Give it a name: punk poetry. Speed-reading John Cooper Clarke

He is, I suppose, one of the great punk survivors. A contemporary of Mark E Smith and the whole Manc punk scene (Devoto & Shelley, "Hooky" & "Barney", Anthony H Wilson, Slaughter And The Dogs, the Drones, Rafters, the Russell Club, the Electric Circus, Jon The Postman ...), but also a very distinctive skinny-profiled Salford geezer who'd been knocking about the north-west's pre-punk comedy-cabaret circuit for several years and had his roots in various local 60s scenes - Mod and jazz, art school happenings, a bit of primitive Beatles-era pub-and-club rock, you name it. And then there are all his post-punk adventures - major tours with Elvis Costello & The Attractions + Richard Hell & The Voidoids, with early New Order, with goth-era Nico, right through to later stuff where he's on bills with other big-name poets - Allen Ginsberg, Roger McGough, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, people like this. Blimey. Anyway, I'm obviously talking about none other than John Cooper Clarke. The punk poet, the "bargain-basement Baudelaire" (his words), Mr Motormouth, you never see a nipple in the Daily Express, all that. Yeah man, that's right. I've just sped through his I Wanna Be Yours autobiography, a 470-page extended yarn jam-packed with lairy rock and roll anecdotes, countless druggy tales, set-piece jokes ("gags" he'd probably call them), odd JCC humourisms, funny stories (some of which are actually quite ... funny), countless references to his fave songs and musicians (many billed as "heroes"), stuff about clothes (a whole flared-trouser's worth of this actually), accounts of his various romantic relationships and his frequent scrapes with the law, and ... miscellaneous other stuff. Altogether, then, there's a lot in this book (too much, maybe), there's a strong JCC "voice" and it is, I have to say, extremely readable. But it's also, in my not-quite-so-positive view, not without a fair few blemishes. Anyway, first off, here are some of the things I found most noteworthy:

*Clarke is interested in art, architecture, design, clothes and the look of things. For example, he says the brightly-coloured advertising billboards in and around 1950s Salford were "pop art before the events". He comments on the looming domestic appliances in Tom & Jerry cartoons as having "the magnitude of architecture" to diminutive T&J. 

*His interest in style leads to some interesting observations. With punk style, for instance, Clarke says the following: "Even though the punk-rock look was a stylistic mélange, there was a right way and a wrong way. It was a matter of judgement; you knew it when you saw it". On the one hand this feels sort of off (punk rejects right-and-wrong rules, no?), but on the other it's maybe spot-on: punk as an organised, recognisable look. Perhaps this is exemplified by what he saw in Buzzcocks at their first show: a look that was "very striking in an odd, indefinable way". He mentions that Pete Shelley was wearing "pink jeans and cheapo Woolworths gym shoes".  

*American stuff is a constant touchstone. Of one group of teenage mates he says, "Like me, they were all totally Americanised: suckers for certain clothing brands and movies, sick humour and slang, cartoon characters, flamboyant criminals, and music, music, music".

*Right from his younger days (1960s) through to his first big success (late-70s post-punk) and beyond, Clarke bangs on about clothes. To the point of obsession. He revels in his knowledge, listing types of hats and cuts of trousers and so on. It's pretty interesting in its own right but obviously has a wider significance in delineating a scene or type of person. For instance, concerning going dancing at Roger Eagle's Twisted Wheel hotspot in mid-60s Manchester, he says the scene was compulsively about looking sharp, not least with the help of a few stolen clothes: "shoplifting became a popular sport. I used to steal a lot of clothes". Hey, who cares about getting banged up for a button-down!? 

*Clothing = posing? In one mini-anecdote - from the early 70s I think, JCC doesn't always date things that clearly - Clarke mentions that a good friend of his from the time (Liz) first noticed him because he was wearing "an antique three-piece suit I'd recently had altered at a tailor's, and which, unusually at the time, I wore with a watch and chain". He also had a moustache that he'd waxed with pomade. All very Edwardian ... 

*Hair also er, crops up a lot. Or should that be, is back-combed up a lot? His own super-distinctive 1966-era Dylan "big hair" look (check out the halo effect of his massive hair in the Old Grey Whistle Test stage lights in this clip of him doing - a pretty soporific - Beasley Street) understandably gets a few mentions. He seems to see his hairstyle as part of a haircut type - "a post-Beatles alternative" to the quiff, with variants including Rod Stewart's 70s hair or Chrissie Hynde's pop success-era hairstyle. Er yeah, maybe. The quiff and this so-called post-Beatles cut are, he says, the "only two acceptable rock and roll haircuts". Isn't this an idea taken from Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop book? Or did I imagine that? Anyway, it's probably a joke and if not, it's totally wrong in my opinion. Next customer please!

*Unsurprisingly given his wordiness and rather elastic vocabulary, Clarke is pretty bookish. Early on he mentions how his mother was a big library user and how he too always had a library card. Camus seems to have been a favourite author and Sartre also gets a fun mention. During one of his periods doing random jobs (usually and unashamedly trying to do as little work as possible), he mentions his workmates being surprised that he used to decline overtime: "They couldn't understand why anybody would turn down the extra money, but I'd had enough, tired out from reading Being And Nothingness next to a welder all day". Mais, oui!

*Old-school entertainment (very much non-alternative comedians, big-voiced club singers) is acknowledged as a big influence by Clarke. In the early 70s, he was making a slightly unlikely go of it doing his early poetry and master of ceremony routines in Manchester's clubs and pubs, much of it a striptease- and comedy-dominated world of heavy boozing, chancers and semi-gangsterism. "I was in my element in these joints", he says, and "watched every visiting comedian". He name-checks Stan Boardman a few times and we're clearly in Comedians-type territory. He says he based his own club persona on Anthony Newley's character in The Small World Of Sammy Lee, "a proto-Mod Jewish kid" and a "wise-cracking spieler". Meanwhile, one old-time comic he mentions is Jimmy Wheeler whose end-of-routine catchphrase was apparently "Oi, oi, that's your lot", which I must admit I rather like.

Evidently John Cooper Clarke's book of memoirs

OK, fine. This is just some of the not-so-small world of Johnny Cooper Clarke, as described in his definitely quite big book. I Wanna Be Yours is part social and cultural history, part showbiz memoir, part JCC parading his JCC-ness. Plus, lots of drugs, which I'll come back to later. But of course, this being another must-read Niluccio on noise blog I'm clearly here for the music, not the Clarkean observations on Manchester working class history, raucous working men's club comedy or youth fashions in post-war Britain. Here I reckon it's quite a mixed bag. In terms of Manchester punk, Clarke is right there where the action is. Lots of early gigs with Buzzcocks, the Fall, Warsaw/Joy Division, the Sex Pistols and the Clash on tour (at the Electric Circus), and numerous others. He apparently attended the second of the two famous Lesser Free Trade Hall Pistols gigs (he was impressed by the immense power of Steve Jones's guitar sound), and Howard Devoto - who Clarke met around this time - evidently encouraged him to get involved in punk. Already aged 27 in 1976, Clarke was theoretically too old for punk but Devoto apparently thought he had some kind of proto-punk quality, a beanpole oddity in his Mod suit jackets and narrow-legged trousers. Yep, right place right time. Through doing regular slots at Band On The Wall in early 1977, he got to know - and become big friends with - Martin Hannett, who - rather amazingly - was at one stage Clarke's regular chauffeur guy, ferrying him to and from gigs, all the while playing tapes of his production demos on the car radio, including Unknown Pleasures which Clarke says he heard well before its official release. Again, right place right time. Other stuff: Clarke says he liked the Stranglers ("unique in many ways. They didn't obey any of the rules"), which I kind of agree with. Also the Only Ones (with whom he played numerous gigs), while he praises the Saints and the Birthday Party. All pretty unimpeachable. Alongside early Roxy Music and the Stooges, and art-jazz players like Roland Kirk, reggae and early dub/toasting is seen as the main musical event, pre-punk. Yes, it's hard to disagree with these appraisals, but it's also maybe a little open to question whether some of this is being written with the many benefits of hindsight. "We got into urban-Jamaican gonzoid-Rasta heavy dub early on", he says. What, like the I was there mega-hipster of LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge song, popping up, Zelig-like, whenever something new and exciting appeared throughout musical history? Could Clarke really have plugged into all the main musical currents so effortlessly? Or perhaps another way of looking at it is to understand that Clarke's musical world is immensely wide-ranging. So for example, a big thing for him is an appreciation of earlier generations of performers - people like Marion Montgomery, Slim Gaillard, Del Shannon and Johnnie Ray. Not always my bag, but ... OK, fair enough. But then he goes even further, admiring Elvis Costello's appreciation of the "American songbook": "country, showtunes, the blues, the crooners, soul, and of course, rock and roll". Hmm. Next, John, you'll be saying you like MOR pop-rock bands like the Pretenders (page 365: "I loved the Pretenders") or overrated folk-pop dudes like Van Morrison (page 426: "total fan"). Double hmm. No, in my opinion Clarke's a little too accommodating music-wise. You have to draw the line at things like showtunes (gulp) or annoyances like Back On The Chain Gang. It's vaguely possible that this is a streak of musical contrariness from this self-declared "contrarian", but it looks to me like it's actually part of Clarke's "big world", which also included near-adulation of people like Bernard Manning (Clarke had a try-out at the Embassy Club) and a slightly unnerving disdain for hippies, "flower power" values and people such as vegetarians (dismissed more than once in the book). Is this all part of a "no-nonsense", "grounded" spit-and-sawdust political worldview? It seems to be. There are similarities with fellow Salford uber-bloke, Mark E Smith, though admittededly Clarke's dandy tendencies and aversion to work don't exactly fit with Smith's ethos. Neverthless, Clarke prides himself on only claiming unemployment benefit ("signing on the sausage") for two weeks in his life and seems to have little truck with things like alternative comedy or politically-engaged art. To me, all this shades into a knee-jerk reactionariness which I found a touch depressing.

Last but not least, any blog on I Wanna Be Yours has to spare a bit of time to discuss Clarke's pretty monumental drug habit. Heroin use is apparently an increasingly dominant part of his life for something like 15-20 years (mid-70s through to something like 1990, I think), but the way he tells it drugs have held an almost life-long fascination. Still a teenager, he evidently had a period where he went on sprees breaking into chemists with two brothers from Moss Side, a pair of "drugstore bandits" with whom Clarke would "swap goofballs for hashish". One of these likely lads is said to have known "the business hours of every apothecarist north of Nuneaton". Clarke talks of getting hold of the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, a pharmaceutical reference book which he seems to have treated as a sort of bible of drug-taking, all part of his autodidacticism: 

"I took a scholarly interest in the whole issue of drugs in general. Me and my pals had seen our lifestyles pathologised before our very eyes, and now Tombstones and Purple Hearts always arrived with a side order of shame. Yet, in the Mod era, it seeemd to us like the contemporary thing to do; we had watched our dads pouring pint after pint down their throats night after night, so as far as we were concerned, taking a single pep pill was frankly the streamlined option." 

I see his point. Heavy beer-drinking, by the way, seems to be something Clarke rejected even while he was surrounded by plenty of it. On the road, Costello and the Attractions were "booze hounds", while he describes sixties Manchester as a place where "working people got belligerent drunk of a weekend". Is it much different now? I also detect a desire to stay thin and don't, to be honest, quite believe his (too frequent?) assertions that he wasn't the sort of person who was constantly checking his own weight. Either way, by the mid-70s it's appetite-suppressing heroin pretty much all the way. Inevitably this leads to an ever more extreme cycle of needing to earn money to buy the stuff he was increasingly dependent on. Here we're into a whirligig of seeking out suppliers, hiding his stash and the "works", one or two dangerous-sounding escapades to buy heroin in places like New York's Lower East Side, getting caught by the police, narrowly avoiding going to prison, yo-yo-ing in and out of rehab, and so on. And on. It could, in truth, have got a bit boring but I didn't (mostly) find it so because Clarke usually tells a good tale (I could have done without one particular drug story set in Switzerland, but still ...). And, more importantly, he also has some interesting things to say about drugs, not least for a confirmed drug non-user like me. When you're hooked, he says, "you'd do anything for that shit". One time, arriving in Edinburgh for a week-long stay and unable to score, he immediately took a sleeper train back to London and then quickly returned with his precious H. "I was there and back within fourteen hours." Serious drug use apparently requires hard work, commitment and systematicity. "Most people find the idea of routine to be boring", he says, but "there's nothing more tedious than a life of chaos". In a rather nice one-liner he says, "routine is the unattainable goal of the addict". No, when all is said and done he doesn't seem to harbour any illusions about this type of addiction:

"My entire life was more or less taken up with the junkie routine. I would shoot up three times a day, which would enable me to live the life of a normal citizen. I was a so-called 'functioning addict', or thought I was. It didn't impinge upon my work, really, although actually it did. I didn't write so much."    

To judge by his very uneven discography - which has a huge hole in it between 1982's Zip Style Method album and 2016's This Time It's Personal - I think you'd have to say it definitely took some kind of creative toll. Certainly Clarke himself says that in the latter part of his career he morphed into a stand-up comedian who also did a bit of poetry, as he augmented his old - and hardly-ever-updated - repertoire with various jokes and stories. Almost inevitably, one phase of JCC's drug years was spent living in a shared flat in Brixton with that other big 80s junkie, Nico, the icy heroin queen herself (they were both being managed by semi-infamous Manchester music impresario, Alan Wise). Slightly curiously, Clarke mentions how this period is recounted in James Young's Nico book (see the last link) but says it's a book he's never read. Why not, I wonder? By contrast he praises Richard Hell's Clean Tramp book when talking about Hell (he clearly reads this kind of stuff). Maybe he just couldn't bear to read about himself ...? 

So there you have it, or at least some of it. Drugs, music, more drugs, more music, clothes, famous names, jokes, larks, near-death incidents (I blame the drugs), and maybe even a certain amount of staking the ground for his legacy. The I was there punk-poet guy. I don't really mean this too harshly. He evidently was there quite a lot of the time, certainly with punk and then with the far more commercial juggernaut of pop-punk/new wave. He was there and he's remembered a lot of it. At times I was almost incredulous at the amount of detail he was weaving into his stories (how can he remember all this stuff, I was thinking) but maybe er, he kept a diary. Plus, he does mention having recent-sounding conversations with Peter Hook to sort out some of his shared reminiscences, so maybe that's what he's done with the book in general? And also there's a steady pedanticism to I Wanna Be Yours which suggests that Clarke may be some kind of habitual detail-hoarder when it comes to songs, musicians, venues and the like. So it's entirely typical for him to say things like, "we ... wound up at the home of Allen Lanier, erstwhile boyfriend of Patti Smith and member of the Blue Oyster Cult. You may remember them from such tunes as Stairway To The Stars or (Don't Fear) The Reaper". To my ears this last part teeters on the edge of being satirical but I don't think it is (I'm not 100% sure though). Trainspotter-ishness also pops up in comments (alongside a little vainglory?) such as, "In June, I made my third Old Grey Whistle Test appearance". Third or fourth, John? Remarks like these slightly wrongfooted me, actually, as did some of the stuff which I take to be Clarkean humour but I can't quite place - eg his repeated use of the phrase "luxury, pure unashamed luxury". Another big one is "Give it a name", followed by a colon, then something obvious or blunt. Is this some kind of post-Embassy Club stage patter thing? Probably. More identifiable were the occasions when Clarke strings together a few fancy bits of vocab for semi-comic effect, eg talking about a nature reserve in his (now) home location of Essex: "Its estuarine topography makes it a wonderland of avian activity". I actually thought the book would contain a lot more of this but still, I reckon I Wanna Be Yours is well written/edited, intelligent and yes, pretty funny. For what it's worth, the book's pretty heavy use of fucking this and fucking that makes it all the more enjoyable and smoother to read (yes, it definitely fucking does ...). 

Hmm, on reflection perhaps I've been a bit too tough on Clarke's book in this post. Could it be on account of that time I had the great idea of dragging my mum and dad along to see him in a pub in north London in the late nineties only for my 70-year-old mum to explode with indignation at all the swearing and demand that we leave within five minutes of getting there? Yeah, could be. In general though I think Clarke's punk poetry (if that's what it is/was) has been a force for good. Feeding off the speed and energy of punk, he was cranking up his "machine-gun delivery" performance poetry "to the max". Which was an excellent move. And it undoubedly helped pave the way for other "punk poets" like Atilla The Stockbroker and Seething Wells, plus, later on, people like Benjamin Zephaniah, John Hegley, Lemn Sissay and others.  A couple of years ago I saw a poet on between the bands at Sheffield's Delicious Clam and didn't think anything of it (other than, he's pretty good), but it was Clarke that blazed that trail. Poets fit right in now. Reflecting on his time supporting Be-Bop Deluxe on a big UK tour in 1978, Clarke says "no poet could upstage a band; you can't compete with music", and maybe that's right. But he certainly gave performance poetry a massive shot in the arm (no drug pun intended). Anyway, if you end up dabbling on YouTube after reading this blog, ignore all that mediocre stuff where Clarke's backed by some vaguely soul-jazz music and check out the much better version - John Cooper Clarke raw and unaccompanied. And on that note, enter the dragon ... and exit Niluccio on noise.