Examining Mike Garry’s biography gives the briefest of peeks behind the curtain. Alongside the poet’s involvement with prisons, libraries, museums and mental health charities, Garry describes ‘[working] closely with Manchester United, the BBC [and] the Barclays Premier League’. Accordingly, his poetry regularly appears on BBC Radio 5 Live, Radio 4, BBC Breakfast, Match of the Day and Sky TV. But Garry’s work transcends the UK footballing fraternity: working with Manchester United ‘has truly elevated Mike’s poetry to an international audience’.
That global reach is built on a very straightforward form, an introduction to which is best made via an unlikely source. In Alan Partridge’s mockumentary Scissored Isle, Norwich’s finest speaks with a beat about ‘City, United, Albion, Rovers / Cobbled streets that advertise Hovis’. Garry has seen the clip. He might even be the clip. ‘I think Coogan’s a genius,’ the author of books like God is a Manc says down the phone from his home in Hackney. ‘I’ve seen him impersonate me, a film I made ages ago.’ Whether Scissored Isle continues that caricature is beside the point though, for, as is his noble aim, Partridge speaks not just to the man on the street, but to something higher, too. Here, a particularly ubiquitous form of spoken word poetry gets a battering. You know the type: earnest and ordinary, rhyming and jaunty, with grit and toil and passion, with probably some reference to manual labour and, after a final lingering pause, and a sharp suck through the teeth, poignancy.
Unfortunately, the form’s popularity has failed to launch any of its primary exponents into the public consciousness (Tony Walsh or John Cooper Clarke are perhaps the two exceptions). Instead, it’s become a byword for companies trying to sell products, or even worse, themselves. Building societies peddling mortgages, global corporations propagating a down-to-earth image or an out-of-touch football industry desperately trying to be one of the lads. But still, someone’s got to write them, even if the price of authenticity is paid with anonymity. ‘Someone at the BBC once told me: “You either get your name out there, or you get paid”,’ Garry says. And in many cases, he has chosen the latter.
It’s probably unfair to lay the blame for the commercialisation of spoken word solely at Garry’s door, though he’s certainly been a cog in the machine, establishing himself as one of a handful of go-to guys for when the BBC or Sky need a sprinkle of poetic magic to zhuzh up a matchday.
All of which is fine, though football poetry does, with the greatest respect, now seem more Football Focus than FA Cup Final. Part of that is down to the sheer availability of the stuff, fuelled by the stealthy rise of Building Society Prose, something Garry has had a hand in too. Take Armbands (2017), a short, touching verse about swimming lessons delivered to-camera from Garry’s kitchen table. ‘Here’s an armband for your not-so-little ones,’ the advert reads at the conclusion of Garry’s verse: ‘Our student current account.’ It’s doesn’t quite have the stomach-turning feeling of Richard Ayoade charming the pants off you with his dorky-suited nerdery before the HSBC logo flashes on the screen, but it still gives the uneasy impression that your feelings have been taken for a ride and then unwittingly sold at. For as much as they might try to convince you otherwise, you just can’t cuddle a bank.
But where did this glut of advert poetry come from? The first time the link between poetry and advertising clicked for Garry was during childhood: the rhythm of Ben Sherman ad campaigns (‘That’s a nice shirt. It’s a Ben Sherman’) and the narrative poetry of 1970s public information films, specifically the chilling delivery of Donald Pleasence’s Grim Reaper character in a film about the dangers of drowning. There are other examples too, from British Rail matching Vangelis’s dystopian lurches with WH Auden’s clickety-clack commentary on their 1988 Night Mail ad to Nick Toczek’s utterly bleak verse for Prudential’s 2002 ‘Plan from the Pru’ campaign, all leading to the moment the Spoken Word Advert became truly mainstream: with McDonald’s’ 2009 upbeat effort, ‘Just Passing By’.
That ad was a crowning moment for the form, crystallising a kind of communal ordinariness tied to vocational graft (‘the labourers, the cablers, the council motion tablers’) and combining it with a poetic structure dependent on some form of refrain (Garry calls it chant-like), a rhythmic quirk the copywriters nabbed from one Rolf Harris. Garry has mastered that combination of content, form and function: family/community/industry, time/place/life, threaded together – whatever the weather! – to sell football shirts and fries.
Over the course of our conversation, Garry flits between two worldviews. The first places a divide between artistic and commercial, typical of the ‘job’s a job’ mentality expressed by artists since time immemorial. ‘We need patronage,’ he says. ‘Advertising agencies are my patrons, and it’s about working together to achieve a goal. And in most cases, I’m really open. I’m not up my own arse, so there won’t be any [mock precious poet voice] “I’m not changing a single line.”’ So far, so pragmatic.
