Tonight at noon
Poet, painter, performer, mentor; for over forty years, Adrian Henri was at the centre of Liverpool's creative universe. I read his poems, I looked at his paintings - and then I moved to his city. This tribute to the inescapable influence of Adrian Henri is Part Two of my Capital of Culture extravaganza.
There was an Adrian Henri before Liverpool, but I find it difficult to imagine him.
Born in Birkenhead, raised in Rhyl, taught in Newcastle; Adrian Henri was a fairground worker and a painter, a lover of jazz and an absorber of influences prior to his arrival in the city in 1957. But the Adrian Henri who, a few years later, turned the musical chug of Mersey Beat into a semi-psychedelic urban surrealism, who painted realities and fantasies of Liverpool 8, and who helped blow open the closed doors of British poetry, seemed steeped in the city.
With his fellow 'Liverpool Poets' - Roger McGough and Brian Patten - Adrian Henri transformed a generation's perceptions of what could and could not be poetic; after reading 'The Mersey Sound' - still one of the most successful poetry anthologies ever published - hundreds of thousands came to know the sights and sensations of Henri's Liverpool. Hope Street, Upper Duke Street, Little St Bride Street; Lewis's, the Kardomah, Yates's Wine Lodge. His was a romantic attachment to streets and the memories they contained, a landscape to which he added cultural references drawn from his own uninhibited passions.
The poet in him was much celebrated (and, it has to be said, well criticised too for perceived self-centred sentiment) but Henri was never one to be stuffed in a pigeon hole. That he loomed large over Tate Liverpool's 2007 exhibition 'Centre of the Creative Universe' is down to his easy flitting between art forms and his position as gregarious facilitator as much as intense practitioner. Trained as a painter, and a lover of music, he learned much about performance art from America, and transformed Liverpool poetry readings into multimedia events. He as much as anyone helped turn some artists in Canning Street garrets into a 'scene' worthy of the name, connecting music to poetry to painting and ending up with art worth remembering.
By the time Henri welcomed the counter-culture's poet-god Allen Ginsberg to Liverpool in 1965, this scene was flourishing; in recognition of magical nights in the city and the global reach of its music, Ginsberg flattered his hosts with the now famous phrase "Liverpool is at the present moment the centre of the consciousness of the human universe". Henri was the personification of this consciousness; he mixed genres like paint, even taking his poetry-rock band The Liverpool Scene on the road and into the studio, as well as teaching, exhibiting and reading across the UK and beyond.
This free-thinking scene bubbled into the mainstream as The Scaffold hit 'Top Of The Pops', and many of its participants began to move away, or just move on. But Henri stayed; Liverpool was his muse, and his home. Older, quieter, and ready now to paint the countryside as well as the city, he nevertheless encouraged others and remained a fixture on Mount Street, just round the corner from the Everyman Theatre where so many of Liverpool's experimental urges had found a home.
Adrian Henri died in 2000, just a few months after a major retrospective of his painting at The Walker Art Gallery and days after being awarded the Freedom of Liverpool. I'm sure it meant much to him, but it was scarcely necessary; the freedom of Liverpool had been his for years. After all, as ring master and wizard to a crowd of Liverpool visionaries, he was the man who brought Christ into Lime Street.
Text © Damon Fairclough 2007
Images © Damon Fairclough 2007