Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a poet. As a boy growing up in Liverpool, he showed little aptitude for literature,

but at Hull University that dam burst and the words came flowing,

encouraged and supported by Philip Larkin. His witty colloquial style gave his work wide appeal.

In the 60s he formed a highly successful pop group called The Scaffled. There Lily the Pink,

his words, went to number one, but the 60s swung away and he returned to his

first love. He's written more than 30 books of poetry all of them still in print

to quote from his poem for a dead poet, he was a proper poet. He said things that made

you think and said them nicely. He is Roger McGough, who's far from dead and sitting opposite me right now.

But is that your definition of a proper poet, Roger?

Somebody who says things that make you think and says them nicely?

I think it would be, yes. That's the sort of poetry that I like I mean poetry is a

mystery to me still but I like something that's accessible but it's not like just

telling somebody a story there's always a element of mystery about it that comes

in what sense where was I don't know There's always an element of mystery about it that comes in writing.

In what sense? Where was the mystery?

I don't know in a funny way.

It comes from the impulse that makes you write it,

as if the work often comes from somewhere else,

as if their ideas are coming around and about

and I'm just picking and choosing them and trying to make sense.

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