Interview: Roger McGough talks ahead of Shrewsbury show

For generations of young people, however, McGough's witty verse has been living proof that poetry can be fun as well as thought-provoking. But when McGough, aged 78, opens his national tour at Theatre Severn's intimate Walker Theatre on Thursday, where he will be sharing the stage with South London three-piece Little Machine.

So what can the audience expect to see? "I'm really energised by working with Little Machine," McGough told us over the phone from his West London home, adding his co-headliners had also made quite an impression on him.

"We did two dates at the Hay Festival and it was really good. They set classical poems to music, but their background is rock 'n' roll and punk. They've got good musicians, a good singer and they make a lot of classic poems come alive." McGough said Little Machine treated all the poems 'with respect' and the collaboration had spawned a rare treat for audiences. "We do some of my poems as well, and they've even got me singing, so they've got a lot to answer for, now I think about it," the Liverpudlian said with a laugh.

And in spite of publishing two collections, Poetry Pie and It Never Rains, in the past couple of years, McGough is eager to showcase fresh material in Shrewsbury.

He said he had a lot of new poems he was taking out and performing, and he hopes his show can provide some positive energy. "In these times, I think there's a need to make people laugh, so people will get some relief," he explained. "We'll make some political points too, but it'll be an evening of enjoyment." A graduate of Hull University, McGough's time as an undergraduate coincided with poet Philip Larkin's tenure as university librarian. "He was there when I was there and was sub-warden of the hall I was in," he said.

"I did French and geography but I enjoyed his poetry – still do – and I did send some of mine to him in my final year.

"He wrote back to me very kindly and very encouragingly, but I never actually sat down with him. I wasn't mature enough, I wouldn't have known what to say." Like John Betjeman and Charles Causley, Larkin was one of several influences on McGough's writing.

"I remember Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue coming to read at Hull," he added.

"Vernon Watkins came too, talking about Dylan Thomas. Thomas was another influence and also the French poets.

"Like the American beat poets, they were confident in what they were doing in their poetry, and were writing for the people."

The likes of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud also appealed to McGough when he was 'an angst-ridden teenager' while Larkin's work lives on in his performances with Little Machine. "He features in the show," he said.

"The boys do one of his poems, the one with the rude words in, and I do a poem about him and I being at university together."

The tenderness and sensitivity of McGough's serious poems mix comfortably with the playful puns and clever word play that abound in his work, though he admits that his verbal dexterity is something of a defence mechanism. There's something about being from Liverpool, being working class and writing poetry, a fear of appearing to be too clever and too intellectual, so playing with words and rhymes was a way of deflecting that," he said.

With Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, McGough was one of the Liverpool Poets in the 1960s, while his friendship with fellow Scaffold member – and brother of Paul McCartney – Mike McGear led to an association with The Beatles that resulted in him landing the job of uncredited scriptwriter for the band's animated film, Yellow Submarine. "By the time I got to the script, there'd been about 25 scriptwriters before me, and The Beatles didn't sound as if they came from Liverpool," he explained.

"He had his little case in front of him with money in it and I walked past and remember he was playing 'Summertime'.

"I thought, 'that was good', so I threw a quid in and he stopped playing, said, 'thanks, Rog' and played 'Lily The Pink' as I walked away."

Roger McGough + Little Machine are at the Walker Theatre, Shrewsbury, on Thursday. See www.theatresevern.co.uk for details.

By Stephen Taylor