Poetic off Licence

About a year ago I listened to a Radio 4 show presented by the sometimes stand-up and poet Kevin Eldon. In the documentary he was looking at the intersection between comedy and poetry, interviewing fans and exponents of the form.

I’d heard of most of the performers before.  John Cooper Clarke- a personal favourite- was one of them: he reminisced about his days supporting bands, providing audiences with couplets before punk acts brought the noise. Eldon himself featured in his guise as the character Paul Hamilton, a jumper-over-the-neck pretension machine, who plays all the right words- but not necessarily in the right order. Further, it featured Tim Key, a comic who delivers daft comedy as high drama.

An artist I’d never heard of though was Hovis Presley. The three-hour programme featured an archived documentary about him narrated by Radio 6 DJ Mark Radcliffe. Hovis Presley was born Richard McFarlane in 1960’s Bolton. Shy from a young age, he had to be cajoled by teachers to perform his sketches (he only did so when they acquiesced to his request for five Curly Wurlys). After travelling the world and doing itinerant jobs he plied his trade on the North-West comedy scene where he rubbed shoulders with Peter Kay, Steve Coogan, Johnny Vegas and John Shuttleworth (of which, he would go on to later tour with). In 1997 he garnered five-star reviews for his Edinburgh show Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Hat, but instead of the success encouraging him, it deterred him and he cancelled his show mid-run. 

Experiencing his career zenith and nadir in the same year took his toll, so much so Presley never strayed far from home again. Instead he threw his energy into others, teaching a Drama course at Salford University, where he used his contacts to help his students find gigs. His was a parochial form of celebrity, one where his poems were read in Salford Registry Office; where his hardwork rejuvenated the local arts scene. On June 9^tth 2004 he suffered a heart attack, meaning his contemporaries mourned the passing of that rare thing: brilliance without ego.

So let me tell you about some of his poems. For ages since hearing the documentary I’ve kept my eye out for his only published collection Poetic off Licence; however, it has always been out of my price range. With not many copies available, they go for £60 - £100 on the Internet. Last week I thought I would try searching again; fortunately, I managed to find a small publisher ‘Flapjack Press’ that did it for less than the King’s ransom (£8). Going from just being able to read his romantic ode ‘I rely on you’ to enjoying his complete works was wonderful.

‘I rely on you’ is available on Presley’s website. If it didn’t have 70's period references it would be a reading at my wedding. Here’s some lines for you to enjoy:

I rely on you
like a handyman needs pliers
like an auctioneer needs buyers
like a laundromat needs driers
like The Good Life needed Richard Briers
I rely on you

It is from the John Cooper Clarke school: using everyday items to say something about love. The word ‘rely’ on first sight mightn’t appear romantic, but it's actually very apt. For love isn’t always kisses and valentines; sometimes it’s bad days and bosses. Having someone secure and strong to protect you from life’s buffeting winds is not just helpful, but vital. That juxtaposition of the extended Richard Briers line with the pithy ‘I rely on you’ is pretty special.

You might now be beginning to understand why Richard McFarlane’s stage name was Hovis Presley. Hovis is a brand synonymous with the homely north; Presley of worldwide superstardom. It’s these incongruities and juxtapositions where Presley’s finds his humour. Take two of his other poems, ‘I wondered as lonely as an insurance salesman’ and ‘The winter of my quiet content.’ The first title is a play on Wordsworth’s ‘I wondered as lonely as a cloud’; the second Shakespeare’s Richard III’s ‘Now is the winter of our discontent.’ Now have a look at some of the lines and see the laughs you get when you cross English heritage sites with comic gunpowder. We’ll look at the lines on the salesman first:

hope is hibernating

optimism’s flying south

I wouldn’t know a gift house

If it kissed me in the mouth.

These are just a few lines from the poem, however here you find a mercurial mind at work. Essentially, the poem is a comic rendering of Miller’s Death of a Salesman: a poor fellar surrendering his dignity to the money-god. The idiom ‘look a gift horse in the mouth’ is made all the more tragic by our speaker's inability to recognise it, even if it planted a smacker on him. The alliterative opening, metaphorical middle and Englishness ending reveal a master craftsman at play.

'The winter....’ is maybe my favourite. I’ll put the whole poem here for your enjoyment:

the bedroom’s cold

the blanket’s hot

the wind’s getting up

but I’m not

now is the winter of my quiet content.

Presley has subverted the high-stakes opening to Shakespeare’s play by ignoring its political machinations, setting it instead in the domestic home. Our speaker has bared his bottom to the sub-zero, won the battle with January’s frost, by finding a warm spot in his bed and forgetting the world outside. Again, look at the wind 'getting up’ – it’s this English phrase that allows him to literalise it in the forth line. At the end Presley plays vicar: his half-pun marrying high art and laughs in happy union.

If you smile at the title Poetic off Licence then you’ll love this book. So get down to ‘Flapjack Press,’ put some money behind the bar and have a jar of this northern male.

Poetic off Licence is available at http://www.flapjackpress.co.uk/page3.htm