City Poems & City Music Live Part One

About

Henri’s interdisciplinary spirit informs this season of art, poetry and music, reflecting on the experience of the city, and accompanying an exhibition of ephemera, artworks and rare footage from the Adrian Henri Archive. The display charts the development of the UK live poetry scene in the 1960s, and the rise of The Liverpool Scene, the pop poetry rock band fronted by Henri.

This is the first of three evenings of experimental performance curated by musician Thurston Moore, arts editor Eva Prinz and art historian Catherine Marcangeli, gathering leading poets and musicians from the UK and the US, who share an interest in the rhythms and sounds of urban experience.

“Adrian Henri lived and worked at a time when the practice of art and creative expression was opened up to a whole sector of society that had never had access to it before. The excitement of that discovery meant that definitions and boundaries meant very little – the making and the doing and the participating was the main thing. It didn’t really matter HOW you expressed yourself just as long as you DID express yourself. So of course you could be a “poetpainterpopstarperformanceartistagitatororganiserdesignerdirector” if you wanted! It was the most natural thing in the world.”
Jarvis Cocker in I Want Everything to Happen, ed. Catherine Marcangeli, Ecstatic Peace Library, 2019

Part of City Poems & City Music: Adrian Henri & Friends