Although he was the youngest of the Liverpool trio that launched the popular poetry revolution of the 1960s, Brian Patten was arguably the catalyst whose enthusiasm and single-minded dedication did most to bring the whole phenomenon into being.
Patten, who has died aged 79, was first linked with Roger McGough and Adrian Henri when, early in 1962, as a 16-year-old pop journalist, he wrote about them in his column in the Bootle Times. He had met McGough, a Hull University graduate, and Henri, a painter and jazz musician, on the Liverpool club scene, and was already taking their poems for Underdog, the little Xeroxed magazine he edited, to sell in clubs and pubs and at a few sympathetic bookshops.
