Newcastle poet, actor and film-maker Tony Jackson died last night in the
RVI in Newcastle. He'd been taken in with pneumonia on Friday, and hadn't
been conscious since that time. He was 52.
Tony was closely involved in the Newcastle poetry "scene" of the 1960s - a
close friend of Tom and Connie Pickard at that time, active at the Morden
Tower, and in the running of the Morden Tower Bookroom and Ultima Thule
Bookshop. Adrian Mitchell's poem "Tony Jackson Is A Walking Jungle" comes
from this period... From the '70s he worked extensively with the People
Show (along with Jeff Nuttall, Mike Figgis and others), increasingly
devising his own routines (in chains) as his movement became restricted by
MS. He refused to give way to his illness as long as possible, with the
courage so many MS sufferers show - worked for various MS groups, but
refused to get typecast as such. His work over the years appeared from a
number of presses including Writers' Forum, Galloping Dog and Pig Press.
Strange to relate the "walking jungle" of the public figure - who
physically threw people out of his shop for asking for Rod McKuan (?)
books, and staged his own death in a knife fight in Jesmond Dene at one
point, with the warm and funny person we knew as a writer and as a friend
- corny but true.
___________________________________________________________
Richard Caddel
Durham University Library, Stockton Rd., Durham DH1 3LY, UK
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Phone: +44 (0)191 374 3044 Fax: +44 (0)191 374 7481
WWW: http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dul0ric
"Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write."
- Basil Bunting
___________________________________________________________
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
