Poetry on the Road Antwerpen

Poetry on the Road Maastricht

(Harrow / Middlesex, 1946) made his first appearance as a guitarist at the Edinburgh Festival 1965 when he participated in a night revue of the Dublin Trinity College at the Traverse Theatre. That same year he met a number of Liverpudlian poets during the poetry afternoons in the Traverse before commencing his law studies at Liverpool University. He kept in touch with those musicians and poets and instead of entering the legal profession on obtaining his doctorate in 1968, he became a career musician.

He played in various groups before setting up his own group Grimms with poets and performers. At the end of 1973 Adrian Mitchell asked him to rewrite the music for a new staging of his musical Mind Your Head. This triggered off a closer engagement with the theatre and subsequently with television and film. Eventually he joined Pink Floyd as second guitarist and played in their rendering of their `epic' The Wall both in West Germany and at London's Earl's Court.

His skills as a composer were in demand as well; he provided the score of the BBC tv-series Thin Air and of Adrian Henri's new translation of the Wakefield Mystery Plays.

Since then Andy Roberts is on tour regularly with Adrian Henri, Robert McGough and Brian Patten, presenting music and poetry. He participated in the 1991 and 1993 Poetry International festivals. This year he can be seen, together with Adrian Mitchell, in Antwerp's Poetry on the Road.