Poet and novelist Gareth Owen talks to Terry Grimley about country music.

Gareth Owen, a familiar name on the Birmingham arts scene for more than 20 years as a writer and performer, will be making a sentimental journey to the city next weekend.

He returns to the Crescent Theatre, scene of many past projects including his musical Rupert – which launched the career of a promising young singer named Ruby Turner – in the person of his alter ego, country singer Virgil Clenthills III.

Gareth, who is originally from Lancashire, taught English at Bordesley College of Education for 23 years.

He has published five collections of poetry, mainly for children, which have featured extensively in schools, and has written a similar number of novels.

For a number of years, he presented the Radio 4 programme Poetry Please!, a role now occupied by Roger McGough.

Now retired to Ludlow, he and “Virg” still share the occasional musical outing with their band, Comfort of the State.

“This show keeps me going because it’s a lot to remember,” he says, recalling that Virg first made an appearance back in the 1980s.

“I was managing Ruby Turner at the time, so I was listening more to soul music and I was reading things like the NME.

“I came across a story that intrigued me about a man called Tom T. Hall, so I bought his album and loved it.

“He had a line about ‘back when gas was 30 cents a gallon and love was only half a tank away...’, which I thought was great.

“So I thought ‘why don’t I write my own, because they’re not complicated songs?’ “I quickly wrote about ten songs in a week and I linked them with some stories about Virg Clenthills. He is he is an archetypal rags-to-riches country singer-songwriter.

“I’m no singer in the strictest sense of the word, but if I try hard enough, I can convince myself that I can put it over so, with a friend of mine who could play the banjo, I did a show at the Crescent.

“I even wrote Virg’s life story and I made a little film about him searching for his grandparents’ house in Dudley, because he felt rootless.”

He recorded a lot of the songs with Turner’s then-band at Bob Lamb’s studio in Moseley. After moving to Ludlow, he played them to a guitarist friend who put a band together to continue the show.

“There are no drums, because the important thing is to hear the words. I have performed in a bar, but it doesn’t really work because people have to listen.”

Gareth says there are people who have taken the show seriously, which he is pleased about. But he adds: “I come on as me for about a quarter-of-an-hour at the beginning. I don’t really want them to think I’m Virgil Clent Hills III.”

As he acknowledges, people tend to be snooty about country music but even though this is a comedy show, he is keen to emphasise his respect for what he is lampooning.

“It’s comedy but we try to make it as authentic and as well-crafted as possible. I enjoy disorientating people. They’re laughing away and it suddenly turns serious at the end.

”They come up against this sentiment and emotion and they’re not sure what to do so another thing it allows you to do is to write sentiment.

“There’s a huge eroticism of violence at the moment in films, which people don’t condemn, but they don’t condone sentiment.”

“There’s a directness about country music that you don’t find in pop”, he argues.

“If you listen to somebody like John Prine, the songs are about the lives of ordinary people in a way that pop music isn’t.

“What my show is about is that I live in a kind of fantasy life of ordinary, run-down people from the southern states of America.

“I would hate to live it, but I romanticise it. I’ve been to the southern USA and there’s a lot of right-wingness about it.”

What that offers Gareth, though, is the chance to go where a liberal English writer might usually fear to tread.

“Virg allowed me to say things I couldn’t say myself. It’s a licence to struggle out of the paper bag.

“There was a line in one of the songs about a ‘half-breed hooker’ and somebody in the band said ‘you can’t say that, because you’re not supposed to say half-breed’.

“I pointed over my shoulder at Virg and said ‘he wrote it’.”

* Gareth Owen introduces Virgil Clenthills III at the Crescent Theatre’s Ron Barber Studio next Saturday, May 16, at 7.30pm.