“Without a doubt, it was punk that changed my life,” reckons punk’s very own poet laureate, John Cooper Clarke. “Admittedly, I was writing poetry before it all happened, but then I heard those early songs by the Pistols, the Clash and Squeeze... even the colloquial language of ordinary kids from Queens on the Ramones’ first album. It opened the door to a completely new style. I could deliver my poems at 1,000 miles per hour!”
The Sex Pistols arrived at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976 to play what is regarded as one of the most important gigs in the history of British music. Hanging around in the small crowd of about 40 people were half of the Buzzcocks, most of Joy Division, Morrissey, Mark E. Smith, Mick Hucknall and a mid-20s lab technician from Salford Tech, John Cooper Clarke.
“As a scruffy, Secondary Modern kid from Salford, I couldn’t listen to Genesis or Yes and feel like they were writing songs for me. It wasn’t my music! But with punk, I could understand the songs; the words mattered. That lyrical energy fed directly into my poems. I knew where I was headed.”
Clarke has been writing poetry for over 60 years, but the actual process of putting together those words has remained remarkably constant.
“There are all sorts of technical gizmos you can get these days, but I still prefer a notebook and pencil. When an idea comes, I write it down. The other night, just as I was falling asleep, I came up with a verse for a poem I started over three years ago. Poems never get finished, they just get abandoned!
“Ideas come when I’m watching telly, having my breakfast... they sneak up on you. People often ask what my poems are about but that’s not always easy to explain. Sometimes, even I don’t know what they mean! Poetry is like that. I might read a poem by Hilaire Belloc and, 20 years later, a word will suddenly leap into my mind. Oh, so that’s what Monsieur Belloc meant.
“Like a lot of poets, I write about love. For example, if you take R U The Business from the collection that’s just come out:
Does Superman wear blue tights
And keep away from kryptonite
Do old ladies get mugged at night
R U the business
“On the whole, though, I’m not a big fan of taking apart poems and trying to find the ‘inner meaning’ or the ‘ultimate message’. To paraphrase the late, legendary comedian, Barry Cryer, ‘Taking a joke apart is like dissecting a frog in your Friday afternoon biology lesson at school. Ultimately, the frog dies and nobody laughs.’”
Clarke’s love of poetry came via his English teacher, Mr Malone, a sporty, outdoors-type who had a weakness for the romantic and militaristic poets of the 19th century.
“Mr Malone was also the bloke who convinced me that I had a bit of a gift for language. Not that it made much of a difference when I left school. The idea of me making a living from poetry was... well, let’s just say that I didn’t know many professional poets. But, somehow, the strange combination of Mr Malone, Alfred Lord Tennyson, punk and Pam Ayres all made sense to me.”
Pam Ayres?
“Oh, yeah,” laughs Clarke. “Seeing Pam - an ordinary lass from rural Oxfordshire - reciting her poems and making people laugh on Opportunity Knocks showed me that it could be done. She brought poetry back into the spotlight.
“The funny thing is that even if you go all the way back to the days of music hall and vaudeville, poetry was there. Poetry was part of your average Saturday night out. There was always a monologue man - a fella reciting humorous verse - on the bill. I’m thinking here of someone like Stanley Holloway and I suppose I saw myself as carrying on that excellent but much misunderstood tradition.
We’d both fallen foul of the opioid nightcap. I wasn’t the first poet to find himself in that situation. Lots of artists have ended up there for lots of reasons but, in my case, it was as a result of undervaluing my art and myself.
John Cooper Clarke
“Excellence cannot be defined outside of a tradition,” adds Clarke, now on a lyrical roll. “You can blind anyone with futuristic science, but whenever I go to a new restaurant that everyone’s talking about, I always order steak and chips. A traditional meal! Why? Because if they can’t apply care and attention to the traditional, they have no business owning a restaurant. Yes, I might get a bit more adventurous the second time around, but only if they’ve proved they can get the basics right.
“By the familiar shall you know them!”
Thanks to the punk explosion, people started getting to know John Cooper Clarke. For a while, he was almost a star. He appeared on the same bill as the Pistols, The Fall, Joy Division and Elvis Costello; he had a Top 40 hit in 1979 with Gimmix! Play Loud; he was on telly and he published books. Like Pam Ayres, he was making a living from poetry. Sadly, unlike Pam Ayres, Clarke spent much of the’80s addicted to heroin and living in Brixton with Nico. Yes, Nico of Velvet Underground fame!
“We weren’t a couple,” he chuckles, “but we’d both fallen foul of the opioid nightcap. I wasn’t the first poet to find himself in that situation. Lots of artists have ended up there for lots of reasons but, in my case, it was as a result of undervaluing my art and myself. My problem was that I thought I was going to get rumbled; people would look at what I did, see that it wasn’t very good and I’d get turfed out on my ear. That makes you insecure... and you don’t always make the best decisions when you’re feeling insecure. It’s the double-edged sword of fame, innit? Not that I’ve ever considered myself ‘famous’.
“I hope I’m not coming across as trite. Kicking the habit is not something that should be degraded in the slightest. It wasn’t easy, but somebody decided I was to be given another chance. I was able to make a new start and I can’t tell you how good that feels.”
In the wake of that new start, Clarke has found himself busier and - arguably - more successful than ever. He and tour manager Johnny Green - ex-Pistols roadie and tour manager for the Clash - have travelled around the world several times, he’s just released his fourth volume of poetry, his music was featured on The Sopranos and in various films, and he was the subject of a 2012 BBC documentary, Evidently... John Cooper Clarke.
But what really brought Clarke’s renaissance into sharp focus was one of his poems, I Wanna Be Yours, which provided the lyrics for a song of the same name on the Arctic Monkeys multi-million selling 2013 album, AM.
I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust
Alex Turner has even admitted that it was “Johnny Clarke” who convinced him he could sing in his own northern accent.
“I can’t thank Alex and the band enough for what they did and what they’ve said about me. I’ll be forever grateful. Things like that have allowed me to continue doing what I’m doing and allowed me to enjoy poetry, again. Being a junkie is a desperate existence. You don’t ‘enjoy’ anything because you’re always on a chaotic roll, looking for money.
“Fortunately for the people that know and care about me, I ain’t got that shit going on anymore. I can honestly sit here and say that I love my life and I thank God for it every single day!”
John Cooper Clarke is currently touring the UK. His latest collection of poems, What, is out now (Picador).
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