John Cooper Clarke: ‘It wasn’t on the menu for somebody like me to make a living out of literature’

John Cooper Clarke. Picture: PA WireJohn Cooper Clarke. Picture: PA Wire
John Cooper Clarke. Picture: PA Wire
On the phone from his publisher’s office, John Cooper Clarke is reflecting on his chosen career. Back in the mid-1960s, when he first began to harbour literary ambitions after reading the work of Charles Baudelaire, there seemed little chance of a working-class youth becoming a professional poet, let alone one day finding themselves proclaimed the Bard of Salford.

“It wasn’t on the menu for somebody like me to make a living out of literature,” says the now 72-year-old in a familiar Lancastrian drawl. Save for the dramatist Shelagh Delaney “from nearby Ordsall”, whose play A Taste of Honey was a hit in the West End and Broadway, he says: “It wasn’t regarded as a hothouse of poetical endeavour where I lived.”

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It took the arrival of punk in Manchester in 1976 to transform Clarke from a lab technician at Salford Technical College to a formidable performer whose gift for verse was salted with down to earth Northern humour.

Forty-five years later he has become something of a national treasure, feted by the likes of Arctic Monkeys and Plan B and with his poems on the GCSE English syllabus. An autumn tour of the UK is largely sold out.

Lockdown, he says, finally afforded him time to finish his memoir, I Wanna Be Yours, now out in paperback.

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“I’m afraid without the epidemic it wouldn’t be the case,” he says. “I had a very hectic schedule lined up for me in that year, one that I’m fortunately able to honour this coming October. It worked in my favour, if I’m honest.”

Rather than “a ponderous trudge through the turgid facts of an ill-remembered life”, Clarke aimed to strike a “conversational” tone in the book, similar to musical memoirs such as Lonely Boy by Steve Jones, No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs by John Lydon, My Way by Paul Anka and Life by Keith Richards.

“What they all had in common, what makes them so entertaining, I think, is although they have a certain trajectory, things happen in a certain order because they have to, they have this conversational tone they all share,” he says. “You can only really get that by singing it first then editing out all the repetition and the umming and erring.

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“I don’t care who you are, nobody writes the way they speak. You’d have to be some kind of monster to want to do that. Take Keith Richards’ book: Keith has a unique style of speech peppered with slightly outmoded hipster lingo that is kind of dying out and his book almost has that bronchial, raspy quality that Keith has. I just wanted a piece of that, so that’s how I approached it. I worked with a fine editor called Rosemary Davidson, who’s worked with some of the big hitters, so that’s how it got done.”

Alongside tales of his upbringing, that left him with a lifelong fascination with pop music and American culture filtered though Hollywood movies, are stories of his adventures in the world of performance poetry.

A love of verse was sown at secondary school by his English teacher John Malone, and Clarke is an advocate of learning to read poetry the traditional way.

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“People talk a lot of rubbish these days about the secondary modern system but I learnt poetry at school the Michael Gove way,” he says. “‘This was written by a 35-year-old person 100 years ago, you’re not going to understand it, you’re a 12-year-old kid, but nevertheless you just learnt the words, like we used to learn prayers at Catholic school or Latin, and maybe in 30 years time you might get a handle on what this guy was getting at’. Saying that, a poem is not a puzzle that is there to be worked out and solved.”

Reciting poetry in class taught him that poetry is “a phonetic medium”, he says. “If you read the story Cyrano de Bergerac, going back hundreds of years people recited poetry; you didn’t sit in a corner like a wallflower reading it to yourself, absorbing it, because it’s all about it’s all about what it sounds like. I’ll never shift from this idea. That’s why I go for rhyme in a big way, it’s a discipline, there’s a right way and a wrong way, and it’s a very dynamic, driving thing.”

Further inspiration came from Pam Ayres, whose appearance on Opportunity Knocks in 1975 led to numerous TV and radio appearances. Clarke recalls: “There was only one other poet that I knew for a fact didn’t have any other job, all they ever did was write poetry, and that was Charles Baudelaire, he became my template, and then people were all like, ‘Yeah, but he was born with a fortune and he squandered the lot, that’s no way to live; show me someone within the last century who made a living by poetry’ which I of course couldn’t do until Pam Ayres was on Opportunity Knocks. She was winning it week after week, the people’s choice, so I said to my dad who had the biggest downer on this, ‘Look at that girl there, she’s won the heart of the nation with poetry’, so he had to eat a certain amount of crow.”

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If any gig was destined to impress his father, it was Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club in Manchester. It was there that Clarke cut his teeth as a performer – a school of hard knocks that taught him useful lessons for later weathering audiences at punk rock shows. Manning’s humour was frequently controversial – in his book, Clarke observes that it suited the comedian to be regarded as a folk devil – yet he says Manning was not without his kind side,

“It was in his interest to be a universal hate figure,” Clarke says today. “One little crack of armour as he saw it, that would be the kiss of death for him, he wasn’t there to be liked. He started out as an MC in his own club and that’s a position where everybody wants you to get off and get the main act on, but Bernard was too big a character so he quickly became the main event – in much the same way that Ronnie Scott used to be at Ronnie Scott’s club. Every time I went there it was the same routine as 15 years ago, that was part of the shtick. There are a million stories of Bernard’s secret acts of kindness, they’re legion, especially in the neighbourhood where he grew up, an extremely poor area called Harpurhey in north Manchester. It’s a very tough nut place. Until quite recently they were still doing bare-knuckle fights.”

After seeing the Sex Pistols perform at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, Clarke fell in with their local support act, Buzzcocks. Although he disliked the spitting at punk gigs, Clarke says he saw the movement as his “ticket to London and beyond”.

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“My thing has always been to get the rough stuff out the way at the beginning and after that, it’s going to be a doddle, so with that in mind, I entered the world of punk rock,” he says. “At first it was a bit lairy but after a while when I became a known quantity through being written up in the music press and referenced by other punk rockers it became acceptable to recite poetry at punk shows. Plus there was already an example of a punk poet: Patti Smith.”

By 1977 he was playing punk venues in the capital such as The Hope and Anchor and released an EP, produced by Martin Hannett. Its success led to a five-figure deal with CBS and over the course of the next four years, he released four albums backed by The Invisible Girls, a revolving cast of musicians who included Hannett, Paul Burgess of 10CC, Pete Shelley, Stephen Morris of Joy Division and New Order, and Bill Nelson of Be Bop Deluxe, with whom he toured.

Another figure he held in high regard was the late Mark E Smith of The Fall, who he remembers as a teenager. “I think about him a lot,” Clarke says. “If you get a favourite writer you start looking at the world through their lens, and I think Smithy definitely had that quality that transmits to an individual listener in that very personal (way of) ‘you sort it out, now it’s your problem’.”

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Being celebrated in later years by fellow artists such as Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys and the rapper Ben Drew aka Plan B is, he says, a source of “validation”. “That’s wonderful,” he adds. “That’s because I was on the GCSE syllabus, consequently I have an entirely new generation of fans. There is no typical Johnny Clarke fan now. You look into a crowd and it could be one of my people. Every age, every type of person from the age of 15 up enjoys my poetry and why not? Man of the people, that’s me.”

I Wanna Be Yours is out now, published by Picador, £9.99. John Cooper Clarke performs at Hull City Hall on November 23, Leeds O2 Academy on March 24, and Sheffield Octagon on April 2. johncooperclarke.com

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