Tongue Pie: Prose and Poetry, 1969–2006
by Fred Russell, with an introduction by Carole Angier

Fred Russell has been writing all of his adult life: about his family (‘the Russells were a rough family, rebellious and against authority’), about his love of football, and about the characters of the Wychwoods in Oxfordshire. Performing his poems to rowdy audiences who had come to see his band, the Beaker Folk, he quickly gained a reputation as a writer of wit and irreverence.
But when award-winning biographer Carole Angier was asked to write an introduction to the book, she persuaded him to reveal a different side to his work. Alongside the poems designed to amuse or shock were ones he seldom talked about, dealing with his spiritual longings and his search for answers to life’s eternal questions.
Tongue Pie is the result of this collaboration between two very different writers, and it marks the emergence of a truly original voice.

ISBN 0954 6342 3 3/978 0954 6342 3 0; 112 pp, illustrated; £6 softback

My Father in his youth had been wild and unthinking – he once jumped into the river in Bath to save someone, when he couldn’t swim himself. He once spent six months in prison for stealing a car with two other young men. He told me he spent the time reading the Bible until his mother bailed him out, but it never made him very religious.
He could be sat in a chair one moment, the next he could fly into a rage, with his belt coming off, if I’d done something wrong. I was not the son my Dad expected me to be.

What song do you sing, Robin

What song do you sing, Robin
At the birthday of the Lord
Some undiscovered tune of joy
For this cold wintered world?

Is it a song of gladness
Now the night has gone?
In frosty morning freshness
Can we learn to sing that song?

Did you sing it once in Bethlehem
At Christ’s nativity
With shepherds and the three wise men
And all humanity?

But why the note of sadness
And why the breast of red?
Did you pick the thorns in kindness
From our Saviour’s head?

What message bring you, Robin?
That we have been set free
That He has conquered pain and death
And proclaims His victory.

(From Tongue Pie, by Fred Russell)

Reviews

‘The most extraordinary anthology of fanstastic poetry and reminiscences. … Just wonderful!’ Alison Booker, BBC Radio Oxford