In conversation with Frank Skinner

David Hoyle: Had you been to the Abbey before?  

Frank Skinner: Yes. I used to live in that block of flats on Lambeth Bridge. I came here as a slight faith tourist occasionally, for a service on a Sunday as it’s such a beautiful place. Anglicans stole most of the best churches, so they’re always nice to visit. 

DH: We share them, but you’re right. 

FS: Well, I’m hoping when the slavery reparations come through that we Catholics will be next in the queue! 

DH: Right. Huge debate for us, as you would imagine. In fact, we’ve just appointed a really wonderful historian called Renie Choy, who’s helping us think about telling the full story. 

So we’ve done a very big piece of work on our memorials and what they represent. We’re trying to do a better job of telling a better story. 

FS: But I don’t think the Anglican Church should have too much sackcloth and ashes. I remember an atheist, quite a fierce atheist, said to me: ‘You know, the only good thing that ever came out of Christianity was the way it fought slavery.’ And I thought: ‘Yeah, we’ll take that.’ That was a grudging compliment, which are always the best.  

We always think: ‘Oh well, different times then, you know.’ That people didn’t know. But there were still good people who saw past the zeitgeist and saw, you know, their own individual morality cut through what was fashionable. 

DH: One of the things that fascinates me about the Abbey is that its history is now told as though it’s one long, smooth story, but actually it’s full of contradictions and it’s full of people arguing about things like emancipation or what political liberty looks like or what justice looks like. And particularly in a world which is now so confrontational, I love the fact that, actually, it always has been that kind of space. 

Let’s get to poetry. I know you have two degrees in English. Was poetry a love before that? 

FS: When I was 11, the teacher said: ‘We’ve got to do the assembly on Tuesday. I’d like you to read a poem.’ It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Sometime During Eternity, which is about Jesus, but it’s Jesus as an amazing jazz player who comes and arrives on Earth and just blows people’s minds. So instead of preaching the good news, he’s blowing it. And it begins: ‘Sometime during eternity, some guys showed up, and one of them who showed up real late (is a kind of carpenter)’. So the sort of last of the prophets, if you like.

And then he goes into a ‘Jee-jazz’ Jesus. But not derogatory or disrespectful, just a sort of hip view of that story. But I didn’t know poetry could be like that. And even on the page, it looked like nothing I’d seen, the shape of it on the page. And I was slightly fascinated by that, how much white space there was. Now I think of that white space as what we have to put into a poem… our thinking space. 

Then I saw a book in somewhere like Woolworths. It had a guitar on the front, so I looked at it, and it had the word ‘Mersey’. And at that time, that would always draw you in. It was called The Mersey Sound and it was by three Liverpool poets – Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. And I just flicked through it in the shop. I mean, I would never have thought I would ever buy a poetry book. But there were poems about my life, if you like. There were poems about getting the late bus, going to the chip shop, and all that stuff.  

But there was also something very important for me in that book, in that these were three, I think, working-class guys from Liverpool. And they talked about all these working-class everyday activities, like the chip shop, but they would also talk about Ginsberg or Roy Lichtenstein – artists and poets like I would’ve talked about footballers.  

When I’d got a taste for things like poetry or whatever, even when I was a student, I remember someone started talking to me on the bus about the Shakespeare we’d been doing that day, and it was, you know, ‘we can talk about sex or something like that on the bus, but don’t talk to me about Shakespeare in case anyone hears.’ 

DH: Were you the first in your family to go to university? 

FS: Yes, I was. I think my family and friends were unsure of who I was and suddenly unsure of how I saw them. Coming from a working-class background, if you are seen to aspire, that can be quite threatening. I felt a real sense that ‘nobody leaves the sinking ship’. That was the deal. 

DH: And poetry is certainly seen as an affectation by a lot of people. 

FS: I was reading Margaret Hebblethwaite, who gave a talk at a Catholic event recently. She said that in the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘no’. But a very good Roman Catholic scholar called Nicholas Lash said: ‘Let’s try turning that on its head.’ In the beginning the word was ‘yes’. And if God is constantly saying ‘yes’ to things, it’s brilliant. 

DH: Do you think poetry is a good language for talking about faith? 

FS: Thinking about religion and talking about religion is quite a lot like talking about poetry. It’s about looking deep into what is a surface thing. The whole concept of ‘the Word made flesh’ is poetry coming into a world of prose. 

DH: What do you make of Poets’ Corner and the business of lionising some poets and not others? 

FS: I love Poets’ Corner. There are several guys in there who have given me, I mean, the white heat of joy from reading their poetry. As for the selection process, if you asked me my ten favourite poets today and tomorrow, they wouldn’t be exactly the same. 

MF: You have dabbled briefly in songwriting… 

FS: Four number ones. Let’s not shoot it down! The magnificent operatic singer at my church hasn’t had that many. 

MF: Do you sort of feel there’s a line between something like the Three Lions song and the sort of poetry you’re into? Do you think there’s high and low art? 

FS: I do think one of the worst things you can do to poetry is to set it to music, because poetry comes with its own music. People in the media never trust poetry. If you start reading poetry on television, two lines in they’re panicking. I think everyone would have switched off by now, no matter how brilliant it is. 

I do like poetry that some would consider to be trivial. I love poetry if it really means something to me, but I love poetry I can just enjoy on my lips and the sound of it. 

Ogden Nash wrote a two-line poem which I love. He’s writing about areas of New York. And one of them is just: ‘The Bronx? No, thanks.’ There’s so much that’s good about that. So much. You know, I could talk about that for an hour, and that’s two lines. Sometimes just the sound of the words, the feel of them, is enough.  

I don’t have the high art, low art distinction. If it’s good, it’s good, you know?