John Cooper Clarke Played My Local:
JCC played an hours set, with 2 encores covering half an hour. The Half Moon at Herne Hill holds approx 200 people and it was full, plus maybe 50 more. Due to no air conditioning, and standard London weather (cold and wet), it was hot, humid and airless. The show opened at 9.15pm, to a decidedly appathetic reaction (you ever tried getting worked up in a sauna). But the support acts and compare did their job very well (Vic Lumbruscko had fine line in poems including audience participation) and won over the crowd and had us nicely poised for the arrival of the man at 10.30 P.M.
He looked just the same as I remember from seeing him last over 10 years ago, though the illusion was shattered as he had to fight his way through the bar area to get to the performers “enclosure” before going on stage. The bits between the poems have grown, from when I last saw him. The Germans and Scandinavians came in for the most piss taking, although Burnley took the cream of his monologues. The pub singer impressions towards the end of the main set were eerily good (does this man have a second career). The old favourites, Kung Fu International, Evidently Chicken Town, Health Fanatic, I Married a Monster From Outer Space, The Isle of Man, The Day My Pad went Mad were supplemented with a crop of new (to me) poems, Hire Car, Martin Newell, Burnley, Are You the Business, Haiku, I Wrote the Songs, Tom Jones, and a new line in non-rhyming limericks.
JCC still has a gift for standing on stage and being entertaining, like nobody else, asides like a perfect Haiku is the notice “Please do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends“, are the work of a genius. In conclusion I last saw JCC over 10 years ago and he unlike myself has worn far too well.
Iain Baxter