it one next to Henri and Patten on the so-called "Liverpool Poets ". The band was so successful that he appeared in a new enlarged edition in 1974 and 1983.

However, unlike Patten and Henri, he was more of the " street poet " who used the rhythm of the language in a curious, subversive way. This notation was first used as early as the 1967 extended to poetry novels Frinck, A Life in the Day of Summer with Monika and and later in the anthologies Gig (1973 ), In The Glass Room (1976) and Waving At Trains (1982). His poem " Icarus Allsorts " is a well-known work on the mythological figure of Icarus in popular culture.

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

McGough has written next to numerous plays, which often also contained music written. But after another novel titled Defying Gravity (1992 ), he published a series of children's books like The Magic Fountain (1995), Until I met Dudley (1997) and The Way Things Are (1999).

For his services to the British literature and culture in 1997 he the Order of the British Empire was awarded. In 1998 he was one of the winners of the awarded by the Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award. In 2004 he was Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In addition to further work as a Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University, he was later Vice President of the Poetry Society.

Swell

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