Derek Meins - 'The Famous Poet' (1965) Released 28/07/08

Ah me, the poet’s cry. Mercy mercy me, I say. Derek Meins mini-album ‘The Famous Poet’ is unleashed from it’s pen. A somewhat fatuous work of dubious merit, thespy caricature and musical madness, Meins employs spoken word alongside songs from his arcana of performance poetry that document a twisted surreal mind who could well be the devil’s concubine. More akin to John Cooper Clarke than our beloved Ivor Cutler, rhyming couplets are peppered with arsenic with the manic energy of a class clown groomed from performance.

On ‘The Freud Song’ Meins bellows “Popular? Culture? I’m so fucking cool I slice my own bread!” with all the conviction of a born-again schizoid and then we’re treated to a wayward song about Freud and inter-familial fucking with a Grease Lightning energy. So far, little insight to the unconscious mind or the id and it’s impetuousness, “…Owww, people fuck each other…”, indeed. “If the ocean was made out of gin/ maybe I would learn how to swim…“ sings Meins on ‘The Gin Song’ with the solemnity of the sodden and the melody of a porch-song aria.

Yet, there’s an evident musicality beneath the droll verse, with ‘End Of Man’ and ’Honeygirl’ chipper in tune like pieces of Beatles vaudeville, while ‘Oh! You Pretty Woman’ works a Pogues-like revelry with a jug band sing-along that would go down a storm at Munich’s Oktoberfest. ‘A City Called Hell’ slows less - a piece of anarchic clanging drums like a five-year old is having their merry way, and the Brecht and Weill-like ‘Over Yonder‘ is sorely tempered by it‘s brevity.

‘Richard’ introduces the spoken word of a thespy doctor dealing with a delusional patient best left on the cutting room floor, and ‘Modernity’ twists a yarn - “…lusty ships of my excitement did set sail…” dealing with a Valentine’s virtual envelope with a e-card and dreadful verse of Modernity wanting to fuck him. ‘Ex-Her-Size’ is about a rather rotund woman who he encourages to go jogging, sounding flat on recording yet like the snake eating it’s own tail, the future slender woman comes back to bite his bum.
We may not have the Euro and the economy is back-sliding, but while we’ve still got Blake and the ghosts of Arthur and Churchill, Avalon can rest well. Though the children need to be in by half nine at the latest. Derek Meins is the living embodiment of Rick from The Young One’s - The People’s Poet. Not half! Ahem!