John Cooper Clarke has, arguably, not only the most recognisable silhouette in show business, but also the most infectious of poetic voices. Mention that the Bard of Salford was to visit the Observer office for this interview last week immediately prompted snatches of extemporised quotation from some of Clarke’s more famous lyrics – I Wanna Be Yours, Evidently Chickentown, I Married a Monster from Outer Space – from those colleagues who had some grounding in his snarly Mancunian vowels and those who were not afraid of pretending. Nick Cohen, our columnist, broke off from columnising to recite extended passages of Clarke’s verse first committed to memory when the poet was sharing spittle-flecked stages with Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols back in the day. Dr Clarke, as he styles himself, wearing his honorary doctorate from Salford University with pride, has always had that effect; to the many devotees of his live performances over five decades, he is both much imitated and inimitable.
He arrived in traditional garb: pointed boots, strides clinging to stick-insect legs, dark jacket, buttoned-up white shirt, generous shades, Ronnie Wood hair beneath a tall grey felt hat. He will turn 70 next year. One of the more fortunate breaks in his poetic career, he suggests, was that he looked like a punk before punk rock arrived. He had fixed on his sartorial style in the unlikely arena of Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club, where he acted as compere in the early 1970s, warming up an audience united by their shared antipathy to performance poetry. The outfit was another form of fighting talk, one he has stuck with in a journey that has seen some extremes.
Clarke lost much of the 1980s to a heroin addiction, when he lived in a flat in Brixton with Nico, the late singer and muse of the Velvet Underground; he dislikes any attempt to glamorise that period, and is reluctant to discuss it in detail.
A long renaissance in the years since has resulted in perhaps greater popularity now than ever. His perennial UK tours – he is just about to embark on another – are invariably sold out to audiences of all ages. There have been some landmark events to prompt this: Arctic Monkeys’ dreamy 2013 cover of I Wanna Be Yours; the use of Evidently Chickentown as the backing in one of the most memorable sequences in box-set TV, at the end of an episode of the final season of The Sopranos; the fact that his poems have made it on to the GCSE syllabus. But mostly it is down to his brilliant rambling dramatic monologue of a stage show, which has become less staccato over the years. He used to have to fight his audiences to be heard; now they hang on his every inflection.
Clarke has lived for the past 25 years in Colchester, Essex. He speaks with love of the life he has created there, referring often to his wife, Evie, and daughter, Stella, his guiding lights. Though he has travelled a long way from his native Salford, it has never left him. It was once observed of Alan Bennett that the world invariably becomes an Alan Bennett sketch around him. Much the same is true of Clarke, from the other side of the Pennines.
I’ve interviewed him once before, that time on the telephone, and was struck how – just as on stage – there appeared no subject under the sun which he could not bend to his comic will. Much of that gift lies in his voice: you can’t help but smile when he talks. He came into the office pulling a suitcase and immediately he sat down he was unzipping it to reveal his latest pride and joy, a handsome hardback collection of his poetry, entitled The Luckiest Guy Alive. The cover features a Peter Blake painting of his stick man profile, and embossed graphics in Scrabble tiles. “Kind of literate punk,” he said.
I explained to him the format of this interview. Some questions have been submitted by famous admirers of his, others by Observer readers.
“Fire away at me at random, Tim,” he said. “Give me what you’ve got.”
I began with a question from one of the many performers who, no doubt, owe just a little bit of their style and delivery to watching Clarke with an audience, seeing how it might be done.
Jarvis Cocker
Musician
Where do you get your trousers from?
The short answer, Jarv, is River Island or Marks & Spencer, the skinniest they do. For a while, though, I have had some problems with the craze for the low-rise pant, the hipster. Now, I’m no expert, but I think when it comes to guys, the less said about the hips the better. To make the hips the focal point of a pair of trousers is, to me, a fashion mistake. It was a mistake in the 60s and it doesn’t look any better on some fat fuck in Shoreditch now.
My trouser needs are simple: a narrow leg in a dark colour, with jean detailing. That’s another thing I have always avoided: peg tops. I learned a long time ago that if you wear trousers where you can put something in the pockets, you will put stuff in those pockets – and before you know it you are clad in jodhpurs. Capacious trouser pockets are like a new living-room shelf: the moment you put it up it becomes occupied not only by favoured “ornaments” but by half-squeezed-out tubes of Neutrogena hand cream and stuff. And you will live with those items for years, halfway up the lounge wall. It’s the same with trouser pockets in my experience.
So, to answer Jarvis’s inquiry: by default, during the low-rise years, I strolled the feminine range on the ground floor of Marks & Spencer. I like a high waist if anything, like a flamenco dancer… that rakish, swashbuckling look. I have to confess that jeggings were one solution. A much underrated garment, the jegging: they never need ironing and they hold their colour.
Michael Blaikie
Observer reader
I found your poem Kung Fu International on one of my dad’s punk CDs when I was eight (I’m 33 now), and I remember listening to it over and over, and pausing so I could write each word down and learn to recite it. I credit this experience as one that led me to a lifetime of writing. What was the first song or poem you remember learning the words to?
That’s a good question, Michael, because that is exactly how I did get introduced to poetry – at school, Michael Gove-style. We had to learn The Lady of Shalott, by the late, great Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was 12 pages long, and I have to say I am all the better for it. The way poetry works is this: you learn the sound of the words first. You are not going to understand The Lady of Shalott – you are a 10-year-old boy in Salford and it was written by a 33-year-old bloke 150 years ago. But that’s the secret: the sound of the language, those sonorous words.
To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point. And we had to know the whole 12 pages, because on command, at any moment, you might be called on to stand up and recite a particular verse. I am sure some of my classmates felt their time could have been more profitably spent. But I have to say that view was by no means unanimous. We had a brilliant English teacher called John Malone, who somehow conveyed his love of 19th-century poetry to an entire class of rough kids at Higher Broughton secondary modern school. And it caught on. He brought about this hothouse atmosphere of competitive poetry recital. In the way I imagine that rappers subsequently did in Compton, Los Angeles. Erstwhile louts trying to out-verbal each other, in a flamboyant, slightly foppish way.
Tim Adams: I imagine you held your own in those battles?
Oh, I was the king of the block. It goes without saying. Those English periods were a happy time. Apart from them, I hated every second of school.
Ben Drew
Plan B, musician and actor
Who were the lyricists who inspired you to write the way you do?
That’s an intelligent question too, from Ben, because lyricists have probably influenced me more than any other poets.
The first lyrics I became aware of would have been in the pre-rock’n’roll 1950s, when my Uncle Dennis was demobbed from the RAF and he lived at our house for a bit. He was closer to my age than my parents’. He brought his collection of records and a record player, which was new to us. He had Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Sinatra obviously… the great American songbook. Those lyrics hit me like poetry. And, again, it is better that you don’t know what it’s about at first. Poetry is a phonetic medium. If you read the lyrics to It’s Magic, that very sexy Doris Day song, for example, you are already singing the song… they leave you no other way to go. I didn’t understand those lyrics, but they gave me an idea of an adult world. And they have followed me all my days, because as you get older you keep finding some new dimension even in the simplest love song.
TA: You were more Sinatra than Elvis back then?
No. I mean Elvis was a world-changing event for me. Elvis and Frank, though, was the first glimpse of an eternal conflict I could never resolve. I will never resolve.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Reggae poet
What are your recollections of touring with the reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson?
They are only good, put it that way. One thing: when I met Linton, I knew I had to tighten up my game in the wardrobe department. He set a very high bar. Back then there was only me and him doing poetry on stage, so we cranked it up a gear, not least because our audiences often had no prior interest in poetry.
I have another reason to thank Linton: we went on tour together in 1981, all around the UK, and when we appeared in Essex, that is when my wife was first introduced to my work. I didn’t meet her then, but she was in the audience. So: thanks, Linton! I can’t talk that guy up enough.
NottinghamFlorist
Observer reader, posted online
Have you realised you would have to change very few lyrics of your poem The It Man for it to be a rant about President Trump. Are you a soothsayer?
Have you ever seen Our Cartoon President? It runs every teatime on television in the States. It is sensationally good, in the manner of Family Guy or King of the Hill. It is merciless about Trump, but even so, you can’t ignore the fact that even then he somehow still tends to come out on top. That is the story of the Donald, and because in this business I learned long ago you should never knock success, I can’t help admiring the crazy fucker in some way. Is that the crime of the century? He has at least stopped Kim Wrong Un from exploding his bombs.
Lauren Laverne
DJ
What is it that mono can do that stereo can’t?
Hi Lauren. Well, for one thing, mono could produce the Phil Spector “wall of sound”. You couldn’t have that in stereo. That glorious bank of french horns bleeding into a mess of cellos and strings. I tend to live by the dictum “less is more”, but that mono sound proved more can be more. It is also more true to life. If you went to see a band, the Beatles, the Stones, they were up there on the stage; you would naturally expect all the sound to come from their general direction. What do you want to listen to the bass player over your left shoulder for? Stereo is some nerd twiddling his knobs. The only stereo I like is a jukebox: two speakers but both on the same piece of furniture. Phil Spector is obviously out of circulation right now, but I am keeping the faith alive. Stereo, my ass.
Caius Caligula
Observer reader, online
What is the worst act you opened for, and why?
Caius Caligula? Is that a stage name? I hope so. Worst act? I wish I had an answer. Show business isn’t easy and it instinctively goes against the grain to do my fellow performers down. But let’s rack our brains. Surely there’s some dead bloke? No. The truth is, Caligula, if I was opening for them, they were better than I was. Otherwise they would have been opening for me.
Christopher Eccleston
Actor
Which of your poems are you most satisfied with?
Well, that is a typically clever question from Christopher, who did a memorable performance of Evidently Chickentown in that Danny Boyle film Strumpet, written by Jim Cartwright. And since you ask, Chickentown is among my favourites, not least because of that and its appearance in the penultimate episode of The Sopranos. There is no greater accolade for me.
Thomas O’Sullivan
Observer reader
Is Chickentown about Stevenage?
I never put a geographical stamp on it. I figure any town in the whole world has an equivalent of the fictional neighbourhood I describe. I wasn’t thinking of Stevenage, though I did live there for a couple of years. People used to go on about how soulless life in those new towns was, but that was not my experience of Stevenage. I thought it was fabulous: great amenities and lavishly fenestrated new houses, with generous garages. That movie, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, starring Barry Evans, for which Traffic did the theme, was set there. Barry Evans and his young friends were all mods in a mod town.
I was in Salford when I saw that. And I thought: “Wow, imagine being young and living in a mod town like Stevenage!” And then I did for a couple of years. And the people weren’t “soulless” at all; they were quite chummy in my recollection.
philwest
Observer reader, online
You wrote [in the refrain in Chickentown] “the fucking train is fucking late, you fucking wait, you fucking wait” back in the late 1970s. How much has privatisation bettered or worsened things?
It’s an intelligent question, Phil, not least because I am old enough to have a historical perspective of the railways, but not yet too old to have lost my memory of how things were. You couldn’t have asked me at a better juncture. British Rail, like any monopoly, had undoubtedly got complacent. The standards weren’t high. There is no doubt that you can get a better cup of coffee since privatisation; you’d have waited a long time for an espresso in 1975. And the private sector has upped the standards of concourse retail in general, which used to consist of a couple of broken cig machines.
I hardly ever get the trains these days, but I know one thing for a fact: they should spend a few billion on improving the current network rather than on HS2. Who on earth needs to get to Manchester 15 minutes quicker? No one can be that busy. And then when you arrive at the so-called Northern Powerhouse, you will find you can’t get a train to Blackpool or Burnley for about two years. It will be Murder on the Bus Replacement Service. There they are, bulldozing these beautiful villages so someone can get to Manchester quarter of an hour earlier. Who ever asked for that? I’m thinking of withholding my tax until they call a halt to HS2. Why not Skype if you are that keen to connect at speed?
TA: Do you do much Skyping?
Never. I don’t possess the equipment. But theoretically, on planet Bizarro, where Superman is bad and Lex Luther is good, that is what I would do.
Kate Nash
Singer-songwriter
I discovered your music and spoken word when I was a teenager, and it was very inspirational to me. What wisdom would you impart to young girls who look up to you in 2018?
Young girls who look up to me? Well, Kate, my first thought is: they should find somebody else. I’ve never been good at advice. I’ve done everything the wrong way. If you had any sense you wouldn’t look to me for any life lessons.
Steve Allen
Observer reader
What’s your favourite word? Mine is “arbitrary”…
I keep meaning to get a favourite word. Everyone seems to have one. My answer is this, though: they all have their uses; it’s invariably a matter of context.
Jason Williamson
Singer, Sleaford Mods
Was Jon the Postman the real voice of Manchester?
I’d obviously argue not, Jason. Jon the Postman would climb up on stage at any gig he attended and do an impromptu a cappella version of Louie Louie by the Kingsmen. That performance undoubtedly made him a popular figure in the Manchester pub scene of the mid-1970s. I think he moved to the States for a while, but I’m not sure the act travelled with him. He knew my brother, who still works for the GPO, the Royal Mail, so we have a bit of baggage, you might say. For that reason, perhaps I am not best placed to objectively gauge the enigmatic appeal of Jon the Postman.
Stephen G Titley
Observer reader
You helped the Fall in the early days, letting them rehearse in your house, and you were a lifelong friend of the other Bard of Salford, Mark E Smith. Was there ever any talk of you joining the Fall?
Are you kidding? I’m self-employed, my friend. I didn’t get into show business to be pushed around by the likes of Mark E Smith. Having said that, every incarnation of the Fall had something different, but the one thing they all had in common was the sensational live act that was Mark Smith. He was a magic realist right to the end. He had it all.
Craig Charles
Actor and broadcaster
Is “Vince the ageing Savage, [who] betrays no kind of life, but the smell of yesterday’s cabbage and the ghost of last year’s wife” in Beasley Street based on anyone in particular?
I should say that all my characters are an amalgam or something, Craig, but Vince was the bloke in the downstairs apartment when I lived in Plymouth for a while, real name Frank. Every time I saw him he had a meat-cleaver in his hand and the look of a man who might have been Henry Cooper’s psychotic kid brother. It is fair to say we were not on expansive speaking terms. I believe he remained unaware of my poetic tribute.
fireangel
Observer reader, online
Was Nico easy to live with?
Yes. She was exemplary. You wouldn’t have known she was there.
gadusmorhua, online
Observer reader
Did you ever think you could stop using smack [heroin]? I need some encouragement.
It can be done, clearly, but it ain’t easy. I like to say I did it in two ways: gradually, and suddenly. The fact is you need help, though. My message is always the same: don’t even do it once. I think it is dangerous to think it is anything to do with having an “addictive personality” or any of that bollocks. Anyone would dig it. Anybody. Why? Because it is fabulous the first time. Don’t ever do it. And, gadus, good luck with your attempts to rid yourself of this terrible affliction. I pray that you are successful.
johnthebaptiste
Observer reader, online
What is on your rider [dressing room request list] these days?
The sad truth is I never get to pick. It is the work of my long-term manager, Phil Jones. It is things that he might eat if he ever did turn up to my show: which is to say various heavily flavoured, deep-fried, lavishly salted snack treats. And cheese and chutney sandwiches. I occasionally ask him about it: “In all my years on the road, Phil, have you ever seen me eat a cheese and chutney sandwich, or a single Dorito?” I’m no snacker. I don’t graze. If I have a cup of coffee, I’ll sit down at a table. I hate that idea: eating on the go. It’s like men wearing short trousers. Where will it end? But if I were ever to be asked for my rider requirements they might well involve a box of Mr Kipling’s French Fancies, which I would stash for a 3am snack. Pink first, then yellow. The brown ones I’d give away. Otherwise, I ask for the apparatus for a gin and tonic.
Andrew McMillan
Poet
When you first started out, did you get stage fright? And if so, how did you combat it?
I didn’t get it too bad. Partly that was because ever since I was a teenager I had been taking what you might call pep pills, so I was invariably a little bit artificially jazzed up when I walked out on stage. This was at Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club in Manchester. It wasn’t easy: it is an unnatural act to get out there and draw that much attention to yourself. My answer back then would be, as they say, to be hopped up on goof balls. But since then, now I don’t get a bad time from hecklers, and invariably enjoy the love of the poetry-reading public, it has become a much more relaxed affair.
Danny Marsh
Observer reader
As an audience member I know what I get from watching you perform. However, I am interested in what you get out of it. Do you get some element of therapy from writing and performing your poetry?
No. No way do I ever approach my work as a way of working out my own problems. Many people have told me that they do use the writing of poetry to concentrate their mind on some pressing metaphysical problem. But not me. I think of it more like Tin Pan Alley work.
The truth is I’m not just a practitioner of poetry when I am on stage… I am like the police: never off-duty. It is a romantic picture, that idea of Cole Porter always writing lyrics on the back of cigarette packs and menus. But that is really the way I do it, keeping that dream alive. I don’t try to explain it. As the great Bill Withers once said, “the writing of songs involves a kind of magic I don’t mess with”.
TA: Would not doing it ever be an option?
Not for me. Writing is the prism through which you see the world. Anything can kick you off.
To take one of my more popular poems, Beasley Street: I worked my way back on that one. I had the last line. The template was the 1933 Busby Berkeley movie 42nd Street. The big production number at the end concludes, you recall, “Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty, Forty-second Street”. And I thought I would do that, but with a lousy street. I spent quite a while thinking of the right adjectives: greasy, cheesy and so on, and then looked for a street name that toned in, but was credible. And there it was: Beasley, asking for it.
I really like the idea of being a poetic hack. I believe it’s the kind of thing Charles Baudelaire aspired to: you know, the guy with the overview, a mirror reflecting the entire Parisian crowd.
Every man Jacques of them.
OblongCassidy
Observer reader, online
Have you ever been offered an honour by the Queen, Sir John?
I’ve never been offered an honour by the Queen, but I’d be happy to accept.
Vin Heffernan
Observer reader
How do you feel about Brexit… not the crap leading up to it, but the actual exit?
I don’t even want to talk about it, to be honest. I hate the word itself. When it first started to appear on the front of the paper – the Guardian was the worst offender – by the time I found out what it meant I was too annoyed to want to think about it. I know for many people our departure from the EU is the worst thing that’s ever happened. For me, I think it might turn out to have some gifts – but don’t get me wrong, my wife is French and half of my daughter’s relatives live in France. We go and see them and they come and see us and we benefit from frictionless border controls. But if you ask me, I do think the free movement of working people has impacted badly on the poorest members of our society, which is bad for both the immigrant workers and bad for our workers, because it has driven down wages and conditions.
Wilko Johnson
Musician
What are your feelings about Jaywick?
Don’t get me started on Jaywick. It is a kind of a dream town, as I’m sure Wilko knows, coming as he does from nearby Canvey Island. Jaywick is next to Clacton on the Essex coast. It was created originally as a holiday place. Every style of English suburban house is represented there, but all at two-thirds scale. They were built as holiday chalets, but people now live permanently in them. The Kray family had a bolthole there. When I moved to Essex, among the first things everyone said was “Don’t ever go to Jaywick, it’s a toilet”. But I persuaded my wife to drive me there one weekend and on arrival I turned to her and said: “We’ve never been here before, sweetheart, but I sure have dreamed about this place.” The streets are all sand. There are two pubs: the Three Jays and the Sheldrake. If memory serves, you are marginally safer in the Three Jays. The theme of the big estate is the great British automotive industry: Wolseley Drive and Morris Road and Austin Crescent. Keep it quiet, but I plan to make a movie in Jaywick some day.
Cobbler5
Observer reader, online
What’s your favourite gig venue, and why?
It has to be the London Palladium, at which I have the honour of appearing again next month. That’s the gold standard, not just for me, but worldwide. Look who’s played there: Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, you name them. When Lenny Bruce was reduced to doing little 100-seat nightclubs he had this whole brilliant routine about a washed-up comedian who’s given one last bite of the apple. His agent’s saying: “Don’t go screwing it up again, you’re opening for Doris Day at the London Palladium.” And why did Lenny choose the Palladium for that routine? Because he was confident that in whatever borscht-belt dive he found himself they’d immediately get the reference: “Hey, that’s the place the Queen of England goes.” What a thrill walking out there. If it’s true, as I claim in the title poem of my book, that I am the Luckiest Guy Alive, it’s for two reasons. First, there’s my domestic situation, my wonderful wife and family. And then this other life where I am appearing at the Palladium. The Luckiest Guy Alive? I rest my case.
• The Luckiest Guy Alive by John Cooper Clarke is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.89 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Click here for tour details
• John Cooper Clarke will be launching The Luckiest Guy Alive at an exclusive reading with Q&A session at Hoxton Hall, London N1, on 1 November. Tickets available here
