Meltdown 2011: Roger McGough and friends

This was the first event of this year’s Meltdown festival that we got to see.  I really like anything of McGough’s I’ve ever been exposed to but I’m no expert.  Still, the tickets were reasonable and it’s not every day you get a chance to see him, so I took a punt on it, going without any expectations good or bad.  It proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable night, of mostly poetry but also some song.  The audience definitely skewed toward the greyer end of the spectrum, as did the majority of the performers, which lent McGough’s poems of the intimations of mortality (such as “I Am Not Sleeping”) or of decay (the haunting “Flannel”) a certain piquancy.

McGough was easily the best performer of the poets on stage, at ease in front of a roomful of people and an excellent judge of tone in his readings — no lines fell flat, and his poetry was full of humour, even in his bleakest ones — I particularly liked “Survivor”, where the speaker talks of thinking about death, dying, disease and starvation; these “keep his mind off things”.  McGough has a great command of poetry which is funny, but Mike Harding’s efforts, likeable as he was, struck me much more as humorous verse.  Kit Wright’s work had rather more heft but he didn’t seem comfortable in front of such a large audience.  Willy Russell, though, who I am not bunching in with the other poets (I think of him as a writer of all sorts), was absolutely hilarious almost from his first words, and the reading from his novel The Wrong Boy had me squealing with laughter (there was a particular line where a granny is telling a grandson that he’s her favourite grandchild, that two of her other grandchildren are the sort to “make a paedophile eat his own sweets” — a line which, in Russell’s delivery, finished me off).

Music was provided by Real Fur (very enjoyable, I will keep an eye out for them) and Ralph McTell, who was probably the best, if possibly the quietest, performer that night — capable of commanding everyone’s attention though seeming a very gentle-spoken man.  His songs were greeted with reverent silence and his poem was delivered in a riveting incantatory style.

My only main criticism would be of the last piece — a collective performance of a song called, I’m guessing, “All in Time to the Music”, a bleak, almost nihilistic affair wholly at odds with the mood of the rest of the evening.  However, this came across as more of a blip in the mood rather than a depressant, and we left quite satisfied (though the BF did see The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, which was going on in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the same building, on a screen as we left and said that by the looks of the shenanigans going on there we really ought to have gone to that).

See comments for setlist/reading-list.