Let us begin by establishing what’s true and what’s not. So, Roger, I say, can we clear up a couple of points raised in some of your poems? Did you ever actually ask Kenneth Branagh what he did for a living when you met him?

“No,” the 86-year-old poet says, laughing as he sits in his study in London on this Friday afternoon.

OK, well then, did you dance around Victoria Station with the American poet Sharon Olds?

“No, but I did meet her,” he admits. “At Victoria Station. I couldn’t see her and then I heard this clickety-clack. It was a typewriter and there was a woman sitting outside WH Smith on the floor with her legs out with a typewriter.”

Hmmm. Basically, what you’re telling me, Roger, is that when it comes down to it, we probably shouldn’t believe the things you say happened in your poetry. You didn’t tell Bob Dylan to go electric back in the 1960s? You didn’t tell Jimi Hendrix to give up the ukulele and pick up a guitar?

I'm beginning to doubt the story of stopping the car in Nantwich on the eve of Christmas Eve in 1968 whilst driving from London to Liverpool and knocking on the first door you came to because you and the rest of your band Scaffold wanted to see yourselves on the telly performing Lily the Pink?

The Scaffold (Image: Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

“That was true,” he interrupts Ah. Scaffold - who, if you are not old enough to recall, were a trio made up of McGough, Mike McGear (aka Paul McCartney’s brother) and John Gorman - had recorded their TV appearance earlier that afternoon and it was being broadcast that evening, McGough explains. They realised they weren’t going to get back to Liverpool in time to catch it, hence the Nantwich stop.

The man who answered the door recognised them straight away. “It’s the Scaffold,” he shouted up to his wife upstairs.

The three of them watched their performance and then got back on the road just a few minutes later. The man’s wife didn’t even have time to get downstairs.

“I did meet the lady at a head teacher’s conference much later,” McGough recalls. She told him she had never believed her husband’s story that Scaffold popped in to see themselves on telly. But he confirmed that they did.

“Things about how I helped Bob Dylan and Jim Hendrix … All utter rubbish,” McGough admits. “But I did meet them. I did meet Bob Dylan and I did meet Jimi Hendrix.”

Perhaps it’s only fair to put this all down to poetic licence. After all, McGough is the patron saint of poetry (according to former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and if anyone should know it’s her). He burst onto the poetry scene in the 1960s alongside his fellow Liverpudlian poets Adrian Henri and Brian Patten. All three contributed to the 1967 book The Mersey Sound, which has since sold more than a million copies (there are claims that it is the best selling poetry anthology of all time).

Since then McGough has been a constant poetic presence, whether in the bookshops (he has published more than 40 books), on our radios (as presenter of Radio 4’s Poetry Please) and, for a short time at the end of the 1960s, in the charts.

Tall, thin and bespectacled, he may have made an unlikely pop star, but Scaffold had three top 10 hits at the end of the 1960s: Thank U Very Much, Liverpool Lou and the aforementioned Lily the Pink, which was the Christmas number one in 1968.

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We’ll get back to that. But right now we’re talking about the present moment. This has been a tough year for McGough. “My sister died at the beginning of the year, the same day as Benjamin Zephaniah,” he tells me near the start of our conversation this July afternoon. But it’s been a rewarding year too. June saw the publication of McGough’s The Collected Poems: 1959-2024.

It is a monster of a book, on the high side of 700 pages, full of playful, approachable poems - fine examples of craft and craftiness - about childhood and old age and poets and parties and football and Father Christmas and the weather and desire and Dylan and Hendrix and The Beatles. At one point Alloa even gets a mention. There are love poems, dream poems, funny poems, playful poems, and poems that catch your breath or catch you out.

You could call the book a summation of his literary life, except he’s still writing.

There are 18 previously unpublished poems in the new collection. And he’s written more since. “About eight new ones, two of which are publishable, the rest need reworking,” he tells me.

“At five in the morning there’s always a pen and a bit of paper next to me. I’m constantly putting words together, stringing words together and then tightening the knots.”

He’s also regularly out and about performing said poems for audiences. This year for the first time he even went to Glastonbury to do so. “They put me up in a nice house. But my son went off to stay with his mates in a tent and had a great time.”

I’m not sure he’s sure about Glastonbury. But he’s definitely sure about Edinburgh. This month sees him appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the latest in a long line of appearances in Edinburgh in August that stretch back to 1961.

“You were a little lad in short kilts then,” McGough suggests to me.

I was minus two, Roger, I tell him, which makes him laugh again.

“I was in Liverpool and I was a teacher,” he says, remembering his first visit. “A friend of mine called Arthur Dooley, who was quite a well known sculptor at the time, had a commission at a shop called Binns in Edinburgh. He had to go and make some artwork. We collected rubbish which he used to transform the fourth floor to epitomise the workers’ struggle against consumerism.”

Poet Roger McGough who appears on BBC television in In Vision May 1974 (Photo by WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)Poet Roger McGough in 1974 (Image: Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

McGough had nowhere to stay so they kipped down on the steps of the National Gallery. “This is true,” he points out in case I’m wondering if this is a line from one of his poems.

“I was a teacher. I could have afforded to go to a bread and breakfast, but this seemed more romantic.”

Today McGough is in Barnes in south London. His children have all grown up and left home so it’s just him and his second wife Hilary these days. “I like living in Barnes. It’s not Liverpool but it’s OK.”

But this afternoon his head is in Edinburgh. He is looking around his study at the posters and photographs of his previous visits to the Scottish capital.

“Words on the Run with Willy Russell at the Assembly Rooms in …I don’t know what year. Mouthtrap, a show I did with Brian Patten.”

There was the show he did with Victoria Wood, he adds, looking at a photograph of the two of them together. “Before she became the Victoria Wood we all knew and loved. Someone rang her up from The Scotsman or the Glasgow Herald and asked how would you describe yourself? She said, ‘a cross between a schoolgirl and a lorry.’”

So many memories. Until Covid he’d been to Edinburgh every August for nearly 60 years on the trot since that first time in 1961. All in all, he reckons, he’s spent a year and a half of his life in Edinburgh.

“Do you remember Michael Horovitz?” he asks.

The late English beat poet?

“He was running poetry readings in a cafe in what is now St Andrew Square and I remember doing one of the poetry readings with Paul Pond who was, in fact, Paul Jones, who became the Manfred Mann singer. He was a student from Oxford reading poems. That was the first reading I did.

“And then I went every year after that with the Scaffold to the old Traverse in the Lawnmarket before it went down to the Grassmarket. We become a sort of fixture there really.

“We were greeted very warmly by the audiences in the Traverse. It was lovely.”

This year he’s at the book festival where he will read his poems and make people laugh. Humour has always been important to his poetry, although, at times, it’s meant that some critics have considered him less than serious.

He can’t help himself, though. Playfulness is woven into his work and his words.

“I was probably wanting to be a ‘serious poet’ but when it came out, it came out funny,” he suggests.

“It’s a gift, but some critics say, ‘if you’re not being serious you’re not writing poetry. It’s light verse.’ And it’s not true. You write what you write and sometimes it’s serious and dark.

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“But there was always that, ‘Roger, what are you trying to get away with? Behave yourself’ sort of thing.”

The Collected Poems has plenty of examples of poems that are “serious”. Both personal - poems about the end of his first marriage - and political. There are poems about 9/11 and Bloody Friday, the day the IRA detonated 22 bombs in Belfast in just over an hour, killing nine people and injuring 130. In the poem Identification, he writes from the perspective of a father identifying his dead child: “The face, is that the face I ask? / that mask of charred wood …”

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. McGough was a child of the Blitz. He grew up through the nuclear fears of the Cold War, and is living in this present uncertain moment in time. In a way, you could argue the humour and the playfulness of his work is an assertion of hope in humanity in the face of all the evidence.

Whatever happens, life, he knows, goes on.

“My mum was one of 13, so lots of uncles and aunties. Mainly aunties, because the uncles were all overseas in the armed forces,” he recalls. “Very gabby.

“My dad was one of nine but they were a bit quieter on my dad’s side. The McGoughs and the McGarry’s, Liverpool Irish.”

His dad worked on the docks. “He was a rather shy man,” McGough suggests. “And a man’s man really.

“I was always slightly a puzzle to him. He was a sportsman and I wasn’t that.”

McGough thinks he might have been his mum’s favourite in the family. “She wanted me to do well. She had high hopes for me. And even though you are living in a two-bedroom terrace house and there’s a war on and there isn’t any money we were always told how lucky we were.

“Lucky to be born in Liverpool,” he adds. “Could have been in Manchester.”

Hah.

“My dad died very young. He was 53, so he never knew what I did. But my mum lived long enough to see me be a poet and be in Scaffold. So, she was made up.”

Success, when it came, he suggests, was a matter of being in the right place in the right company at the right time in the 1969s. He knew The Beatles before anyone else, after all.

“When I first met them I was living with Thelma [McGough’s first wife], and Thelma had been to college with John Lennon. So, they were around. They had been to Hamburg. They were very cool.”

McGough was a teacher at the time. He remembers walking along the school corridor one day, “and I heard Please Please Me playing on the radio and thinking, ‘Blimey.’”

The BeatlesThe Beatles (Image: free)

Scaffold followed in The Beatles chart steps. McGough teamed up with Paul’s brother Mike and John Gorman and they even got The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein to manage them. Pop songs and satirical sketches at the Fringe followed.

“I always knew it wasn’t going to last. But it was lovely that it happened and it did help my career as a poet, no doubt about that.”

Did it feel like Liverpool was the centre of the universe in the 1960s, Roger? “The truth of the matter, of course, is Liverpool was running out of steam. The docks were closing. A lot of people were laid off. Liverpool was heading downwards.

“It was a boom time for music in Liverpool, but the excitement seemed to be elsewhere - in London, in Carnaby Street, where the money was. And California.

“A lot of the people said Liverpool was the centre of the universe in the sixties, but that was said by people who came in from outside. Like [Allen] Ginsberg. People who were living there were more aware of the realities.”

And, he reminds me, The Beatles moved away.

McGough’s own pop stardom may have been short-lived, but his poetic career has been a long one. He has combined poetry and family without too many hiccoughs.

“I got married twice. I got married to Thelma and had two lads. We broke up and I later married Hilary, and we had a boy and a girl, so four children. And a stepson.

“Suddenly you’re a father. I know friends of mine who didn’t want children. The pram in the hall gets in the way. But to me each of them was a gift.”

His kids are all grown up now. He is a grandfather these days, heading towards his 90th year.

One of the new poems he’s written for the book is entitled Let Me Die an Oldman’s Death, a rejoinder to Let Me Die a Youngman’s Death, a poem he wrote many years ago. Is mortality something he worries about?

“You’re conscious of it, always.”

He thinks back to when he was 53, the age his father died. “That’s when my daughter was born. And you’re like, ‘Will I live to see her go to school? Will I live to hear her first words? Will she ever call me daddy?’ “And now she’s married and having a baby.”

That in itself is a source of concern, he admits. “Oh, she’s having a baby. Am I going to live to see …’ “But it doesn’t depress me. I’ve had a good life.”

He is sanguine about where he is. Old age is not an ending.

“What happens to you when you get to my age is you have less energy, inevitably. I used to love going to the pub, but I can’t drink like I used to. But you don’t always have to drink six pints a night.

"You are aware of what you were like then,” he says of his younger years, “but you’re not overwhelmed by it. You wish you had more energy, but alright.”

What hasn’t diminished, I would suggest, is love. There is a lot of it in his Collected Poems; a love for language, a love for life, and a love for family.

“Thank you,” he says, “I think there is. I think that’s where the hope comes in. We are in difficult times. My grandchildren, I want them to be positive. ‘You’ve got your whole life in front of you.’ People don’t say that any more.”

Roger McGough believes they should. “Everyone thinks the state of the world is going to get worse,” he says.

“I don’t necessarily adhere to that.”

On this occasion I really want to believe him.

Roger McGough: 65 Years of Poetry is at the Courtyard Theatre on Tuesday, August 13, at 5.45pm, as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. McGough will also be appearing alongside Hollie McNish at the Spiegeltent on Wednesday, August 14 at 4.30pm