Addiction, ageing, alcoholism, bereavement,
burglary, impotence, infidelity, schizophrenia,
self-deception and suicide are just a few of the
themes occurring in this CD of poems and songs by Jim
Bennett, and its most persistent theme (in many
guises) is the ageing of his generation and of
Liverpool itself. So don't expect a barrel of laughs,
but do expect the occasional serious tickle.
Jim Bennett is very much of that generation of
Liverpool poets who adopted the directness and
spontaneity of American beat writing and adapted it
into a peculiarly English - and Liverpudlian - mode
of expression. Avoiding the pitfall of becoming
"a three-chord guitar-player | singing about
some place | he's heard about in other people's songs
| but never seen," (as the narrator puts it in Down
In Liverpool), his poetry is staged in the
recognizable Merseyside landscape as it changes along
with its characters.
Jim is a very effective reader of his own work,
with a voice slightly reminiscent of that of Brian
Patten, which helps to make this CD better than your
average studio poetry recording. As well as the 27
poems, there are also four songs. Though I'd often
seen Jim reading out his poetry, I'd never ever heard
his songs until the rough mixes of this CD. It was a
surprise, and a very pleasant one. These are modern
English folk pieces, well-sung and with some neat
finger-picking, and the influence of Andy Roberts is
very clear in Man On The Moon.
I first saw Jim Bennett performing around 1996,
with the Dead Good Poets Society in the Everyman
Bistro, but he'd been around and doing poetry, to-ing
and fro-ing between Britain and America, ever since
he'd first started reading out his poetry back in the
sixties. Somewhere In Liverpool looks back
from its standpoint "thirty years on | from the
days when | the long-haired rough-spoken poets |
wandered into O'Connor's | and screamed their poems |
above the bar-noise."
Several of the poems take this retrospective
approach. The title piece, Down In Liverpool,
is a darkly powerful poem which gains from repeated
listenings. Its alcoholic main character is ageing
without ever having properly grown-up. He wanders
messily through life, unable to see that he's
destroying his wife, and at the same time projecting
his own decline onto the city around him, for example
onto the Dicky Lewis statue, "the phallic symbol
of Liverpool, | now looking limp | and dangling like
a dead fish. | There's so much of us in this
place." Any guilt is side-stepped: "Today I
will get drunk before I start to remember | whatever
it is I'm trying to forget."
Shops are a recurring image: the Lewis's statue
becomes a symbol of impotence; and in Rooms, the
couple looking at shop-window furniture show-rooms
come to see them as a sort of idyll of a pristine
world: "that place that smelt new | when it was
new | ... | before the room began to smell of
us."
Elsewhere, in both Problems With Bags and
Trouble At Tesco's shops become the scenes of
small crises. The latter is darkly witty in the
detail of its portrayal of paranoid schizophrenia;
and in case I've been giving the impression that
these poems are all doom and gloom, it's worth
mentioning that even the darker pieces have their
moments of light, and that there are a good number of
lighter and more optimistic pieces on this CD,
including the very funny Dogs.
A Poem For You is a love-poem in a
straightforward 1960s Liverpool style, with a
conscious bow to Adrian Henri's poem, I Want To
Paint. Unseen, an autobiographical poem
about surveying the mess left by burglars in the flat
of his recently-died mother, emerges as a
surprisingly optimistic piece in its unplanned facing
up to what really matters and what doesn't.
But considering all the grimness brought forth in
this CD to do with getting older, three pieces stand
out in their different attempts at reconciliation
with ageing. After talking angrily of the changes
since the 1960s poetry scene, Somewhere In
Liverpool evokes the idea of the past as
something that survives in the present,
"Somewhere in Liverpool | where we are poets |
and we are scousers | and it is still | the summer of
love." The song, Just Like The Old Days, has
its chorus, "We made love in new ways | Just
like the old days | When love was something fresh and
new," and at first uses the old standby of
having its events in "a dream," but then
allows this to become a reality on waking. Here the
hankering for the past at last becomes a celebration
of the present, as happens more directly in the poem,
Like The First Time, which is also one of
the very few poems to mention parenthood. Here, in a
sleight of word so quick it's almost gone before
you've noticed it, Jim allows an ambiguity on the
phrase "time passes," so that it refers
both to growing older and to making love. There's
hope for old goat yet.
David Bateman, July 2000
-
An
Evening Down in Liverpool By Bill Melrose
-
- Jim Bennett launched
his new CD of poetry and song in the Third Room
at the Everyman on Wednesday evening, August 9th.
An enthusiastic band of aficionados ignored the
distant clatter of dishes and the hum of
ventilators fighting a war of attrition against
heat stroke. They were rewarded by an evening
rich in variety and entertainment, with
‘open mike’ spots and guest appearances
to back up the main event.
The contributions from the
floor were of a high standard, from Tim
Stone’s compendium of cartoon characters
animated into song to Nick Hancock’s vivid
description of canoeing in British Columbia. The
quiet thoughtfulness of Angela Keaton was matched
by the variety stage verve of Georgina Smith.
There were poems about ageing by a lady who
didn’t show it, about the perils of teaching
Latin to a nubile thirteen year old, and about a
war-time innocent called up to Catterick camp.
Sam Vernon supervised the programme as well as
telling us about her ill-trained pussy.
David Bateman was
the first of the guest artists, looking more
saturnine and underfed than ever. His narrative
poem about a rapist within the family and the
immorality of the vigilante reaction should be
read to the recent protesters of Portsmouth. He
finished with a trademark piece, delivered with
the usual tautness which complements his
convoluted and wickedly inventive wit. Pete
McGovern brought up the rear. He is a quiet
unassuming man who is transformed the minute he
steps on the stage. Folk singer, poet, guitarist,
comedian with impeccable timing and well honed
ad-libs, he is the complete entertainer. His only
weakness is an uninformed antipathy to Everton
FC. He rounded off the evening leading the
audience in a rendition of the Liverpool anthem,
In My Liverpool Home, which, of course, he wrote.
But all this was
just the icing. The cake was Jim Bennett’s
new CD. Jim is still a hippie at heart, but he
has a middle-aged chest which complained huskily
about him singing on the night. (I checked on the
CD later. The voice is surprisingly pleasant.
Technology is a wonderful thing.) True to his
roots, he started with a lament to the lead
singer of Velvet Underground who had more lines
on her arm than Railtrack, but he does not really
delude himself, acknowledging later in mock
sorrow that
you can’t be
a hippie
when your hair
falls out.
Though he would
rather be On The Road with Jack Kerouak in the
wild abandon of youth, he now goes shopping in
the family saloon to Tesco’s and Boots. He
takes with him, however, the inquiring eye of a
journalist and a compassion rising from maturity.
The poem about the poor inadequate who
‘lost’ his trolley in Tesco’s is
both funny and sad and acutely observed and
though the trouble in Boots with the plastic bags
is also amusing, there is a sharp cutting edge of
protest;
he’s not all
there
she said, tapping
her head.
But he is all here
I said
One of Jim’s
great strengths is his range. He reads a poem
which naughty boys all over the world would
repeat with glee – I’ve got a jellyfish
hanging from my nose – and follows it with
poems bearing his soul, peeling off layer after
layer of feeling. He sees his father’s ghost
trapped in the carriage window of the New
Brighton train; his distress at the vandalising
of his deceased mother’s possessions is
sublimated into a poem. He conveys the tenderness
of love where
we hold each
other
always like the
first time
Jim has
rediscovered the secret of simplicity. Carefully
chosen words, transparent words, let the reader
look into a metaphysical subtext.
As the title poem
of the CD suggests, Jim is true to his Liverpool
background. He takes the post-war decline of the
city personally, though he never abandons hope.
His cathartic musings take him past bookshops and
‘places where things happened,’ like Ye
Crack, The Legs of Man and Lewis’s.
‘Walking in Liverpool’ is a guided tour
of the streets with realities and memories
merging into one. The furthest he gets away from
Liverpool is Grasmere and even then, he is back
on Merseyside before he
discovers
Wordsworth ‘lurking in a poem.’
Poets often do
not do justice to their own work, but Jim has
been performing for a long time. Experience has
made him more confident. He delivers with a quiet
incisiveness, letting the words do the work. He
is no longer afraid of the pauses which are
now…pregnant. Close your eyes and at times
the cadences are suggestive of McGough. But what
the hell – they are all scousers together;
somewhere in
Liverpool
where we are
poets
and we are
scousers
and it’s
still
the Summer of
love.
It was a great
evening, and it was free.
Down in Liverpool
by Jim Bennett.
A Long Neck Media
production.
Available as CD
(£8.99) or Audio Tape.
Review by Bill
Melrose.
|
Down
in Liverpool
A new CD of
Music and Poetry from
Jim
Bennett
- "an authentic voice
bringing the sound of beat to
Liverpool"
- or available from your
record store.
-
|