‘… the Rot …’

During 1968 the comparisons between Patten, McGough and Henri were at their widest. McGough had become a regular on ABC's The Eleventh Hour and was gigging extensively with the revitalized and more musically orientated Scaffold. Their stage humour was very different from their songs. ‘Our songs certainly brought financial success and made us household names’, McGough acknowledges, ‘but it also misled audiences. Mums and dads came along and we weren't providing what they wanted. We were never a musical knockabout act like the Grumbleweeds, but that was what so many people thought we were.’

Mike McGear has other regrets.

Making the bat metaphor literal, McGough's poem playfully re-evokes A.A. Milne's children's nursery rhyme:

With the TV programme's theme to the fore, Henri chose another route – dedicating the piece to Bob Kane (the creator of the strip) and local band the Almost Blues, he directly echoed Adrian Mitchell and the spirit of the counter-culture:

Concluding Henri's Love Night at the Everyman, the poem became the ‘Bat-Rave’ featuring everyone concerned. This event became the first gig for the Liverpool Scene. The original line-up was Henri as the poet, Mike Hart on vocals and guitar, Evans on tenor saxophone, Roberts on lead guitar, supplemented by Percy Jones on bass, and drummer Brian Dodson who virtually recruited himself. ‘Things were very casual’, Evans remembers, ‘we'd get booked out to places as a band with no name really so every time we got a gig we started calling ourselves the Liverpool Scene because people were calling us that anyway’.