A Review: Tony Kinsella.

‘Compensate each human weakness, nurture every nascent art
praise each humble faltering effort
put the horse before the cart'

A quatrain from The Girl Who Dances To Announcements which seems to capture the philosophy of Hovis Presley (Richard McFarlane) who’s volume of comic verse, Poetic Off Licence, has been re-published as a fitting legacy to his untimely death earlier this year. The book is a celebration of ‘human weakness,’ wherein Hovis plunges headlong into the complexities of a mad world with unfazed but misplaced optimism and burns up on entry. The first time I saw Hovis Presley perform was at a Bistro in Leigh. He lurched up to the mic in Hawaiian shirt (open), Bermuda shorts (ditto) and an odd combination of grey socks and flip-flops. He peered through his glasses, stroked his unkempt beard and mused, ‘Just wait ‘til I catch that image consultant.’ In Hovis’s world, the only thing that ‘comes out in the wash’ is the markings on the tenner in his jeans.

The man who once declared, ‘You look just like me first girlfriend … do you want to be?’ catalogues his bad luck in love, where the girl fakes orgasms while the guy ‘fakes erections.’  Where the only thing that ‘gets my pulses racing’ is throwing lentils down a hill. Where he longs to be a pop star so girls will talk to him for longer ‘before mentioning their boyfriends.’  And even when he finally tracks down a soul mate willing to declare her undying affection, he is forced to conclude that, ‘round here shop assistants call everyone love.’
As we might expect from a man who adopts such a pseudonym, Hovis comes out with all puns blazing. Even the contents page of Poetic Off Licence reads like a glorious collection of one-liners: Wild Orchids Wouldn’t Drag Me Away; One For Sorrow, Yootha Joyce; I Wandered Lonely As An Insurance Salesman.  And this simply serves to pre-empt an effortless economy of comic language, from the plosive pathos of his ‘bonsai bank balance’ to the couple who ‘tripped the light sarcastic.’

Hovis’s world is peopled with fellow-Everymen. The bloke who got so bored he ‘turned a flat cap into a catflap;’ the struggling contortionist who ‘couldn’t make ends meet;’ and the alleged plumber who ‘never did a tap.’  Passing references to Doddy and Groucho betray a love for vaudeville and music hall. Frugal Dougal is one half of the Miserly Brothers, a skiffle duo who play Stranger On The Shore on comb and paper. Yet this is also a man who once possessed ‘the only Action Man singer songwriter’ and went on to invent ‘the pump-action pump and the heated roof rack,’ thereby rendering him as much at home in the surreal landscapes of Eddie Izzard or Ivor Cutler as the monologues of Al Read and Marriott Edgar.

Like all comic poets, Hovis mines the rich seam of rib-tickling rhymes; though anyone who rhymes ‘paper clips’ with ‘St Moritz’ and links the non-sequiters of confetti, Peter Bonetti and Serengeti within three lines deserves instant immortality in my book. And there is a rich tapestry of stylistic experiment, especially in the audacious metamorphosis of gags into poems, like the oft-quoted ‘Ex’:
‘As good things go
She went.’

Elsewhere, there is an aching poignancy to the references, exacerbated by Hovis’s death. A man who sometimes struggled with depression reflects on a time when ‘just being myself has become overmanned.’ A man who shunned the glare of the limelight steps back from his own lifestyle and advertises it in Exchange and Mart. And a man so sorely missed prophesises on a conclusion for which we should all hope and pray: 

‘The winter’s cold
The blanket’s hot
The wind’s getting up
But I’m not
Now is the winter of my quite content.’

For all the humanity, truth and vibrancy of Poetic Off Licence, the title of my favourite poem seems strangely inappropriate:‘a legend in his own opinion.’  Comedian, Craig Campbell, who knew Hovis Presley for a lot longer than I did, once told me: ‘Every human being is unique, but Hovis took uniqueness to a different level.’ Hovis was a legend, full stop. In the words of another great poet, ‘And the rest is silence.’