When news arrived of the death of Adrian Henri, Liverpool poet, painter and sixties icon, one of my first thoughts was that for most of the past 25 years, a self-portrait of him has hung close to my bed.
It wasn't an intentional act of homage - the painting was found abandoned in a flat that I and Tricia rented in Liverpool in the early 1970s, and the bedroom was the only place we had space to put it - but there's no doubt that Adrian was part of the landscape of Merseyside in those heady days, as much as the cathedral, docks and Toxteth landscape that he made into poetry. For me, he defined Liverpool in those days.
He was a neighbour when I lived in Liverpool 8, and we sometimes appeared on poetry-reading programmes together, though by then he was in a much more glittering orbit than I was and was only rarely able to fit in local readings. When I knew him he was already very well known from being published in the Penguin Modern Poets series, in a best-selling collection with Roger McGough and Brian Patten. Patten was the lyrical one, McGough the adroit wordsmith. Adrian was different again; he drew from a European background and also from American culture, so his poems were full of allusions to European surrealists, American Beat Poets, continental Absurd Theatre and more; all obscure to me, but doorways to a fascinating world.
