On paper, John Cooper Clarke shouldn’t work. The nasal twang and dulcet deadpan tones of the Salford stick-insect who more or less invented the spoken-word scene during punk’s first flush, after all, will forever be associated with his own heroic recitations of his finest works. On the page alone, the machine-gun rhyming couplets and social-realist surrealism of ‘Beasley Street’ and ‘Evidently Chickentown’ simply shouldn’t cut it. Yet Cooper Clarke made the grade on the GCSE curriculum years ago.
One of those to graduate from the school of Cooper Clarke lyricism was Arctic Monkeys vocalist Alex Turner, whose own meat-and-two-veg vignettes were laced with similar northern English observations. Turner has even acknowledged his debt by printing his mentor’s words on the band’s record sleeves. Those wishing a lesson first-hand, however, should attend the week-long late-night residency that sees Cooper Clark play mein host for his first Edinburgh Festival Fringe dates since the mid-1990s.
Now, as then, Cooper Clarke’s act falls somewhere between a chicken-in-a-basket club turn and discursive Dadaist cabaret. Which, for someone who has supported Joy Division, The Fall and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, sound-tracked both a Sugar Puffs ad and an episode of The Sopranos, and whose lost years saw him acquire a heroin habit alongside ex Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico, is probably how it should be. He may be billed as comedy, but Cooper Clarke is a serious proposition.
“I suppose I do straddle a few planks,” drawls the sixty-one year-old, his voice never more than a few seconds away from a guffaw. “I fall into several different camps, just to mix my metaphors. But I can live with the comedy tag. There’s a low attention span for serious poetry. Especially in rock and roll joints. Which is only fair. So when selecting stuff for a live situation, I mainly go for humorous stuff.”
Such was the case during Cooper Clark’s fertile early years across six albums produced by the late Martin Hannett and a band of Mancunian luminaries, including 1980’s classic ‘Snap, Crackle and Bop’, and a sole paperback collection, ‘Ten Years In An Open-Necked Shirt’. Even here, however, beneath the one-liners was an astute observer of Thatcher’s Britain. ‘Beasley Street’, Cooper Clarke’s withering portrait of inner-city slums, was compared to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
“I think what they actually said,” says Cooper Clark, puncturing any establishment acceptance, “was that compared to T.S. Eliot, it’s shit.”
As good a gag at his own expense as this is, Cooper Clarke has done as much to take poetry outside straight-up literary circles as the pop poets of the 1960s.
“People try and make a division between spoken poetry and the written word,” Cooper Clarke observes. “But I say if poetry doesn’t sound any good, it’s shit.”
Cooper Clark’s own exposure to the form came through what he calls “the usual stuff. The Charge of the Light Brigade. Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. All this Victorian, heroic stuff. We had a teacher who was like Ernest Hemingway. He was this rugged outdoor type with a glass eye who every summer holiday would acquire these life-threatening injuries after falling down Snowdonia or something. But he had this sentimental, romantic attachment to Victorian poetry, which he used to read out loud. So it was all down to Mr Malone, really. It was like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. But Salford Style. They rammed it down our throats. People keep saying you should make poetry accessible, but I say ram it down their throats. Look at Shakespeare. You grow into it.”
Now clean and living in Colchester with his wife and teenage daughter, Cooper Clarke is sharper than ever. He outed the nascent punk rock revival a decade back, has updated ‘Beasley Street’ for the urban regeneration age with ‘Beasley Boulevard’, and has “loads” of new material.
“There’s been a bit of a spurt of late,” he chuckles. “I’m checking my biological clock before it’s too late.”
With this in mind, after almost thirty years, another book or album is well overdue. Cooper Clarke blames himself.
“When I look back at my book, compared to everyone else’s it’s like a fuckin’ encyclopedia. If you look at all those Faber and Faber books, they’re so slim you could slip ‘em under the door. And there’s me,” he snickers, ever the showbiz pro, “always thinking of the customer.”
John Cooper Clarke, The Udderbelly, August 13-19
The List Edinburgh Festivals Magazine, July 2010
ends
One of those to graduate from the school of Cooper Clarke lyricism was Arctic Monkeys vocalist Alex Turner, whose own meat-and-two-veg vignettes were laced with similar northern English observations. Turner has even acknowledged his debt by printing his mentor’s words on the band’s record sleeves. Those wishing a lesson first-hand, however, should attend the week-long late-night residency that sees Cooper Clark play mein host for his first Edinburgh Festival Fringe dates since the mid-1990s.
Now, as then, Cooper Clarke’s act falls somewhere between a chicken-in-a-basket club turn and discursive Dadaist cabaret. Which, for someone who has supported Joy Division, The Fall and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, sound-tracked both a Sugar Puffs ad and an episode of The Sopranos, and whose lost years saw him acquire a heroin habit alongside ex Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico, is probably how it should be. He may be billed as comedy, but Cooper Clarke is a serious proposition.
“I suppose I do straddle a few planks,” drawls the sixty-one year-old, his voice never more than a few seconds away from a guffaw. “I fall into several different camps, just to mix my metaphors. But I can live with the comedy tag. There’s a low attention span for serious poetry. Especially in rock and roll joints. Which is only fair. So when selecting stuff for a live situation, I mainly go for humorous stuff.”
Such was the case during Cooper Clark’s fertile early years across six albums produced by the late Martin Hannett and a band of Mancunian luminaries, including 1980’s classic ‘Snap, Crackle and Bop’, and a sole paperback collection, ‘Ten Years In An Open-Necked Shirt’. Even here, however, beneath the one-liners was an astute observer of Thatcher’s Britain. ‘Beasley Street’, Cooper Clarke’s withering portrait of inner-city slums, was compared to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
“I think what they actually said,” says Cooper Clark, puncturing any establishment acceptance, “was that compared to T.S. Eliot, it’s shit.”
As good a gag at his own expense as this is, Cooper Clarke has done as much to take poetry outside straight-up literary circles as the pop poets of the 1960s.
“People try and make a division between spoken poetry and the written word,” Cooper Clarke observes. “But I say if poetry doesn’t sound any good, it’s shit.”
Cooper Clark’s own exposure to the form came through what he calls “the usual stuff. The Charge of the Light Brigade. Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. All this Victorian, heroic stuff. We had a teacher who was like Ernest Hemingway. He was this rugged outdoor type with a glass eye who every summer holiday would acquire these life-threatening injuries after falling down Snowdonia or something. But he had this sentimental, romantic attachment to Victorian poetry, which he used to read out loud. So it was all down to Mr Malone, really. It was like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. But Salford Style. They rammed it down our throats. People keep saying you should make poetry accessible, but I say ram it down their throats. Look at Shakespeare. You grow into it.”
Now clean and living in Colchester with his wife and teenage daughter, Cooper Clarke is sharper than ever. He outed the nascent punk rock revival a decade back, has updated ‘Beasley Street’ for the urban regeneration age with ‘Beasley Boulevard’, and has “loads” of new material.
“There’s been a bit of a spurt of late,” he chuckles. “I’m checking my biological clock before it’s too late.”
With this in mind, after almost thirty years, another book or album is well overdue. Cooper Clarke blames himself.
“When I look back at my book, compared to everyone else’s it’s like a fuckin’ encyclopedia. If you look at all those Faber and Faber books, they’re so slim you could slip ‘em under the door. And there’s me,” he snickers, ever the showbiz pro, “always thinking of the customer.”
John Cooper Clarke, The Udderbelly, August 13-19
The List Edinburgh Festivals Magazine, July 2010
ends
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