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Since its inception AndyRobertsMusic, with the active encouragement of Andy, has always tried to maintain Adrian's music, poetry and art in the public domain and we have included some of Adrian's poetry and music together with news and re-releases of the Liverpool Scene catalogue. We have however, up until now, felt unable to include any of Adrian Henri's paintings without the neccessary permissions.

AndyRobertsMusic is pleased to present new pages dedicated to Adrian's work and are proud to have been given permission by Catherine Marcangeli to present several paintings not yet seen on the world wide web.

Born in Birkenhead in 1932, but brought up largely in the seaside resort of Rhyl in North Wales, Adrian Henri was a creative force for over forty years. He went to St. Asaph Grammar School and was the only pupil taking A-level art and had the art room all to himself. In 1955 he graduated in Art from the University of Durham. He became interested in poetry and jazz after meeting Roger McGough and Brian Patten in 1961.

He achieved prominence in the mid 1960's with his best-selling books of poetry and took part in that glorious flowering of Liverpool talent in popular music, performance and poetry that had such an important worldwide influence.

Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten produced 'The Mersey Sound' (Penguin Modern Poets vol. 10 - selling over a quarter million copies), and helped the 'Liverpool Poets' as they were known, establish themselves as the new force in British Poetry. Andy Roberts accompanied Adrian Henri and Roger McGough for the album of Poetry - 'the INCREDIBLE new liverpool scene' (CBS 63045) and this led to the formation of The Liverpool Scene with other Liverpool musicians Mike Evans, Mike Hart, Percy Jones and Brian Dodson.

Adrian Henri was by training and vocation first and foremost a painter who exhibited widely, won prizes, and created for himself a distinctive niche in British art.

We have added additional pages to the site which highlight Adrian's skills and talents. Scroll down the page for further news and information on Adrian Henri and his work. Follow the links for pages celebrating Adrian's paintings and poetry.

| Adrian Henri | Poet and Painter Extraordinary |

Bel Mooney, writer and broadcaster, travelled to Liverpool in January 2000 to talk to Adrian Henri and Catherine Marcangeli at their home and Adrian's studio.

The subsequent article appeared in the Times Magazine. Read it here >>

A Celebration for Adrian Henri
21st March 2000

In 1999 Adrian Henri suffered a stroke. His friends got together to create a special evening to celebrate a special man.

To say Adrian is a larger than life character is no understatement. He is one of life's largest. This man has fronted a rock band (although The Liverpool Scene couldn't be contained by the simple words 'rock band'), is a highly respected poet, and an award winning artist. And even these accolades can't do him justice. Tonight was a celebration of and for Adrian.

You can judge the affection for the man by the guest list for the evening at Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall. You might expect people like Andy Roberts to be high on the list, after all he has accompanied Adrian for over 35 years, not only in TLS but also as one of the country's leading poets. You might also expect Brain Patten and Roger McGough to add their names to programme.

When you also hear that John Gorman and Mike McGear re-united with Roger as The Scaffold for the night you know something special is taking place. Neil Innes (from GRIMMS), George Melly contributed their particularly unique blend of music and humour.

Leading 'wordsmiths' such as Carol Ann Duffy (the nearly Poet Laureate), Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell added to the occasion and helped turn the evening into a true extravaganza of laughter, tears, sighing and singing.

There was more, so much more. In the interval, whilst we all supped our beer and wine, the bars reverberated to the sound of a choir. Tom Robinson had us all singing 'Glad to be Gay' and we were all happy to be. Andy played a lovely version of '64', which was of course the number of the house he and Adrian shared during the TLS days.

At the climax of the evening Adrian was brought to the front of the house in his wheelchair and slowly and I'm sure very painfully walked onto this familiar stage. I'm sure we all thought he wouldn't be able to get those words out, but with bravery and typical determination he slowly read 'Love Is'. That rendition will always be a special moment. My eyes were moist and I'm sure I wasn't alone.

It was an extraordinary evening and I felt privileged to be there.

| PAUL CARY | 2000 |

I Want To Paint

A tape cassette of Adrian's 'I WANT T0 PAINT', read by Roger Philips, was produced to co-incide with an exhibition of Adrian Henri's paintings at the Walker Art Gallery during 2000.

| The Guardian | Obituary: Adrian Henri |

Adrian Henri, who has died aged 68, was perhaps best known as a poet, though he was primarily a painter, as evidenced in a recent retrospective at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery. But it was as a communicator, in the broadest sense of the word, that he made his greatest impact, both on those around him and on the cultural scene generally.

Born in Birkenhead, Henri grew up through the war years in Rhyl. He was educated at St Asaph grammar school, in north Wales, before studying fine art, from 1951 to 1955, at King's College, Newcastle, where tutors included Lawrence Gowring, Roger de Gray and, later, Richard Hamilton. The influence of the abstract expressionists, and then the newly-emergent pop painters, was evident in his work by the early 1960s, but already it had a personal signature to it, an affection for the urban landscapes and icons of popular culture of his immediate surroundings.

Jasper Johns's American Flag gave way to Omo packets, and Alfred Jarry's Père Ubu was pictured strolling down Lime Street. In a homage to James Ensor, The Entry Of Christ Into Brussels became The Entry Of Christ Into Liverpool - with all of the Henri heroes and friends crowding the foreground, and Jesus on a donkey at the rear. Adrian was a confirmed atheist.

It was at this time that I first met him. To a 16-year-old discovering jazz, modern art and the beat generation writers, his enormous enthusiasm acted as a catalyst in my own development - as it did for many others. It was directly as a result of this meeting - I was working two stalls down from him in a summer vacation job on Rhyl fairground - that I got involved in the increasingly populist bohemia emerging in Liverpool. He helped organise various multi-media events and happenings that, as well as being extensions to his paintings inspired by the New York artist Allan Kaprow, also triggered his performance-driven poetry.

Alongside that of the other so-called Liverpool poets, this resulted in the Liverpool Scene anthology, edited by Edward Lucie-Smith, then (with Roger McGough and Brian Patten) the Penguin Modern Poets' Mersey Sound, which remains one of the best-selling poetry collections of all time.

Adrian's poems were very much those of a painter; he wrote what he saw, as much as what he felt, though what he described was often expressed with such passion that even the most simplistic listings of people or places were lit with an emotional glow. "I want to paint/ Pictures worth their weight in money/ Pictures that tramps can live in/ Pictures that children would find in their stocking on Christmas morning/ Pictures that teenage lovers can send each other/ I want to paint/ pictures."

Despite the media attention spotlighting his poetry activity, and an increasingly hectic working life as a performer - not least as frontman with the touring rock/ poetry band, the Liverpool Scene (with whom I played saxophone) - Adrian never stopped painting throughout the 1960s, a period that culminated in his winning a major prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition of 1972.

The prizewinning work was one of the last of a celebrated series of "Meat Paintings", which marked a turning point in both his art and personal life. After a heart attack, he had adopted a more relaxed lifestyle and an increasingly lyrical approach in his painting, with rural landscapes and hedgerows taking over from the hard edges of pop art and photorealism.

Of course, Adrian's role as communicator had never been restricted to words and canvases; from his post-student days he had taught at schools, colleges of further education and, most notably, at Liverpool College of Art. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he enjoyed lectureships at polytechnics around the country, writers' tours for the Arts Council and a number of writer-in-residence appointments.

Meanwhile, the one-man exhibitions continued, and the poetry books proliferated. His art and poetry became known worldwide, and exhibition openings and reading tours took him across the globe, from America to South Africa, each place becoming a source of inspiration for paint and words, be it Monet's garden at Giverny or the white-walled suburbs of Los Angeles. His energies extended to stage plays, children's books and television plays.

In all this activity, it was Adrian's character that others warmed to. He was eclectic, tolerant and generous of spirit, and happy to mention influences as diverse as James Ensor, Nicholas de Staël, Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko in the same breath - or, in the case of Me, in the same poem. And he could be just as excited about the work of those around him, whose paintings, poetry or whatever he would promote with an enthusiasm sometimes bordering on the evangelical.

Nearly two years ago Adrian suffered a severe stroke from which he would never properly recover, despite a dogged determination to walk, talk and paint again - aided, in no small way, by his partner of the last 15 years, Catherine Marcangeli. He did indeed start drawing again. There was the Walker Gallery retrospective and, only last week, an exhibition of paintings opened in Rhyl. The night before his death, Liverpool city council conferred the freedom of the city on him.

Catherine survives him.

| MIKE EVANS | DEC 2000 |

An article written by the late John Peel in the January 2001 issue of the Radio Times recalled happy times spent in Ireland with Adrian Henri and Andy Roberts.

| Plainsong | A to B | We Bid You Goodnight |

Andy Roberts records a tribute to Adrian...
"I recorded as a tribute to my life-long friend and teacher, Adrian Henri. I have always regretted that I was too upset to consider performing this during Adrian's funeral at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral in January 2001".
read it here ...

A new collection of classic and unpublished work by the late Mersey Sound poet Adrian Henri has been compiled by his partner, Catherine Marcangeli. Featuring anecdotes from Roger McGough and Willy Russell among others, and a foreword from author Carol Ann Duffy, Adrian Henri Selected and Unpublished aims to be inspiring for old and new readers alike.

“I came to it as an academic, not a widow. There is no therapy in this – it just needed doing,” said Ms Marcangeli, a lecturer at the University of Paris. Early on, it was suggested that I publish letters, but I decided poems were more appropriate. The idea was to put some golden oldies alongside more recent poems, including some that had never been published. I didn’t want to just take a few from each of his collections, so I hit on three main themes which seemed to me to represent his work – love, home and away, and city representations. The three Liverpool poets (Henri, McGough and Patten) are largely known for their work in the ’60s – but that was when their careers started rather than ended. “I hope it gives new insight into the poems, a new way of reading them.

“The idea to get his friends to write little introductions to each section just made it a real family affair.”

Roger McGough and Brian Patten appeared at the Everyman last night (20 Oct) and will again tonight for their sell-out performance 40 Love, which celebrates The Mersey Sound that made the trios’ names famous in 1967. They still leave a third chair on stage for their late friend when performing together. Patten said: “Adrian was my friend since I was 15. It’s lovely to see so many of his poems all in the same place. We do some of his poems in our show because we like to keep him with us in spirit.”

McGough said: “Adrian was a wonderful person and I was delighted to have the chance to get involved with this book and celebrate his life.”

On his contribution, Willy Russell said: “I was thrilled and touched to be asked, because Adrian was such a good friend of mine and I’m proud to be involved in a tiny little way.”

Vicky Anderson - Liverpool Echo