Tom McGrathRadical Scottish poet and playwright, and the founding editor of International Times

It must have been about 1990 when I first interviewed the poet and playwright Tom McGrath, who has died from cancer of the liver aged 68. It was in his Edinburgh office at the Royal Lyceum, where he was the Scottish Arts Council's associate literary director. Some time around the point when I turned the cassette tape over, I asked my second question. McGrath did not do soundbites.
Such loquaciousness would be indulgent in some, but with McGrath - genial, generous and quick to laugh - it was just the way his mind worked. Each thought would trigger a new idea, each allusion a digression, each digression firing another set of mental synapses. Conversation with him was like navigating through a sea of possibilities; it took time to reach the destination, but the journey - always logically plotted - was fascinating. In a 1973 poetry anthology, his biographical note describes him simply as "explorer". It was a job title he never relinquished.
This was no less the case in 2005 when I met him near his home in Kingskettle, Fife, to talk about a revival of his debut play, Laurel and Hardy, and what would be his final stage work, My Old Man. This was two years after he had suffered a stroke; his recovery aided by physiotherapy, prolific writing and a subscription to the New Statesman ("the writers are very predictable but it did give me a point of attack"). Sneaking in a lunchtime drink against doctor's orders, he engaged in a conversation that ricocheted from Billy Connolly to Arnold Schoenberg, William Golding to Oscar Peterson, Liz Lochhead to serial music.